Well that didn't take long: Asbel Kiprop gives up fight to prove innocence - Says he doesn't have resources to fight IAAF

rietiisachoke wrote:

Coe's best 1500m time outside Rieti is 3:31.95. Rieti times obviously have had some benefit. Coe's british fanboys usually forget to add this.

LOL. You clearly have no understanding of intrinsic value. His 3:31.95 in 81 was a superior run that his 3:29.77 in Rieti, in that he got less than 100m of drafting, ran practically the entire race solo, and went through 400m in 52.4 and 800m in 1:49.1!

Probably the most impressive 1500m of the entire 1980's.

His Mile WR of 3:47.33 was also equivalent to 3:30.49. He ran that with a last 100m of 13.1.

Deanouk wrote:

Is EPO that much more effective than blood doping and steroids?

EPO & steroids vs blood doping & steroids? Don't know - there has never been any studies looking at EPO or blood doping & roids. But EPO & blood doping are equally effective in achieving the same results - an increase in Hct. Here's a good blood doping study from way back in 1987:

RBC infusion with highly-trained 10k runners showed an average improvement upon infusion (400ml) of 1 min 9 secs:

What changed in the 90s was the conveniency & practicality of using a drug to stimulate an increase of Hct without the resources & hassle of blood transfusions. With the withdrawl phase there's that several week downtime where the athlete is toast until RBCs build up again. Then there's the transportation & storage of the BBs as well as medical supervision needed.

However, we see blood doping make a comeback in the mid-00s with Operation's Puerto & Galgo as well as the Russian program. Galgo had some big names in Estevez, Dominguez & that fast Ethiopian running for Spain who was caught transporting his own BB to a re-infusion site. LOL (can't think of his name right now). On Fuentes' Puerto operation; the names have not been released and probably never will be. Too bad...it would be interesting to see who was involved with that gig.

Contrarian C wrote:

Do you seriously know so little about the EPO test to not realize it’s not a binary black and white result? It is open to interpretation, which is why several people have to look at the stains and make sure there is a minimal likelihood of it being a false positive. There is always the risk of it being a false positive or more often the case a false negative. It is not even close to a perfect science. I don’t know anyone that would want to bet their entire reputation and career on a test that has the possibility of being misinterpreted.

The testing for rEPO microdosing has improved over the years:

"For samples collected 18 h after a microdose, the sensitivity of the EPO WGA MAIIA assay was 100% in plasma and 87.5% in urine samples at the respective 98% specificity threshold levels."

Looks like you are mixing a couple things up. The 800m and 5000m analysis "casual obsever" showed you comes from him, not me. In my "analysis" I didn't look at Europe specifically, but "focused" on "5 continents" (assuming "focus" is the right term) Why wouldn't a pool of the "top-5" consider outlier talents? I don't know what you are talking about with quotes from US athletes generally, and a Biathlete. I did not present these quotes in any of my arguments or make any leap of faith from them. Quotes like ' unlimited blood transfusions, steroids virtually undetectable' come from "casual obsever", not me.

Coevett wrote:

EPO was legal in the mid 90's but it appears the best British middle-distance runners didn't go on it. Maybe the odd b-level runner like RekRunner I mean Paula's husband

?

Thanks Deanouk. I appreciate the extended data, which actually re-inforce the observations made before.

My conclusions remain different though. It is well documented that blood doping got a lot more convenient, thanks to EPO after 1990, especially for Africans who were basically unable to use transfusions in the 80s, while steroid use became increasingly riskier.

Remember Johnson, caught in 1988? He finally admitted that he heavily used steroids since 1980 without ever raising a flag before '88, which provides another point in case how rudimentary testing was back then.

The above fits nicely with the observation (yours and rekrunner's and mine!) that the 5000 improved a lot in the 80s and in the 90s, but the 800 only in the 80s, as the importance of steroids decreases with increasing distance.

But yes, while fitting, that does indeed not provide hard evidence.

As for non-Africans doping less than Africans, well. It does increasingly look like that, but what's happening at the top? Even when ignoring all the dirty records from the 80s, we have the fastest non-African 5000 m runner caught for steroids during the EPO heydays, and the fastest 10000 m runner flagged as likely doping by the IAAF (more suspicious than Kiprop), and caught with suspiciously high testo by the USADA, who also claimed to have evidence for him having used a forbidden method. That's actually worse than in case of the Africans.

Oh, and I owe you a response regarding the changes since Diack's departure (2016 - 2018): indeed it looks better now.

Examples:

fastest African-born: 1:42.15 - 12:55

fastest non-African: 1:42.93 - 13:10

Compared to all time list:

fastest African-born: 1:40.91 - 12:37

fastest non-African: 1:41.73 - 12:54

Differences:

fastest African-born: 1.24 s - 18 s

fastest non-African: 1.20 s- 16 s

Quite some changes, especially over 5000 m (over 2% vs. over 1%, supporting your assumption that the 5000 benefits more from cheating). And it does not look as if the Africans slowed down more than the non-Africans.

Well, it's only 2.5 years, maybe we should revisit that in 2020.

rekrunner wrote:

What I can clearly see is two excellent demonstrations of the logical fallacy "begging the question" aka "assuming the conclusion".

Coevett wrote:

(Obviously correct answer to anyone without his blind spot - Kenyans doped with EPO far more than the rest of the world).

(Obviously correct answer to anyone without his blind spot - Kiprop had throttled back on the EPO for some time).

Is this a flash of honest self-insight on your part? Congratulations! You realize now that starting with the value judgement that 'either everybody dopes, or nobody dopes' and determinedly interpreting all the facts to fit that politically based conviction, isn't very logical or objective.

If you're just being an aspie again and projecting then...

No, you're the person ruling out the most obvious explanation, and you're doing that because of a political value judgement. None of us are scientists, we're reasonable people trying to decide if the success of Kenyan runners is likely due to doping. It seems no amount of failed tests, no amount of suspicous progressions, in other words, no evidence whatsoever, could shift you from your faith that Kenyans and Moroccans aren't cheats.

I beg your pardon Rekrunner. I thought he mentioned that the data analysis was yours. Sorry, my mistake.

I don’t think his data based on top 5 goes deep enough as a sample pool. My reference to outliers, concerns their inclusion rather than exclusion. If there are a couple of outliers in a decade, e.g Coe and Cruz in the 80’s, then it will skew quite a lot the average of such a small sample size.

The quotes were what he referred to.

Again, apologies for my mistake.

Haha, never any comment to short Rieti. 3:31.95 puts Coe at around nr. 100 all time. Over 10 years to find better split times than Stockholm. Only managed it in Rieti.

No I did not. I wrote

"Here are the numbers I crunched via rekrunners' guidelines"

This refers to his EPO thread, where he looked at the respective top-5 performances pre- and post 1990. I used the same guidelines, e.g. top-5, Africans vs. non-Africans, counting African-born immigrants like Kipketer, Lagat and Farah as Africans, and extended that by decade. Why? Because the doping options as well as tests changed a lot over time; to just look at pre- and post-EPO makes you miss some points.

For example:

- both groups improved over 5000 m in the 90s and 00s

- both groups slowed down over 5000 m in this decade*

- only the "Africans" improved over 800 m in the 90s, while the non-Africans slowed down

- both groups are slower over 800 m in this decade than in the 80s*

*: To me, this implies that both groups have dopers at the top, who have to dope more carefully since the ABP's introduction and Diack's departure.

This is also confirmed by high-profile cheats such as Baumann and Kiprop, and several other highly suspected dopers at the top, as well as a couple of publications about the changes in blood profiles over time across various sports.

By all means, feel free to see that as a coincidence.

Agreed, in principle. That's why I mentioned that that was rekrunner's original criterion, not mine. However, your top-10 data show pretty much the same trends, or don't they?

So when RekRunner is playing with his calculator, he doesn't even take into account factors like rise and fall in number of track and field participants by nationality, or the fact that the populations of Kenya and Ethiopia have both doubled since the EPO era, and that of Morocco by nearly 50%?

No problem. As he just wrote, some of the guidelines were the same as mine, but not the quotes regarding doping causes. Understood about the outliers.

Deanouk wrote:

I beg your pardon Rekrunner. I thought he mentioned that the data analysis was yours. Sorry, my mistake.

I don’t think his data based on top 5 goes deep enough as a sample pool. My reference to outliers, concerns their inclusion rather than exclusion. If there are a couple of outliers in a decade, e.g Coe and Cruz in the 80’s, then it will skew quite a lot the average of such a small sample size.

The quotes were what he referred to.

Again, apologies for my mistake.

Apologies all round for crediting the wrong posters. Yes, I think the extended samples of top 10 show a more subtle trend in the 800m. There was very little difference in the average of the top 10 for each decade since the 80's. I think the marked improvement in the 80's is less obvious with a bigger pool of data. Taking just the top 5 accentuates the impact of the two outliers from that decade, Coe and Cruz. Both would be in many people's top 6 or 7 of all time. I don't think that applies to any other decade.

I'm still of the opinion that steroids and EPO was more prevalent and effected times in the 90's, than compared to steroids and blood transfusions in the 70's and 80's. We have Vainio in the 10 k blood doping (caught through traces of steroids in drug sample, proving that tests were done and athletes were caught in this era) and another Finnish 10k admitting to it after retiring. We also have anecdotal evidence from Canova that some Italian 10k guys experimented with it. But these are all long distance men. There are no cases of any middle distance guys getting caught the same way Vainio was (ye, I realise there was no test for blood doping back then) or admitting to it. I feel there is a real lack of any evidence that 800 and 1500 guys practised blood doping in the late 70's and early 80's. I also suspect that they didn't think it would be of much benefit, and it was quite a risky procedure.

Deanouk wrote:

I'm still of the opinion that steroids and EPO was more prevalent and effected times in the 90's, than compared to steroids and blood transfusions in the 70's and 80's.

Sorry, that sentence doesn't make much sense. Let me try another:

I'm still of the opinion, that the use of steroids and EPO were more prevalent and effected times more in the middle distances in the 90's, than was the use of steroids and blood doping in the 70's and early 80's.

I did some analysis of 1500m in the 90's in an attempt to try and work out when the use of EPO might have infiltrated T&F.

I took the top 10 performers at 1500m for each year (actually started in 1989), including those 1500m times ratified in mile races, if they fell into the top 10. I have each athlete's times in each list, but too late to post them all now.

I'll just post the average of top 10 times based on top 10 performers. Perhaps tomorrow I'll give a break down of the nationality of the athletes in each year's list.

1989 - 3:33.10;

1990 - 3:33.23;

1991 - 3:32.98;

1992 - 3:32.46;

1993 - 3:33.11;

1994 - 3:33.17;

1995 - 3:31.66;

1996 - 3:31.32;

1997 - 3:30.06;

1998 - 3:30.36;

1999 - 3:30.45;

2000 - 3:30.31.

Seems to be a big drop in 1995, of 1.51secs, after 6 seasons where the average only fluctuated by 0.77secs.

Then there is another significant drop in 1997.

If we take the average of the first 4 years of the period above, we get an average (of 89-92) 3:32.94.

The average for the last 4 years of the period (97-2000 - the last 4 years before any EPO test came), we get an average of 3:30.30.

It's quite a crude conclusion, but perhaps an improvement of c. 2.64secs represents an average improvement for an athlete using EPO for 1500m.

casual obsever wrote:

Thanks Deanouk. I appreciate the extended data, which actually re-inforce the observations made before.

My conclusions remain different though. It is well documented that blood doping got a lot more convenient, thanks to EPO after 1990, especially for Africans who were basically unable to use transfusions in the 80s, while steroid use became increasingly riskier.

Remember Johnson, caught in 1988? He finally admitted that he heavily used steroids since 1980 without ever raising a flag before '88, which provides another point in case how rudimentary testing was back then.

The above fits nicely with the observation (yours and rekrunner's and mine!) that the 5000 improved a lot in the 80s and in the 90s, but the 800 only in the 80s, as the importance of steroids decreases with increasing distance.

But times had been improving for the previous 100 years. Coe, Ovett, Cram, Cruz etc were among the very first generation of largely or completely full-time athletes. . Athletics was also never more popular than then, especially middle-distance, and it's participation by European, American, Australasians was at its greatest. It's not unreasonable to suppose, in fact it's quite logical to assume, that the 1980s would see times get very close to the physiological limits, and any improvements after that would be minor and due to incremental improvements in shoes and tracks and training. Otherwise, a new drug and the willingness and opportunity for it to be used by elite athletes.

In other words, the fact that the 800m times improved far less than the distance events doesn't prove that Coe, Ovett, Cram were on steroids, it just proves that EPO was responsible for the huge improvement in 1500/5000 times in the 90s and early 00s (almost entirely by Africans).

So what do you think is the clean limits for the 800m? If Coe, Cruz, Cram, Koskei all broke 1:43 because of steroids, do you think it's impossible to run sub 1:43 clean? Or do you think Rudisha is clean and ran 1:40? Or maybe he is only on EPO, which barely makes a difference for 800m, so he would have ran say 1:41.5 without it? People seem to agree here that 3:29 or maybe 3:28 in perfect conditions for a true GOAT is the clean limit for the 1500, so I wonder what it would be for the 800?

Or perhaps we should look at the period between Seoul 88 and 1993 to see who might be the clean world record holder, as that was the golden period between the introduction of somewhat effective steroid testing and the EPO era. That would mean Peter Elliott is the clean world record holder, as he had the fastest time post Seoul and Pre EPO (1:42.97 in 1990).

Or are you saying that Ovett who was apparently injecting dbol twice daily in the wild west 70s/80s was over a second slower than a clean Peter Elliott, a doped up Cram barely faster, and a blood doped AND dbol/testosterone pumped Coe only a second faster? But then if Coe, Ovett, Cram took advantage of doping opportunities that Elliott lacked, it's odd that they were barely faster over 800m and yet 2 or 3 seconds faster over 1500. Elliott ran his 1:42 when he was essentially a 1500m runner.

When I looked at all all-time performances, I looked at the raw data, and left everything open for discussion. Discussions of shifting demographics would be part of a post-analysis discussion, and it was indeed brought up and discussed.

Coevett wrote:

So when RekRunner is playing with his calculator, he doesn't even take into account factors like rise and fall in number of track and field participants by nationality, or the fact that the populations of Kenya and Ethiopia have both doubled since the EPO era, and that of Morocco by nearly 50%?

Deanouk wrote:

If we take the average of the first 4 years of the period above, we get an average (of 89-92) 3:32.94.

The average for the last 4 years of the period (97-2000 - the last 4 years before any EPO test came), we get an average of 3:30.30.

It's quite a crude conclusion, but perhaps an improvement of c. 2.64secs represents an average improvement for an athlete using EPO for 1500m.

It is a bit crude because it assumes that the top 10 in the EPO era would be the top 10 clean, rather than the guys who are responding particularly well to EPO.

To put it another way, the top 10 in 1989 might have been completely different if EPO was around, and not just the times of the individual athletes.

Also, I think I'm right in saying that Morcelli appears in both top 10 lists (89-92 and 97-2000) and ran only 0.8 faster in 97-2000. This shows how crude it is to draw the conclusion of an average 2.64 secs improvement, unless you believe that EPO only made a 0.8 second difference for Morcelli.

Your analysis is a good start, but I think 2.64 should be regarded as an absolute minimum average, that even Rekrunner should be able to accept.

Also, it's my belief that for whatever reason, the North Africans got hold of EPO first. That would explain also Morcelli's career (I'm sure he got hold of it before 95!).

I have done similar types of analysis. For example, if we look at Kenya alone.

These are the numbers of Kenyan athletes running under 3:33 in two year periods in the 90s :

90/91 = 1

92/93 = 3

94/95 = 1

96/97 = 10

98/99 = 10

00/01 = 9

And if we fast forward to 2016/17 the total is only 5, and one of them is Kiprop. Even if we include Kiprop that's half the number that were running sub 3:33 in the second half of the 90s. But here's another important factor that Rekrunner completely ignores - since the mid 90's, the population of Kenya has increased by around 50% (and that's likely to be higher still for the 18-32 athletic age group). So you would expect around 15 Kenyans to be breaking 3:33 these days from that alone. Instead it's 5, or 4 if you take out Kiprop. And as you are fully aware, if you took out the Monaco performances, these figures would be even more ridiculously obvious the evidence of EPO.

Anway, my conclusions are :

The Kenyans probably were using EPO en masse a little later than the North Africans. This is important as regards El G because he might have been using it as a junior even before the Kenyans had gotten hold of it. And it's not just in isolation we have to consider the advantages on individuals. El G benefitted from having training partners, pacemakers, fellow Olympic finalists etc who were all on EPO.

I still say 5 seconds minimum EPO gives an advantage over 1500, at least for good responders as the North Africans obviously were/are.

Agreed. Or faster than the clean physiological limits because of steroids and blood transfusions.

Now we need to quantify "minor". Would you allow for 1/3 seconds over 800 m per decade thanks to spikes and track and nutrition and training advancements etc. ?

Starting from, say, a 1:41.7 in 81, we could see (have seen) a 1:41.4 in 91, a 1:41.1 in 2001, a 1:40.8 in 2011.

Don't forget blood transfusions.

I actually don't think it's impossible. I think Kipketer, Coe and Rudisha could have done that.

I do think it's highly unlikely to see a clean 1:42.9, because such a runner could easily grab the opportunity to dope, run a 1:40.9 or 1:39.9, and become super rich. Motive and opportunity, at least until say 2005. Now you can still dope of course, but get away only with smaller amounts. On the other hand, now you can get TUEs for more powerful drugs than in the 90s.

I wonder too. I don't believe Rudisha was clean. Another question is: if he would have been in 2002 in his 2012 shape, would he have run 1:39 or 1:38 on unlimited EPO?

That wouldn't really help, as one could use autologous blood transfusions with 0 detection risk.

That's one of the sad things. We never really had a clean sport...

It doesn't help to compare individuals, as we don't know who had better talent for which distance, better training for which distance, and who responded better to doping.