Important points:
1. Dunes Runner is an insane Russian guy(or if not Russian, just someone who hates US/British runners) who loves the Russian cheat who got busted[YO] & who hates PR. Seriously, IGNORE anything he writes. It is the ONLY way to shut him up. He sometimes posts as ?drewp.? IGNORE HIM. If someone is supporting YO (it will be him under another name) IGNORE it. Please!
2. Edith ain?t too no good at writing no English.
3. WAZ is correct about the gray area thing for a few reasons:
Firstly, man-manipulated air that causes your body to produce more EPO is more similar to a drug that causes your body to produce more EPO (which is the current drug of choice over synthetic EPO) than to training at altitude.
2nd-ly:
?Anabolic steroids weren't banned by the International Olympic Committee until 1975, almost a decade after the East Germans started using them. In 1996, at the Atlanta Olympics, five athletes tested positive for what we now know to be the drug Bromantan, but they weren't suspended, because no one knew at the time what Bromantan was. (It turned out to be a Russian-made psycho-stimulant.) Human growth hormone, meanwhile, has been around for twenty years, and testers still haven't figured out how to detect it.?
So, tents maybe banned someday soon, and maybe PR?s records will deserve asterisks(?).
3RD-LY
?Perhaps the best example of the difficulties of drug testing is testosterone. It has been used by athletes to enhance performance since the fifties, and the International Olympic Committee announced that it would crack down on testosterone supplements in the early nineteen-eighties. This didn't mean that the I.O.C. was going to test for testosterone directly, though, because the testosterone that athletes were getting from a needle or a pill was largely indistinguishable from the testosterone they produce naturally. What was proposed, instead, was to compare the level of testosterone in urine with the level of another hormone, epitestosterone, to determine what's called the T/E ratio. For most people, under normal circumstances, that ratio is 1:1, and so the theory was that if testers found a lot more testosterone than epitestosterone it would be a sign that the athlete was cheating. Since a small number of people have naturally high levels of testosterone, the I.O.C. avoided the risk of falsely accusing anyone by setting the legal limit at 6:1. One approach( to test for EPO) which was used in the late nineties by the International Cycling Union, is a test much like the T/E ratio for testosterone. The percentage of your total blood volume which is taken up by red blood cells is known as your hematocrit. The average adult male has a hematocrit of between thirty-eight and forty-four per cent. Since 1995, the cycling authorities have declared that any rider who had a hematocrit above fifty per cent would be suspended--a deliberately generous standard (like the T/E ratio) meant to avoid falsely accusing someone with a naturally high hematocrit. The hematocrit rule also had the benefit of protecting athletes' health. If you take too much EPO, the profusion of red blood cells makes the blood sluggish and heavy, placing enormous stress on the heart. In the late eighties, at least fifteen professional cyclists died from suspected EPO overdoses. A fifty-per-cent hematocrit limit is below the point at which EPO becomes dangerous.?
These test have changed a bit, but the point? At the time of this article, ANY METHOD that raised your T/E ratio above 6:1 or your Hematocrit above 50% was considered cheating!!! So, if the Tent got you there, guess what?? YOU WERE BUSTED!
Final conclusion: PR is not a cheater in my book, but the TENT IS a gray area of what SHOULD AND SHOULD NOT BE considered legal/illegal.