Whatever Happened to Junxia Wang?

Amos Oh wrote:

Mr. Obvious wrote:

There are always confounding factors, so there would be no way to confirm or disprove based on a case study.

However, the grueling training, extreme discipline, and nutritional support starting from the age of eight would have affected these athletes throughout their careers. So that still leaves this one meet as a huge statistical outlier, with multiple athletes running times that they were not able to approach at any other time during their career. Some of those athletes running such huge outlier times multiple times (heats and finals) and some in multiple events as well. That does not automatically disprove that they happened or were legitimate times. Indeed, outliers exist by definition and many instances can be pointed out of athletes whose personal bests were quite a bit better than their second best time. If it were one athlete only there would be a lot less suspicion. At least some of these athletes should have times that are close to their best at other meets.

I guess your defense is that the training methodology was so unique that it allowed all of these athletes a stupendous peak simultaneously at this one meet and at this one meet only. I guess that is theoretically possible, but I don't think it is very compelling.

It is not only theoretically possible, but it also very likely if you consider:

1) that these same runners after 1993 World Championships had become international celebrities, and thus didn't have to rely on overachieving for their livelihoods.

2) that these same runners who took nearly a full decade to achieve what they did had now matured into women. Don't you think that becoming interested in men would tend to work against maintaining the same level of training load, intensity, etc, especially when your coach dictates such matters for you?

3) that it was widely reported that Qu, the second biggest star on the squad left Ma due to such conflicts about having boyfriends, growing her hair, etc.

4) later it was revealed that most of Ma's Army had disbanded as a result of their great level of dissatisfaction.

Obviously, any criticism that these athletes "failed" to produce similar results must take such factors into consideration. Under the circumstances, it would have been nearly impossible even for drug cheats to replicate these feats.

I think I am repeating myself to no avail, but I need to emphasize again that too many people have an unwarranted presumption that forces them to accuse the Chinese of being drugged. Of course I would never deny that they certainly used substances that enhanced their performance and endurance capacity, and probably their recovery rate. But this in no way suggests that they used a BANNED SUBSTANCE!

So, all this talk of cheating is absolute nonsense, unless you can prove that ALL substances capable of enhancing performance are on the list of BANNED SUBSTANCES. And this is of course impossible everywhere, and even more so in China, where they have an entirely different medical discipline than the allopathic one.

It is undeniable that certain plant substances often have greater or comparable efficacy when compared with drugs. For instance, there are studies that show that turmeric is as effective in reducing pain as cortisone, and of course without any side-effects. This is one of hundreds of examples.