El G was definitely as dirty as they come.
Anyone denying this is just burying their heads in the sand. He was doped up like a race horse.
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Jack Ruby wrote:
El G was definitely as dirty as they come.
Anyone denying this is just burying their heads in the sand. He was doped up like a race horse.
Ok, I'll bite. The thing is, people have this naïve belief in dope. They believe that drugs can give superhuman energy. They can't explain exactly how, because they don't know basic Bioenergetics, they just believe.
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it is time wrote:
Bad Wigins wrote:
all you have to do to run 3:25 is go out in 1:50 and HANG ON.
They never do it, because champs, and medals, and all that nonsense certain people think is so precious. Certain types of weirdos.
You can't really be serious.
About what? 1:50 and hang on? Pretty sure that would work, if anyone could.
Never happens because champs and medals? Dead serious about that.
Both Jakob and Tim squandered any chance they might have had. Just not important enough for them. Can't train for champs and records at the same time. Of course noone can go 3:25 if noone even tries.110 -
1:50.0 is actually "only" 3:26.25 so even if you "hold on" to exactly that pace you're not breaking the record. Really if you want to positive split to break the 1500 WR you want to go out in 1:49.0 or so and "hang on".
As if that's easy.
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mikehammer wrote:
mostlyacyclist wrote:
Ok, I'll bite.
A failed drug test does not necessarily imply doping. A passed drug test certainly does not imply a lack of doping. The biological passport went into effect in 2009. EPO testing was crude and whereabouts rules were effectively non existent. Even now, microdosing EPO and using blood transfusions would be quite easy to get away with. With no biological passport, he could have easily had boosted blood values his entire career.
Point being, I can't prove he doped, but saying that athletes have to race clean at the Olympics and if they don't they will be caught is naive. At a minimum, people have a right to be suspicious of the greatest 1500m runner in history, who not only competed at the height of the blood boosting era, but was from a country where numerous athletes have been caught and he was hardly, if ever, tested out of competition.
If we know something produces performance gains (if you want to disagree with this, I don't really know what to tell you. EPO, blood transfusions, and anabolics do enhance athletic performance), and we know many top athletes use them, we must probabilistically assume that the single greatest athlete at a certain event used said measures to enhance performance.
Again, I cannot prove anything, but saying athletes have to race sans drugs at the Olympics is patently false, and even if it were true, it says nothing about what they do out of competition.
To summarize
You don't know anything
Actually, he knows quite a bit.
1. Many PEDs were popular at that time.
2. EPO was and is the most significant of these for endurance sports.
3. Effective EPO testing didn't exist yet.
4. Out of competition testing may not have either.
5. Nobody since has run as fast.
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Not the same poster, but.... wrote:
mikehammer wrote:
To summarize
You don't know anything
Actually, he knows quite a bit.
1. Many PEDs were popular at that time.
2. EPO was and is the most significant of these for endurance sports.
3. Effective EPO testing didn't exist yet.
4. Out of competition testing may not have either.
5. Nobody since has run as fast.
We now have super shoes, supertracks and wavelight yet nobody got within 3 seconds of his record last year. The only person to get within 1.5 seconds of it since was busted for EPO. He was obviously on the juice, I can't believe people think he was clean.
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Did you know ... wrote:
Did you know, at Olympics, they drug test medalists? Did you know athletes have to race sans drugs at Olympics? Did you know with all those 3:26.xx 1500m, only one 1500m Olympic gold medal.
Yes, and this was the worst period in distance running in history outside of Africa (save for a handful of Iberians who were also on the EPO).
1992 - 2004 was basically who was the best responder to EPO out of Iberia, the Mahgreb, and the Rift Valley. And El G still only won one gold, and wouldn't have any if EPO testing had been introduced just one year earlier than it was.
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Peach Pit wrote:
I don't know how I missed it, but I just found out El G ran 3:26 5 times. I only knew about the fastest 2, but it turns out he ran 3:26 again in '98, and then twice in 3 weeks in 2002, over 4 years removed from his first. Here I was foolishly thinking Jakob was coming in to snag the goat Mid-D crown, when it turns out that it's gonna take another Olympic medal and a handful of 3:26s to even have an argument about it. This dude was crazy.
3:26.00 Hicham EL GUERROUJ Stadio Olimpico, Roma (ITA) 14 JUL 1998
3:26.12 Hicham EL GUERROUJ Bruxelles (BEL) 24 AUG 2001
4 3:26.45 Hicham EL GUERROUJ Zürich (SUI) 12 AUG 1998
6 3:26.89 Hicham EL GUERROUJ Zürich (SUI) 16 AUG 2002
7 3:26.96 Hicham EL GUERROUJ Rieti (ITA) 08 SEP 2002
edit - This knowledge reinforced both the idea that he's the greatest mid-d runner ever, and the idea that he was doped to the gills, by about an order of magnitude.
I think you are not the first to under appreciate just how good El G was compared to the second best in history.
In 2018, before supershoes, he also had 7 of the top-10 (3:27.37 or better), with Morceli, Lagat, and Kiprop with 1 each.
El G had 33 out of the top-100 (sub-3:30) all time fastest 1500m times, as well as the 101st (3:30.0). The second best prolific runners were Morceli (8), Lagat (7), and Kiprop (7).
Today, there are 126 performance at 3:30.0 or better, and with recent entrants, the top-100 is El G (28), Morceli (7), Lagat (7), Kiprop (6).
It's tempting to think El G was doped to the gills by an order of magnitude, but given the assumption of many athletes doping during in an era of an inability to test the latest drugs and methods, and an extreme ease for athletes to beat the testers, this raises the question why so few runners were not faster than the likes of Coe and Cram from the 1980s, nearly 4 seconds slower than El G.
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... forgot Ngeny's (8) sub-3:30s.
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It’s hilarious how there are still delusional people that think people like Jakob or Cheerio running 3:28 are clean but 3:26 nope that’s the limit he was on EPO.
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Did you know ... wrote:
Did you know, at Olympics, they drug test medalists? Did you know athletes have to race sans drugs at Olympics? Did you know with all those 3:26.xx 1500m, only one 1500m Olympic gold medal.
Did you know, in one final he fell? Did you know, in the other final he list by 0.25 to the 1000 m world record holder, who you surely think was doping?
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Belarussiya wrote:
It’s hilarious how there are still delusional people that think people like Jakob or Cheerio running 3:28 are clean but 3:26 nope that’s the limit he was on EPO.
Yes, because difficulty rises exponentially here. Going from 3:28 to 3:26 is multiple orders of magnitude harder than going from 3:30 to 3:28.
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THOUGHTSLEADER wrote:
Yes, I'd be ready to believe that El G 100% doped if his coach (Kada) and training partners were definitively linked to doping. If you do a close examination of this, they actually were not. There's a misconception that Adil Kaouch (banned) was a training partner but I do not see that verified.
For Kada, there was a complicated story with Hamza Driouch who was coached by Jama Aden and Kada at different times and got banned for ABP irregularities. However, the timeline seemed to point to Aden doping him and we know quite well that Aden has been caught red-handed with drugs and was pushing drugs on David Torrence (RIP). Kada really hasn't been of much relevance since El G's retirement. That being said, it's still hard to look away from Morocco's federation and culture of doping at the time that seemed to be pretty consistently applied from the top.
El Guerrouj and really Morceli were just so much better than everyone else at producing times and dominant victories. Lagat for a time as well was close to that level. I know Ngeny beat El Guerrouj and did push him to the mile world record. But Ngeny looks more like a Jake Wightman type pulling off the rare victory at the biggest moment while being really good but not the same caliber (with a speed advantage that came into play that the ideal moment). El Guerrouj was just ridiculously prolific at running fast times — we'll see if Jakob ever gets to the level of running 3:26s, 3:27s and 3:28s with regularity.
Seb Coe, writing in The Telegraph, wrote this about El G:
Athletics: El Guerrouj lets biggest prize of all slip through his fingers
"Adil El Kaouch, his team mate, training partner and pace-maker..."11 -
Did you know ... wrote:
Did you know, at Olympics, they drug test medalists? Did you know athletes have to race sans drugs at Olympics? Did you know with all those 3:26.xx 1500m, only one 1500m Olympic gold medal.
I know you're knew, but did you know EPO was undetectable at the time?
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Abdelkader Kada trained Mohamed El Garni who would also be sanctioned for facts related to doping. El Garni started off with Canova, then to Jama Aden, then to Kada.
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Did you know ... wrote:
Did you know, at Olympics, they drug test medalists? Did you know athletes have to race sans drugs at Olympics? Did you know with all those 3:26.xx 1500m, only one 1500m Olympic gold medal.
Did you know that with all those 3:26.xx 1500m, he did the 1500m/5k DOUBLE in '04? That's right, the 5k.
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Let's not forget his #2 AT 7:23 3k
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Hoead wrote:
Did you know ... wrote:
Did you know, at Olympics, they drug test medalists? Did you know athletes have to race sans drugs at Olympics? Did you know with all those 3:26.xx 1500m, only one 1500m Olympic gold medal.
Yes, and this was the worst period in distance running in history outside of Africa (save for a handful of Iberians who were also on the EPO).
1992 - 2004 was basically who was the best responder to EPO out of Iberia, the Mahgreb, and the Rift Valley. And El G still only won one gold, and wouldn't have any if EPO testing had been introduced just one year earlier than it was.
And overall Morocco has had a horribly dirty record on EPO since the EPO testing started c 2001 and then the ABP some years later. You can hit double figures when listing the number of nations who have had Moroccan born enduros busted for doping. Unique in the sport.
Unlikely that they only started doping en masse once the tests became much more robust. And coincidentally their rise prior to that ties in with when EPO started becoming more widely used in athletics, eg bouttayeb, boulami, Skah etc.
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I am American and I wear “say no to doping shirts” on track meets , and vouch that I’m a clean and honorable athlete. I’m not a doper.
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