The fight against drugs cheats in sport goes on. One of the sports where doping has been widespread is cycling. Today, another two riders were found to have used banned substances to gain an advantage in this year’s Tour de France, taking the total to six.

It’s always difficult to know what to think when news of a failed drug test comes through. It’s possible to put a positive spin on it, as the German cycling federation (BDR) chief has done:

“It is a shock, but it is also good news,” said BDR president Rudolf Scharping. “The ever tighter net of the anti-doping investigators is making sure that practically no-one is getting through anymore.”

[Source: BBC News, Tour rocked by new positive tests]

As Scharping says, one explanation of an increase in failed drug tests is that the tests are getting better. If we take this view, then although a failed drug test may be bad news in the short term, at least it can reassure us that we have effective tests and give us hope that the sport will soon be clean.

An alternative explanation of an increase in failed drug tests, though, is that there’s been an increase in drug use. Our tests may be no more effective than before (the tests may have improved, but the methods used to evade detection may have improved too), and the reason that we’re catching more riders may be that more riders are taking banned substances. In that case, each failed drug test just shows that cheating is prevalent.

There does seem to be a new determination to clean up cycling, but despite what Scharping says it isn’t obvious that drug tests coming back positive shows that we’re succeeding.