Agree that Rojo was much more on the NOP attack than Wejo. From what I've seen Wejo is more on the side of innocent until proven guilty.
Agree that Rojo was much more on the NOP attack than Wejo. From what I've seen Wejo is more on the side of innocent until proven guilty.
The more this blood doping comes to the surface the more I commend Salazar. If Hasay moves to the marathon, how will she come within 10 min of the WR without dabbling in the gray area. Guarantee you none of salazars current athletes have blood values like Paula's.
There will always be questions about the NOP scandal but it seems so much smaller now with the passage of time and the IAAF issue. Galen has a silver from a great moment that can't be taken from him. Otherwise he is not much better at his best event than Jager is now or Solinsky was. I think True, Jager and maybe even Hill will become better 5000 runners than Rupp is now.
I think the Brojos are being more cautious with Paula. If kimmage were writing like this about Galen's blood values during the NOP scandal it would have been a big focus. Maybe they learned to tone it down a bit and not publicly demand answers from people who stand accused.
BS wrote:
End of race. wrote:Dopers tend to look good at the end of a race. Paula looked like she had more heart than anyone else. Mo is another one i would put on that list.
You need to tell WADA about this great way to find drug cheats, I gotta believe its reliability must be easily over 90% and even when its wrong, well, they looked good at the end of a race so they must not have been trying and deserved to get busted anyway. It can even be named the "Pre" test, that should add credibility.
Actually, thats a great Idea, considering we don't have any test results and you guys are in a frenzy about what might or might not even be her. Even if it is her, a 1/1000 chance is worthless. Yeah, it means nothing! Wada wouldn't suspend a current runner with that. Further, its impossible to classify a chance of doping without much more information. For example, if a runner stops training for 3 weeks, his/her blood work would change dramatically, especially if they were at altitude before he/she took a break. Plus they somehow determined a risk of doping based off of one sample, maybe two. The point of the biopassport is to find a base line, that can't be done with 2 samples taken who knows how long apart?
BTW, the marathon record in question was broken in 2003, which is way before the biopassport. Back then, runners didn't worry about micro dosing, which is why dopers back then would have a 1/million chance of doping if they really were. You guys don't really think this stuff through.
PhD in NOP wrote:
Not to mention how pathetic it is that we all assume we know Paula is dirty without knowing her.
Good point, next time I'm called up for jury duty I'll say I can't be considered because I don't know the defendant, regardless of the facts or otherwise that are presented to me,because not knowing him/her I can't make an informed decision.
End of race. wrote:
You guys don't really think this stuff through.
I could be wrong but I think your points will be shot to pieces in a couple of hours time.
End of race. wrote:
You guys don't really think this stuff through.
Some have:
"Has the IAAF been contradicted by its own experts?
The Australian blood doping expert Michael Ashenden says that the IAAF - the athletics world governing body - could have banned athletes before 2009 on the basis of blood test results collected in an internal data base."
http://lawm.sportschau.de/peking2015/nachrichten/Has-the-IAAF-been-contradicted-by-its-own-experts,doping310.htmlPeople are writing stupid responses about how blood levels might have changed after a break or after illness or during pregnancy, that isn't the case in this instance. As has been said MANY times the differences in blood levels showed a huge percentage increase just 3 days apart, the experts have already said that these cannot be explained away by anything other than blood manipulation. Pretty sure this story would not have gone quiet if Bubka had been elected rather than 'hush hush' Coe.
If she is the star athlete she's hiding behind lord coe and the iaaf
If she's not the star athlete she would have released the data
She is clearly the athlete with the suspicious blood data
A blood transfusion more than likely
In the time it took for you to write this, you can have provided at least a glimmer of what Paula said to you to convince you that she was clean.
Oh Yeah?!?!?! Would you be talking so tough if I was in front of you?? I'm not scared of you and your tough guy talk, I won't walk away. I am here all day and don't plan on leaving.
As stated in a post two nights ago, I went running with Paula while in Beijing. Prior to the run for the first time in my life I had a lot of doubts as to whether she might be clean mainly because she had come out saying she did not think athletes should reveal their blood values from the leaked IAAF documents. In Beijing before I met Paula, Robert tried to put me on the spot as to whether I thought she was more likely to be a doper or clean and I didn't want to answer which means for the first time ever in my life I thought the odds were not in her favor or being clean.
After our run, I'm firmly back in the camp that Paula has nothing to hide and I understand why she is supporting the WADA stance and saying athletes should not reveal their blood values at this time.
The full story has not been told and while some things were told me in confidence I hope that I've built up enough trust with you all over the years that you'll trust me on some of this stuff. If you think I'm a Paula hack, so be it.
While I'm friends with Paula and Gary, if I thought she was cheating I would say so on here. One of the reasons I wanted to speak with her in Beijing was I was very troubled with her saying blood values should be kept private.
A few details I will share.
1) There is no super injunction involving Paula.
2) There are valid reasons to support the WADA/IAAF stance that blood
values should not be released now.
3) I firmly believe Paula does not have anything to hide and down the
road will make her values public.
These were my concerns before I went to Beijing:
http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=6728693&page=1#6729595
and I don't have them anymore.
I must say when I first met Paula in Beijing in a cab to go to the park to go running, she started talking about Shobukhova's ban being reduced the day before. I even thought to myself, "Can she be this good and just faking it to pull one over me?" That's how skeptical i had become. Now I'm firmly back in the camp that Paula was clean and stands for clean sport.
We discussed a lot of things and she answered every question I put to her. I know I'm vague on details, but some things were said in confidence. I figure those of you I have built up trust with over the years would rather hear my thoughts on this now, as evidenced by this thread, rather than wait, so I'm posting my general impressions here.
wejo wrote:
--
The gun to the head test is what Robert and I always use on whether someone is dirty or clean. I put a gun to your head and there is some truth detector that pulls the trigger if you're wrong. Do you think the person is clean or dirty?
It's a super easy decision for me now - clean.
Kudos for posting the info and digging to the roots of this.
However, you do realize that you just went from "I'll shut down the site if she's dirty" to "I'll blow my brains off if she's dirty", don't you?
Thanks for the post Wejo, but I'm not sold. The fact that she went silent for a month after the ST report, the fact that she had a huge spike in blood values over a 4 day period (taken before and after a race) that she attributed to dehydration, the fact that she had 3 suspicious blood values that experts said had a 1/1000 chance of being attributed to something other than doping, the fact that the ST reported something like "as the athlete began having more and more success, the blood values rose with it over time". She's a very smart woman, and I'm not surprised at all that she was able to flip your stance (no offense), but as a neutral observer the evidence is strongly on the side of her doping.
wejo wrote:
3) I firmly believe Paula does not have anything to hide and down the
road will make her values public.
So if a year from now Paula still hasn't released her suspicious blood values, will you be more skeptical than you are right now?
Also, many of us have wondered over the years whatever happened to Paula's samples that she voluntarily froze somewhere. Have you ever asked her about that?
[quote]wejo wrote:
2) There are valid reasons to support the WADA/IAAF stance that blood
values should not be released now.
3) I firmly believe Paula does not have anything to hide and down the
road will make her values public.
Thank you for your follow-up response. Having said that, can you elaborate on your two points above. Do you know or did Paula indicate when these values will be released. Additionally, since there are valid reasons why the values should not be released right now. What are those reasons? This shouldn't need to be confidential as it must apply to all athletes since WADA is not releasing anyone's blood values.
Meb FTW wrote:
wejo wrote:--
The gun to the head test is what Robert and I always use on whether someone is dirty or clean. I put a gun to your head and there is some truth detector that pulls the trigger if you're wrong. Do you think the person is clean or dirty?
It's a super easy decision for me now - clean.
Kudos for posting the info and digging to the roots of this.
However, you do realize that you just went from "I'll shut down the site if she's dirty" to "I'll blow my brains off if she's dirty", don't you?
One thing I've learned over the years is not to put so much faith in other human beings. By default we're all sinners.
So I won't be shutting down the site or blowing my brains out if Paula is dirty but I believe she is clean. If she's going to an elaborate lengths to use me as part of her plan to hide doping, that's on her not me. A simpler and easier explanation for me is she told me the truth and everything I heard from her made sense to me. I did start from the standpoint of a friend, but when it comes to doping I am very skeptical to begin with. A fuller story will come out.
I was shocked how many British journalists in London thought she was clean and they didn't even speak to her. Because half the time at Worlds journalists are debating who is dirty.
No decision from me. wrote:
PhD in NOP wrote:Not to mention how pathetic it is that we all assume we know Paula is dirty without knowing her.
Good point, next time I'm called up for jury duty I'll say I can't be considered because I don't know the defendant, regardless of the facts or otherwise that are presented to me,because not knowing him/her I can't make an informed decision.
Ah, therein lies the issue. You act as if you KNOW all the facts or are ASSuming you know all the facts, therefore you are making a decision based on limited information, rumors, personal bias, etc.
Well, no one is on trial here and you DON'T know all the facts.
Wejo, Interesting stuff. does Paula know about the accusations on this board? And accusations from other journalists like Kimmage?
You're surprised that the British media thinks she's clean? I am too. After watching BBC coverage of the WC they seem completely objective and unbiased.
Excerpt from recent Kimmage article:
In August 1999, at the Golden League meeting in Monaco, there wasn't much dancing in the BBC tribunes when it was announced that Linford Christie, the 1992 Olympic 100m champion, had tested positive for an anabolic steroid at an indoor meeting in Germany.
Roger Black, a former team-mate of the sprinter, was anchoring the coverage that night and was joined in studio by another former Olympian, Sally Gunnell. It was the second positive test of Christie's long and controversial career but the impression given was that Bambi had just been shot. "This whole Linford thing is totally ridiculous," Black announced.
"It can't be right," Gunnell concurred.
Then they crossed to Steve Cram for the reaction in Monaco. "There's lots of questions being asked but not many answers around at the minute," he said. "Obviously Linford himself is the first to protest his innocence and I would say that probably, if you did a straw poll of athletes around here, you'd have an awful lot of people on his side."
One was Allison Curbishley: "I believe Linford is innocent," she said.
Brendan Foster questioned the testing: "Until it is 100 per cent how dare they bring the name of an athlete like Linford Christie into question?" Katherine Merry and Darren Campbell also lent their support. Christie was banned for two years but continued, with the sport's blessing, to work as a coach.
The waters muddied four years later when Dwain Chambers - the second Briton, after Christie, to break 10 seconds for the 100m - was popped. Unlike Christie, there were no protestations of innocence. Chambers held up his hands, served his time and gave an interview to the BBC that was remarkable for its honesty. This is what he told Matthew Pinsent when asked if a clean athlete could beat a doped athlete in an Olympic final: "It's possible, but the person that's taken drugs has to be having a real bad day. That's what I believe." The response was fascinating. Roger Black, so unquestioning of Christie, was one of many who lined up to question Chambers.
"It upsets me when Dwain comes out with statements that you cannot win an Olympic gold medal without taking drugs," he said. "That's factually wrong and it does an enormous amount of damage to the kids who want to come into the sport. I understand him wanting to be a shining example of what you can do clean but I don't buy that. He knew what he was doing and he should be big enough to put his hands up and say, 'I need to walk away'."
And what are we to make of the remarkable Jonathan Edwards?
Four years ago, over breakfast in London, I reminded the BBC anchor and former triple-jump champion, that if there was one thing he had always done better than jumping forwards, it was jumping backwards. In 1988, he was adamant God did not want him competing on Sundays; in 1993 he was sure God did.
In 2000, he travelled to the Olympic final in Sydney with a tin of sardines in his kitbag to symbolise the loaves and fishes and was offering silent prayers to God ("I place my destiny in your hands. Do with me as you will."); in 2007, he was telling the world that he no longer believed in God. And hadn't he also denounced the "undignified" Dwain Chambers?
"No, I don't know where this has come from," he protested. "I've always liked Dwain. What he did was wrong, and I wouldn't condone it in any way, but I think athletes, young athletes, are vulnerable. They make decisions based on wanting to be the best they can be; they trust people perhaps they shouldn't trust; they defer responsibility for their decisions to other people. So, yes, Dwain made mistakes but was he the greatest sinner within that whole thing? Maybe, maybe not."
"What about Linford?" I asked.
"I think his positive test was contamination."
"What about his positive in 1988 (the Seoul Olympics)?"
"It was a different world in '88, wasn't it?" he said. "People didn't understand quite . . . "
"I think they understand that cheating is cheating," I interrupted.