test2 wrote:
About his "hard evidence", I do appreciate his sharing it but at most it proves that world class performances are possible with relatively low hematocrits. Personally I find this encouraging (maybe some top performances are unaided) but it doesn't prove anything about what effect EPO would have had on these athletes. As Renato repeatedly tells us, training improves performance and lowers hematocrit. So the inverse correlation in the blood values would be expected in clean athletes. Again, this tells us nothing about what would have happened had blood values been raised by a separate mechanism like doping or EPO. Renato is making the mistake of assuming that correlation implies causation.
In addition to the correlation /causation issue you raise, there is also extremely incomplete disclosure of the evidence he does have. He has given a few exmaples, but he claims to do blood testi g every couple of weeks for athletes he trains. Hr has trained many, many athletes. Which means he must have thousands of data points. I am unimpressed that a selective disclosure of a few of those data points actually supports a particular position.
I have encouraged him to publish all of his data or to give it to a researcher to be analyzed and published. He has not acknowledged those posts.
If he will not, for whatever reason, release that information, nobody should assume that the few data points he has released are representative of the entire set. Nobody should assume that set supports Canovas claims.
It is a scientific question and if data is claimed to exist to support a certain conclusion, that data must all be available for examination and analysis.