Alex Hutchinson calls out CANOVA over study confirming EPO works on Kenyan runners

Athletes would spontaneously combust if that stuff worked!

It's physics or basic physiology. Not sure which. I've never seen the inside of a lab.

An Orange fell on Newton's head wrote:

Athletes would spontaneously combust if that stuff worked!

It's physics or basic physiology. Not sure which. I've never seen the inside of a lab.

my sister owned a lab once...a black lab

JonO. wrote:

casual obsever wrote:

Well, he just found Newton. Maybe Clausius or Hess will be next?

So have you figured out how injecting EPO circumvents the laws of physics yet?

Which law, Newton's first, second, or third?

i think he is thinking about the "Aether", now im sure if you could inject that into your body that would be something!

JonO. wrote:

It's really not hard to work out, but for some reason a lot of exercise physiologists have an alternative agenda.

Shame on them for not adopting the far more rational and objective stance of the far-gone conspiracy loon.

casual obsever wrote:

JonO. wrote:

So have you figured out how injecting EPO circumvents the laws of physics yet?

Which law, Newton's first, second, or third?

The one where you fall out of your tree. Jon does that on the daily.

Canova is a liar wrote:

Brahim Boulami, faster than your precious Shaheen, would seem to be the best testimonial Pro EPO. Fastest 3000m steeplechase ever.

You can say that again!

It really is the same thing argued over and over again. Some people claim that epo doesn't work yet evidence suggests otherwise and every couple of months and elite athlete gets busted for it. Deniers cite some study that minimizes the impact of epo as all the evidence they need, yet everything else suggests otherwise. From the mid-to-late 1960s through the late 1980s (heck even the early 1990s, circa 1991) records barely improved (adjusted from grass, clay and cinders), despite the sport being extremely popular. Why? Because training knowledge was maximized, athletes knew the ideal training methods were a mix that included the heavy aerobic training of Peters, Lydiard and Cerutty with the intense anaerobic conditioning of Zatopek and the Swedish fartlek ideas. Athletes during this period also already potentially had unlimited use of steriods, amphetamines/stimulants, blood transfusions, pain killers and altitude training. Then suddenly records started to melt, each year seemingly a life time from the last. We saw gains of 1% on the 1500m, 2% for 3,000m to nearly 3% over 10,000m in as little as 5-6 years. And the only new thing available was synthetic epo. For marathons, admittedly over a longer time-frame the gains have been even larger. The fact is the longer the event the bigger the percentage gain. So for the day to day cycling tours the gains are massive. Yet people continue to down play the gains for longer events by saying these are conducted at submaximal intensity, yes but their sub maximal intensity becomes more intense. In running terms it is sort of akin to running at 27:10 pace and then finishing with a 52s last lap, yet the world record upto 1989 was 27:13 (and I have no confidence in the cleanliness of this time).

Maybe we evolved springier feet or something? There HAS to be some sort of efficiency explanation.

It's probably thermoregulation: thanks to Global Warming, we are now better adapted to dispel heat while running hard than in the 80s, and then run 2:02 in Berlin once we catch a lucky 48 degree day.

Also people in the 80s weren't aware of the importance of Paula's box jumps or Mo's situps for enhancing springy running efficiency!

casual obsever wrote:

It's probably thermoregulation: thanks to Global Warming, we are now better adapted to dispel heat while running hard than in the 80s, and then run 2:02 in Berlin once we catch a lucky 48 degree day.

Also people in the 80s weren't aware of the importance of Paula's box jumps or Mo's situps for enhancing springy running efficiency!

Press ups actually but imagine if they get a 42 degree day in Berlin?

Physics destroyed!

I confirm that I don't know anything about bacteria and new genomes, and I'm not interested in this.

But to think that in Africa the doping is administrated in high scientific way is something at the same time crazy and idiotic, and clearly shows you don't have any clue about the continent and specifically Countries as Kenya, Ethiopia and Uganda.

And I can tell you again : if all the athletes used for the "scientific" researches, instead taking EPO, go to change their training, in the same time of the researches can achieve results BETTER than maintaining the same training adding EPO.

The only experiment possible can be like this :

a) Two groups of athletes of medium level (maybe 5% slower than the current WR), that are not elite, but better than the subjects normally used for the researches (this means about 27'30" for 10 km, 62'10" forHM and 2:09' for Marathon).

b) One group takes EPO, the other group placebo (of course, they don't know).

c) The group taking EPO doesn't change its normal training, the placebo group change training, increasing all the parameters compared with their normal training.

d) At the end of the period of administration, all the athletes go for the same competition, that has to be run at maximal intensity. All the athletes can't compete for a period of two months of preparation, and the last race must be done with the athletes of the two groups only, with some economical incentive, so all the athletes want to try their best.

With the competition, we can see how much the athletes improved their times (of course, not using 3000m for marathon runners...). And I bet that who had bigger improvement are not the runners maintaining their normal training and taking EPO...

casual obsever wrote:

It's probably thermoregulation: thanks to Global Warming, we are now better adapted to dispel heat while running hard than in the 80s, and then run 2:02 in Berlin once we catch a lucky 48 degree day.

Also people in the 80s weren't aware of the importance of Paula's box jumps or Mo's situps for enhancing springy running efficiency!

Too funny! ?

Subway Surfers wrote:

It really is the same thing argued over and over again...

It is the same thing argued over again, if people let this thread to be hijacked, because - as the headline here states clearly - this thread is mainly to discuss the merits of the brand new research paper and whether it proves that Renato Canova is a liar or not.

The paper is very dubious, because in addition of the published version of the study bringing forward almost no new information compared to the PhD paper published a few years ago, the study has its methodological issues and the results enough weird anomalies to render any conclusions about the "real" improvement difficult.

If the mechanism of faster time trial performance of the Kenyans after elevated hemoglobin mass is increased oxygen deIivery to the muscles via elevated oxygen carrying capacity of blood, the study is very strange in this regard.

As background information, one should keep in mind that when Dr. Michael N. Sawka pooled data from 30 subjectsfor his 1987 meta-analysis (JAMA, Vol 257, No 11: pp. 1496-1499) from double-blind studies where 900 ml of blood was reinfused with roughly similar protocol, he concluded that reinfusion of 900 ml of blood elevated Vo2Max on average by 7.9 % (60.6 ml/kg/min to 65.4 ml/kg/min).

When the effect of similar protocol (double-blind etc.) was tested on time trial performance in separate studies, reinfusion of 900 ml of blood didn't increase speed by 7.9 % and not even close, but 1.7 % (Brien 1989, 1500 m), 2.5 % (Williams, 1981, 5-mile) and 3.5 % (Brien, 1987, 10000m), there being (on average) some rough 3:1-ratio between the two in double-blind placebo-controlled studies. The ratio was actually 6:1 in the only study that measured both TT and Vo2Max from the same people, when Vo2Max increased by 11.9 % whereas 3 mile TT-performance increased only by 2.0 %.

In this non-blinded study everybody is so excited about, 6.2 % increase in Vo2Max (a low figure among the blood doping studies) can strangely coincide with 4.6 % improvement in TT-performance (fastest TT improvement among studies) after four weeks of rHuEPO. And 4 weeks after the treatment has ended, TT-performance is still 3.4 % better whereas there is only statistically insignificant 3.1 % increase in Vo2Max.

In statistical terms, the drug increasing total hemoglobin mass had enough potency to increase performance by 3.4 % four weeks after its administration was ended but still it hadn't to statistically increase Vo2Max, the key mechanism via which it increases performance.

And just for the record, those are all 900 ml reinfusion studies from the 1980's and the TT tests are almost all there have been carried out at all, so cherry-picking isn't that possible answer to this problem.

Here is the link to the study showing 1.2 % improvement in performance after placebo injections I mentioned a day or two ago. It was mentioned in the "discussion" - part of the 2018 Haile et al. study, so the authors of that study also found it relevant enough to refer to:

http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/102299/1/102299.pdf

I have only browsed it through relatively quickly, but as the paper states relating to RPE that "[t]here were also no significant differences in RPE between pre- and post-intervention races in either the control or placebo condition" and later that "improved exercise performance for the same degree of perceived effort was observed following placebo administration in the present study", it at least looks plausible that any change in perceived effort would increase performance on top of that 1.2 % placebo effect.

Let's Get To The Bottom Of This wrote:

And this:

http://www.xinhuanet.com/english/2018-07/22/c_137340840.htm

Canova is a liar wrote:

Marco Pantini says hello.

You may have changed your handle from your registered one but it's clear who you are, what with your sources of choice, name calling and inability to spell names correctly.

Aragon wrote:

And 4 weeks after the treatment has ended, TT-performance is still 3.4 % better whereas there is only statistically insignificant 3.1 % increase in Vo2Max.

In statistical terms, the drug increasing total hemoglobin mass had enough potency to increase performance by 3.4 % four weeks after its administration was ended but still it hadn't to statistically increase Vo2Max, the key mechanism via which it increases performance.

Correct, but Mr. Cherry-Picker, you fail to acknowledge that statistical uncertainties go in two directions.

To apply that fact to these measurements: a statistically insignificant 3.1 % increase in Vo2Max is not necessarily smaller than a statistically significant 3.4 % increase.

For example, the real values could have been a 4.5% increase vs. a 3.0% increase. You know this, so stop pretending that there is contradiction here.

OK. Likewise, speak ONLY for yourself, and stop speaking for elite athletes, and coaches for the last 25 years and today. My sources: - for Hesch: Hesch interview (see above) seeing drastic results only after two years and multiple regimens - for your criteria: you in this thread "noticed better training and racing results after the EPO injections" Or 4) to 100), (insert any speculative hypotheses). The "slightly outperformed" should put all arguments in perspective. Your "3 steps forwards and 2 steps back" argument is still speculative hypothesis. "non-Africans failed to match the African performances" and "When you then look at (top ranked doping) nations when ranked by performance, the rankings are not comparable at all" are correct under all scenarios and assumptions. It is not faith that you are unable to make the correlation.

Now why on Earth would you stop the EPO group from doing the more productive training they are now capable of?