The fastest clean 100m? Mid-9.8's

YOU DOUCHEBAG watch too much tv,right?LOL at 'counter cold medicine'LOL at the ancient argument of non-white eyesLOL at everybody in t&f knowing he was doped to the gills other than you'bye douchebag.

It's totally arbitrary. Your standards and field size are ridiculous. Here's why:

Of all the men to ever break 9.73 second for 100m, not a single one has ever tested positive for anything. Thus, if you can run 9.72 or better, you're probably clean.

You're limiting your field size to a half dozen guys, half of whom were coached by PED proponents, and Montgomery is in now way of the same class as the others. He got as close to false starting as you can without getting called on it, and had a 2.0 wind at his back. It was really a high 9.8 effort in still wind.

White Lightning wrote:

I don't think it's arbitrary, and here's why: I arrived at the figure through a process of mixed reasoning and conjecture.

Except the mix was a little lean.

Try a little more reasoning. Replacing some of the conjecture with actual facts would be nice but god knows that's not going to happen.

Ben Johnson - 9.79 Clean !

Your translation is exactly correct! But you haven't done the courtesy of hearing me out.

Your errors: I never said anything about old school sprinters and new equipment/training.

Who said anything about white sprinters vs black sprinters? YOU did.

I will say this: I'm white. I've beaten many guys, white and black. I've been beaten BY many guys, almost exclusively black. I have often been the only white guy in the race, especially if I make semis or finals.

It is my firm belief that the fastest black guys over 100m have always been faster than the fastest white guys over 100m, assuming everyone's clean. I don't believe it when coaches/trainers talk about "recruitment" and "selection" being the deciding factors. So there you go. Did I even mention one white sprinter in this entire thread? No, I don't think so.

Your "reasoning" from your 3 premises to your conclusion is hilarious and absurd.

Back to the topic, statisticians predict the maximum "limits" of human performance based upon a wide variety of metrics, usually fitting performances to some sort of smooth curve. That is one way of doing it, but it will never lead you to a prediction of the maximum CLEAN peformance, because you have no way of knowing with accuracy if your data points are the result of clean performances, even if the tests came back negative.

My method, however, uses only admitted drug cheats (and Maurice Greene)--Johnson, Gatlin, Montgomery. Their results are ADMITTED to be positive, and are therefore known. Even though it has its acknowledged deficiencies, my method is at least worthy of some discussion on its merits.

Which you haven't done at all.

Your comments are interesting, thanks--

I did consider that nobody running 9.72 or under has tested positive, but decided not to draw the line at that point for the following reasons:

1) they are in mid-career, with many more races and many more tests to go. They still have many chances to be found positive, and so a decision as to their "cleanliness" is not a fait accompli, and is premature at this time.

2) one of my basic assumptions was that, in the aggregate, doped 100m guys are faster than clean 100m guys, at the highest level, which rests on the still more basic assumption that all the fastest 100m guys are basically as fast as each other, and that any of them could win a clean race between them on any given day, depending on how they feel, lane draw, luck, etc..

Based on these assumptions, it makes sense to draw the line at the point at which doping is argued to BEGIN, and not to END. Otherwise the title of the thread would have been "The Fastest Doped 100m? High 9.7's".

Which title, although possibly true, would not make any sense, because of one final assumption: that a given individual runner will be faster when doped than when clean. Thus, Bolt, if clean at 9.58, could go say 9.5 doped, which would be in direct contradiction to the conclusion that the fastest doped 100m was high 9.7's.

Hence my decision to find the point at which doping BEGINS.

One last thing: Montgomery's 2.0 tailwind doesn't exclude his 9.78 from the sub-mid-9.8 doped category. The wind was legal--however, it is arguable if he got a false start or not. I know it is arguable whether or not the wind gauge malfunctioned as well, but all parameters of his race, other than the composition of his tissues (wind, reaction, distance, slope, linearity) were measured and verified legal. That objective measurement and verification mean that the 9.78 stands.

Regarding my assumption that all the fastest guys, if clean, are all about equally fast, consider the following 100m race and try to pick a clear winner, consistently:

Donovan Bailey

Bruny Surin

Frankie Fredericks

Ato Boldon

Leroy Burrell

Olusoji Fasuba

Richard Thompson

Francis Obikwelu

Pretty hard, isn't it? None of these guys tested positive, and I think, with the exception of Thompson, that they are all retired.

I think the assumption was a reasonable one.

Also, the assumption that an individual athlete will be faster doped than clean seems reasonable, when you consider the many historic examples of this being true at the world-class level, combined with the available scientific information.

The assumption that in the aggregate, doped sprinters will be faster than clean sprinters, suggests that there is a continuum of drug use, but that it is present at some level at all levels of performance, with an increasing prevalence with increasing performance. At some point it may so negligible as to be considered effectively nonexistent, and at some other point, it may be so prevalent as to be considered effectively all-pervasive. The effectively all-pervasive level is below 9.83 or 9.82 among guys who will no longer be tested (except for Greene--any of his samples still around?)

I've been under the same impression as you. 9.8X should be the world record right now if sports were clean.

We all know testing in the 80's was a complete joke tons of cover ups and people coming out admitting to doping then.

If you go back to the 1990's tests for things such as EPO and HGH didn't exist and I'm sure there was a few forms of undetectable steroids.

Now we had lots of fast times before BALCO was busted then in 2003 they went down and all of the sudden 10 seconds became a difficult time to break in fact the winning time for the 100m that year was over 10 seconds at the world championships.

I've read many articles that say the price to hire a chemist to come up with a new undetectable is very reasonable compared with the prize money to be gained. So I wouldn't say its all the unreasonable that the 3 guys who have run under that 19.8 who haven't tested positive have paid for the latest undetectable drugs.

This why I find your postulations completely baseless: you have Leroy Burrell on your list, who had the same coach and manager as Carl Lewis and sported a set of braces as a 24 year old, 100m world record holder. At the same time, you toss Tyson Gay into the dirty pile, even though he's the most wellknown participant in Project Clean, and allowed USADA to develop a chemical fingerprint to help them detect any irregularities or changes in baseline chemistry.

I may have to revise the time of 9.83-9.82 downward a little, and here's why:

All except one of the best "clean" performances had a favorable wind, but NONE was done with a max 2.0.

Looking at the tables, the best times appear to be Surin's 9.84 (+0.2w) and Fredericks' 9.86 (-0.4w).

If a 9.84 were done in a +1.8 wind, the "corrected" time would be 9.92, giving an advantage of 0.08s. Assuming that it works the other way around, Surin's 9.84 with +0.2w would have been 0.08s faster with the additional +1.8w, giving a time of 9.76!!!!!

Similarly, Fredericks' 9.86 with -0.4w would have been 0.11s faster with the additional +2.4w, giving a time of 9.75!!!!!

Assuming that the wind effects work the same in reverse.

I am forced to either abandon my first premise--mid-9.8s being the fastest achievable clean, or to include any wind-corrected performances below that level in the doping category. That would exclude Surin (9.76), Fredericks (9.76), Bailey (9.78), Burrell (9.81), and Obikwelu (9.79), but not Fasuba (9.84), Lewis (9.82), or Boldon (9.85).

I would be uncomfortable excluding so many from such diverse backgrounds, so I may be forced to revise my estimate downward to 9.75, with the fastest mid-9.7 guys to be Fredericks and Surin.

Either that, or I go with my gut and exclude them, and be left with Lewis as the fastest, followed by Fasuba and Boldon. That would allow me to maintain my mid-9.8 with 9.82 (Lewis) being the best achievable, while still excluding admitted cheats Johnson, Gatlin, Montgomery (and at some point Greene).

I'm not American, and I know the anti-Americans out there are going to hate this, but I am sticking with my original mid-9.8 assertion, with Lewis as the fastest clean 100m guy ever (I know about his positive tests). It is more appealing to me than having Surin and Fredericks as the fastest clean guys ever.

Better yet, let's include Lewis' positive covered-up tests and exclude him too--then we are left with Fasuba and Boldon right in the mid-9.8's. That would be tidy.

I'm still uncomfortable about excluding especially Fredericks, Surin, and Bailey, especially Surin and Bailey after the Ben Johnson thing.

Uncomfortable, but I'll do it.