Athletics, when doping is the default

Correction:

LoneStarXC wrote:

Correction:

It cut my post off. It meant to say

Aaleby wrote:

Norway uber alles wrote:

Sure sure.... blood doping has been rife in every top country in XC skiing... and who dominates for 30 years? Norway...

30 years of clean athletes beating dopers. It's truly amazing!

And there it is again... To be succesfull without cheating is once again impossible, yet lots of cross country runner has been caught, noone from Norway despite the profesionalism of anti-doping Norway. Do you think this is systematic state doping? Is that why Norway manages to hide it for years to years to come? Or could it be that loads of more money, better coaches and higher numbers of active runners could be the simple answer?

It's not an "either/or" thing.

Did you even watch the lillehammer olympics brought to you by epo?

Would be kinda strange why 30% doesnt use astma medicine and still have taken medals if Norway used it to gain advance. How does that work. By drawing lots where those who draws the wrong aint allowed to use the medicine and by that gains a disadvance compared to their teammates?

Its perfactly possibly that it is the case and that Norway knows it gives them an advance. I do find it strange that Norway has banned altitude houses because of a moral standpoint, but chooses to exploit that instead. If it were true. Still, no rules broken.

skiing was almost worse than cycling wrote:

Did you even watch the lillehammer olympics brought to you by epo?

You could say. It still doesnt make sence to not be able to catch a single person from the most succesfull country. That calculation simple doesnt add up.

We know doping is all over, North America, South America, the entire continent of Africa, China, Russia, the UK, France, Spain, Italy , Germany, and everywhere else. So , sorry, clean Norway isn't enough to save Atheltics from being a disgrace. And yes, I am being sarcastic about Norway being clean.

Furthermore ad -crap like reinstating Jakob, having too much problem deciding who should run in women's races. bribery and corruption , Nike. What a disaster.

I like to see how people run so well, but the records, awards and honors, individual and national mean nothing to me.

Good question. In my opinion, this mindset only hurts an injured sport even more, like pouring salt in the wound. Here are some relevant quotes from a group of like minded scientists:Prevalence of Doping Use in Elite Sports: A Review of Numbers and Methods Olivier de Hon • Harm Kuipers • Maarten van Bottenburg "It is tempting to attribute outstanding performances to the alleged use of doping. The main problem with such a line of thinking is that the athlete will always lose in any such discussion: no matter how much he trains without the use of any prohibited substance, as soon as he excels he is, by default, a doping suspect. The essence of sport is to excel, and if excelling becomes synonymous with suspicions of cheating, each and every sport performance turns into an attack on the essence of sport itself. If such reasoning persists, this will seriously jeopardise the credibility of sport." "An innate problem with trying to link performances to possible doping infractions is that athletic performances are influenced by many factors, such as talent, improvements in training techniques, nutrition, psychological support, and changes in equipment and environment. Over time, athletic achievements tend to improve in every sport, but this does not mean that a failure to progress or even a slight drop in top performances mean that these can be related to doping patterns; they may just as well relate to one or more of the other factors that influence performance." "It can be concluded that, on the basis of performances alone, an individual assessment on possible doping is simply not possible, and, in addition, any attempt to try to do this will violate the essence of sport. Linking extraordinary athletic performances to doping use is highly insulting to clean champions. Both scientifically and morally it is not recommended to try and link performance levels to doping use; at best performances can be used to identify general influences of anti-doping measures on the entire population of elite athletes."

So we get a moral argument from scientists. How "scientific" of them - and you.

The OP makes the wrong assumption: doping isn't the "default position" - it is a given. The argument that the sport is clean can't be sustained.

Case in point -- Exhibit A

rekrunner wrote:

Case in point -- Exhibit A

Hey...I knew you would pop sometime. A lot going on with Doha & Berlin - I haven't seen your comments on any of the Bekele threads? 37 yrs old, injury-plagued career, supposedly just 3 months of training and runs a PB just two seconds off the WR! What's your analytical mind say: suspicious or perfectly normal. ?

Armstronglivs wrote:

The OP makes the wrong assumption: doping isn't the "default position" - it is a given. The argument that the sport is clean can't be sustained.

Bullshit. Noone in their right mind would argue that the sport is clean, but the assumption here is that close to every medals in each and every championship has been won by cheaters as it is impossible to succeed with fair play. That is ridicolous.

Jacob Ingebrigtsen was a phenomenon when he was as young as 10 years old. Professor Leif Inge Tjelta, who has long studied and worked with distance runners, including Grethe Waitz, started to follow Jakob when he was 10 years old. Why? He observed the pure young kid carry out a race called "siddisløpet" in 30 minutes, a highly impressive time for that age. Tjelta have tested Jakob every year since he was 11 and his word when he is asked to describe Jakob; completely extreme. Tjelta have tested world class athletes from Norway since the seventies and noone has been close to Jakob. As Tjelta said early in 2018; even compared to someone in the age of 25 Jakob is still extreme. Noone in Norway has been close to his threshold speed. And Tjelta has hard to believe that his lactic acid values is correct as they are so low.

All this, his known progress from he was 11 and until today, where every large newspaper in Norway has followed every step, there are no secrets, everything has been in the open. How he has achieved amazing results each and every year. And still people like you mocks him and call him a simple cheater, a dope user, a fraud. The lack of respect can only be said to be pathetic. Its a shame and to be honest; just really sad.

An athlete like Jakob should be praised as a living proof that it is possible to combine an extreme talent with hard work and become a legend without taking the shortcut named doping.

An amazing performance from an athlete with proven talent. Yet my thoughts include neither "suspicious" nor "perfectly normal". This is not a question for the analytical scientist, but more for the sociologist or psychologist. And I can't help but reiterate, that it is looking at it from the wrong direction, trying to speculate if a fast performance is doped, by virtue of being fast. I prefer to look at this from the point of view of first identifying what are the significant causes of fast marathon performances, both generally, and specifically. If you asked my analytical mind to list the most significant factors that resulted in a 2:01:41 marathon performance, doping would not appear on that list.

What Say You wrote:

rekrunner wrote:

Case in point -- Exhibit A

Hey...I knew you would pop sometime. A lot going on with Doha & Berlin - I haven't seen your comments on any of the Bekele threads? 37 yrs old, injury-plagued career, supposedly just 3 months of training and runs a PB just two seconds off the WR! What's your analytical mind say: suspicious or perfectly normal. ?

Let's go back to your original question about how people can be a fan of the sport if they think all good performances are from doped athletes. I think you're wrong in thinking that everyone thinks everyone is doped. What most people who follow the sport seem to do is have certain athletes that they like. Usually those are athletes from their home countries with maybe a foreigner or two that for some reason appeals to them, They're inclined to believe that those athletes are clean, their performances legitimate and when those athletes lose to ones that they aren't fans of or when athletes they aren't fans of turn in performances that are much better than those of their preferred athletes they'll often decide that drugs are why those athletes did better.

Look at your posts here. You're in Norway and you think the Ingebrigstens are clean but you agree that there is no reason to assume the sport is clean. And you're correct, I believe, in saying it's wrong to assume that every good performance is due to drugs and Jacob should be praised as someone who can succeed without doping. If the Ingebrigstens were Americans you'd have a lot more people agreeing with you I suspect because more people here would have become "fans" of theirs. But they're from Norway so they have fewer fans here, they're more of a mystery, there aren't people who can tell stories about running against them in high school or college so there's less reason to believe they are not doping. And if you were also not from Norway and had no ancestors who were but maybe in North Carolina you'd likely not be as bothered when you hear them accused of doping, though you very well could be.

I actually am with you. I hate it when athletes are accused of doping based on nothing other than really good performances. I'd never accuse a specific athlete of doping with no more "evidence" than that. At the same time, I find it really hard to believe that someone can compete with very talented, hard training, doped runners without having that same "advantage." That was Lance Arnstrong's "justification" for the doping he did. So I do what I think most of us do; I have people that I like for various reasons and hope, maybe even believe, that they're legitimate but am fully prepared to find that they aren't.

rekrunner wrote:

Case in point -- Exhibit A

As always, you are self-referential - but not intentionally, of course.

Of course doping won't appear on your list. You are willing to believe anything but that. But more guesswork posing as scientific analysis.

C'mon rekrunner....you're insulting your own intelligence. It's more than just a "virtue of being fast." You look at the totality of the circumstances with each individual case. For example, the age of the athlete, any suspicious jumps in time in such a short period, setting or running close to a WR, the nation the athlete is from, etc. In Bekele's case, he's 37 yrs old, runs within 2 seconds of a WR and is from a nation that is currently on the IAAF's "most likely to dope" watch list. IMO, these factors make the performance suspicious (if and when the IAAF removes Ethiopia from the most likely to dope list, I'll be much less suspicious of their spectacular performances).

HRE wrote:

At the same time, I find it really hard to believe that someone can compete with very talented, hard training, doped runners without having that same "advantage." That was Lance Arnstrong's "justification" for the doping he did. So I do what I think most of us do; I have people that I like for various reasons and hope, maybe even believe, that they're legitimate but am fully prepared to find that they aren't.

A great post. Fully agree 100%. One thing tho; Cycling cant be compared with anything else. The strain of completing Tour de France is insane. To think a clean cyclist would be able to outrun a field full with filthy cheaters day out, day in would be a new form for naivety. In Athletics you dont get the same strain over a long period of time. That difference is huge doping wise.