Continuous, completely arbitrary measurement results. Two different results from the same test ski a few minutes apart, even though nothing has been done to the cleaned ski in between. Only products advertised as fluoride-free by certain manufacturers receive an approved result from the test device, i.e. a green light.
Here are some examples of how the skiing world lives in huge doubts when the World Cup is about to start in Kuusamo on November 24. A foretaste of the fluoride cream ban, which will finally come into full force, was given two weeks before the start of the World Cup at the Olostunturi Games in Muonio. A ban on fluoride was imposed on them, but it was not enforced.
This immediately led to the fact that certain skiers and their cream manufacturer’s assurances about competing with “fluoride-free” skis are very questionable in sports circles.
In Kuusamo, the spirit of the game changes, because there the ban is enforced and competitors’ skis are searched for traces of fluoride cream both before the start and partly also after the finish line.
He doesn’t mince his words
Developing products for the Finnish Rex cream company and familiar with their chemical compositions Christian Lagerstedt doesn’t mince his words when assessing the credibility and fairness of the supervision for Urheilu.
– If the monitoring device is compared to a police breathalyzer, it is a toy. It doesn’t do what it says. It should measure fluoride, but it doesn’t. I took six 100% bio creams (a fluoride-free product) to the test device, and the device found fluoride in each of them, says Lagerstedt.
He also used the products he mentioned in university-level laboratory tests – and received a fluoride-free final report.
The big question has been during the season, whether the device measures fluoride or cream combinations from the “library” stored in its memory, which is so far very lacking in the product world.
– That could mean that even if someone came up with the world’s fastest (fluoride-free) cream before the competition, it would not be approved by the device, because it would not be included in the machine’s memory library. Many people would pay for the admin rights of that library now, says Lagerstedt.
According to Urheilu’s information, the device accepts fluoride-free creams sent to FIS in the summer, but not those developed after that. They get a fluoride sentence because the device doesn’t recognize them. There are several estimates of when to update the device’s memory.
In the service groups’ tests, the product family of one particular major manufacturer that received the green light from products marketed as fluorine-free is the best. It is not about a Finnish manufacturer.
– I am also concerned about the athlete’s legal protection. There is no possibility of examining the B sample due to the fluoride rejection, says Lagerstedt, M.Sc.
Cheating methods are being developed
He says that he knows that different methods have already been developed to cheat the device, which have also been tried successfully. If a skier in certain weather conditions, such as humid and warm, could get fluorine-treated skis and have them approved by the test equipment, the benefit would be greater than anything that could be achieved with, for example, doping substances.
No fluoride-free product – at least not for years – repels dirt and moisture anywhere near as well as fluoride cream, let alone be as slippery.
The International Ski Federation FIS and the International Biathlon Union IBU use the Alpha II device from the German measuring device manufacturer Bruker for fluoride monitoring.
Both umbrella organizations have bought a dozen devices costing around 30,000 euros; in addition, national associations, including Finland, have acquired them out of necessity. About a thousand Alpha II devices are sold globally per year.
Swedish doctor of physical chemistry Anders Nilsson, Bruker’s Nordic sales and customer relations director, knows the device thoroughly. He is also a member of the FIS fluoride ban working group. Nilsson wants to clarify that the device has by no means been developed specifically for the needs of skiing.
– In an international perspective, our typical customers are, for example, forensic laboratories, customs, the police, the defense forces and various healthcare research units, Nilsson tells Urheilu from his office in Lund.
The art forgery was revealed
He arrives at the World Cup in Ruka to supervise that the fluoride measurement of skis is done technically correctly from the point of view of both the manual of the measuring device and the FIS rulebook.
Nilsson gives an example of what has been done to one of the Alpha IIs he sold to the Finnish Art Museum.
– The museum revealed the Russian classic painting as a fake, because the painting painted in 1926 could not contain the paint developed in 1946 that was found on it.
In the language of physics, Alpha II is a so-called Fourier interferometer. It identifies the molecules it is looking for using light with wavelengths longer than visible light. For the measurement, one wavelength at a time is always extracted from the light source producing a continuous spectrum and the intensity produced by it is measured. When the measurement range is reviewed one wavelength at a time, the detector or detector of the measuring device does not need to understand which wavelength it is measuring, but reacting to brightness differences is sufficient.
The international umbrella organizations of skiing started planning to ban fluoride creams at the end of the last decade. After the transition period, all fluoride creams were banned for this period; previously some products containing certain fluorine compounds were prohibited.
The ban is monitored with a Fourier interferometer called Alpha II, operating in the infrared range. All skis are checked before the start, some also after the competition. The rejection does not correspond to, for example, a doping violation, but only leads to the invalidation of the competition result.
Fluoride creams have been considered a health risk for ski maintenance professionals and also harmful to the environment. The burden of the ski and cream industry as a whole is extremely negligible. Especially a lot of fluorine is used in Goretex and Teflon manufacturing.
With some exceptions, fluoride creams were only banned in top international skiing. Elsewhere, they can still be used, sold and marketed.
Fluoride creams are superior in their slipperiness and ability to repel dirt and moisture. Especially in humid and warm weather, fluoride-free products don’t come close to the same for a really long time.
The second best way
Anders Nilsson admits that the technology used by Alpha II is only the second best way to measure the fluoride content of skis.
– A mass spectrometer would be the best, but then the skis would have to be received from the athletes two weeks in advance. This is the best way for the rapid test required by the International Ski Federation, says Nilsson, who has worked for Bruker for 27 years.
He says that he has heard all possible rumors and suspicions about fluoride testing and the fluoride detector.
– If the cream manufacturer says that its products are 100% fluoride-free and they still get a red light from the device, it is because they contain fluoride. The reason is probably contamination of the manufacturing process, i.e. there is fluoride left over from previous production.
There is not only Bruker’s view of this:
– We have sent these products, which the manufacturers claim to be fluorine-free, to precise laboratory tests, where fluorine has been found in them. We are completely open to cooperation with manufacturers willing to do so.
Dirty utensils
The first big fish of the total ban was the Norwegian alpine skiing star Ragnhild Mowinckel In Sölden at the opening of the World Cup. Nilsson tells what had happened.
– It turned out that there was no fluoride cream on his skis, but that the skis had been treated with care equipment that had not been carefully cleaned.
After the fluoride ban came into full effect, due to the risk of contamination, teams have been strongly urged to carefully wash all old tools and ski bags or get completely new ones.
According to Nilsson, Alpha II looks for the fluorine PFAS compound in the ski sole, which it recognizes from the organic molecular compound formed by carbon and fluorine.
– The device draws very easily recognizable graphics from it. If there is no fluorine on the bottom of the ski, no image is formed.
There is a margin of error in all measurement. The final result of the fluoride measurement is based on a mathematical model calculated from the values given by the device.
– We have ideas about how to try to cheat the device. We do not believe that you can achieve a competitive advantage by cheating, even if it is technically possible, even the opposite. I also believe that other topics of conversation in skiing will come to the surface already during this season. The measurement process is becoming commonplace.
A physicist working in the Orton Hospital research unit, Dr Brother Matti Tiainen got familiar with FIS’s fluoride measurement and its methods at the request of Urheilu. For him, they raise several interesting questions.
– When it comes to measurement based on absorption (a physical or chemical phenomenon where atoms, molecules or ions are retained in a liquid, gas or solid), it can hardly be done directly from the bottom of the ski, because the ski is too thick for light to pass through and the bottom of each ski reflects light differently way.
– So how do you ensure that the same amount of potentially prohibited substance is always recovered, even though different manufacturers use different base materials and surface roughness? Tiainen, who works as a docent at the University of Helsinki, asks.
“At worst, judicial murders”
Tiainen states that when it comes to an either-or measurement, i.e. rejected or accepted, the tolerance should be loose.
– Otherwise, there will be legal murders at worst, based on what I have learned about this matter. You can also ask if some kind of pre-test could not be done with a UV lamp. Fluorine is, as the name suggests, fluorinating, and in order for it to be in an amount that would somehow benefit the athlete, you could almost feel it with your fingers. Frankly speaking, this kind of measurement method in this context reminds me a bit of shooting a woodpecker with a cannon.
Tiais is also interested in whether the tolerance changes if the skis of a 55-kilogram female or 80-kilogram male athlete are attached to the test bench.
– You could at least think that the total amount found in a man’s equipment should be greater, so that the effective benefit for sports performance would be the same.