I am far from desperate to convince you. 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something, when his salary depends on his not understanding it."
Keep spinning. The only way you can do so is to keep making up facts, though. Actually every single one of those nations have improved their national records in several (and in some cases virtually every) distance event since EPO came on the scene:
1500 in 2005.
marathon--2002 or 2011, take your pick.
So, it appears to work in all these populations.
rekrunner wrote:Don't be so desperate to convince me -- we've already been through this, and it seems to me the ones who were not convinced were the non-African athletes during the EPO-era. They either did not believe, or perhaps falsely believed to their detriment, in the power of EPO to improve their level beyond that of their predecessors.
All of the evidence you list supports a competing, yet unstudied, theory that EPO can bring you more quickly to natural performances, but cannot produce unnatural performances. This would explain why it works so well in short duration studies on amateurs well within their personal ability, and also the lack of elite running anecdotes, and even opposite findings, like the recently announced Dutch study that EPO didn't work on cyclists in a time trial climbing the Mont Ventoux.
When we look at elite athletes, when we look at males, when we look at distance running, we find a group that is largely un-studied. When we look at this group, breaking into sub-groups by ethnicity, when we look at the progression during the EPO-era, specifically looking for evidence of the impact on elite performances, of a new doping substance that promises extra-ordinary performances for every group for every sport, we find a lot of sub-groups, from rich nations, able to afford doping, and afford hiding it, with a rather un-ordinary progression spanning more than two decades of the EPO-era, from a drug that was largely undetectable. We find, that EPO, either taken alone, or in combination with drug cocktails:
- did not work for the Americans
- did not work for Britains
- did not work for Germans
- did not work for Italians
- did not work for Kazahks
- did not work for Australians
- did not work for New Zealanders
- did not work for Japanese
- did not work for Russians
- etc.
If EPO could produce the extra-ordinary improvements for every endurance athlete of all races, genders, and sports, then it looks like the elite nationals representing some 85-90% of the global male population showed remarkable restraint, something unprecedented in any sport involving human nature, at a time when East Africans and North Africans started writing new chapters of track history, and later road history.
The fact that we have to borrow anecdotes from the women (known to respond to steroids and male hormones), cycling, and race-walking, only serves to re-inforce that anecdotes from elite running are scarce -- this is for good reason.