VIOLAH JEPCHUMBA, a 65-minute half-marathoner and Ken-born athlete. busted for EPO.

What we really need is to have a study done on guys who just shovel that good stuff in as if there is no test for it. Then we'll see it working like it did in the EPO era.

All the stuff now is just little hits of it for a short period as if they are trying to do it while dodging a positive.

Just Amazed wrote:

https://youtu.be/yMwQiBvbWB8

He's your expert cycling source, Jon.

You did not choose wisely.

rekrunner wrote:

By "strike" do you mean "swing and a miss"?

No, I mean reasons for suspicion.

rekrunner wrote:

I see you've introduced the word "highly" in the definition, and then removed the word "likely", both injecting a subtle bias.

I see. Even I would agree, I notice that in your world, subtle bias = extreme (unless you are talking of course).

rekrunner wrote:

Without any extra knowledge, I find this statement to be moderate, without injecting any personal bias:

"Likely dopers are by definition "unlikely" to be clean, therefore I am sure that they are likely dopers."

I guess you will call this extreme? Ultra-conservative?

No, I would agree. You on the other hand are extreme with statements like

"there is no evidence" / "nothing to see here" / "the values are not real" / "the values are not true", while there obviously are both evidence and real data, just not enough evidence for a ban - according to the IAAF (which was known to accept bribes at that time).

Since you brought up "popularity vote": that actually does decide who holds extreme positions like you, with only a small minority sharing those extreme positions.

Do it like Komen wrote:

What we really need is to have a study done on guys who just shovel that good stuff in as if there is no test for it. Then we'll see it working like it did in the EPO era.

All the stuff now is just little hits of it for a short period as if they are trying to do it while dodging a positive.

Full throttle doping?

Aragon wrote:

Because Subway is in essence mostly right and he most likely read only the abstract which is misleading in its wording, I will only state that the Ret% data is very scarce and it evidently wasn't collected for anti-doping work and I am not sure that either that the available data would not've triggered ABP.

I won't go deeper than that because when I was too interested in the Malm et al paper in another thread it was used against me even when I raised valid points.

Cheesy post Aragon.

Barely related to the issue of this thread, but I failed to see a single attempt of criticism from anyone to the shortcomings I found from the Malm et al study or his treatment of his literature (it is telling that even people who generally agree with you were almost silent). But below is the 1991 Berglund-Ekblom - study that Subway referred to. I have made my reading of the material clear, and as the paper shouldn't be totally inaccessible, so please inform me if you have a dissenting opinion about the OFF-scores and about the study.

https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/abs/10.1111/j.1365-2796.1991.tb00319.x

I was a bit taken back by you openly attacking Malm's credibility, without evidence other than your remark that he may be in need of funding, but I have no interest whatsoever to defend him. I did however argue against your conclusion.

As for this 1991 study comparing Epo with blood transfusions, I indeed couldn't find any ret values during cursory reading. Their average Hct increase is however very similar to Ashenden's 2011 paper, where no participants triggered an ABP alarm, and to the recent story on Kenyans improving by 5%.

As for the 2012 mitochondria story, that Amelia lady did publish a second one in 2015 in Sports Med. In general, same results regarding mitochondria, but no focus on performance improvements. (I only had a peak though)

Before the passport it didn't matter, now we likely see those guys suddenly emerging from nowhere because they dope to the gills while getting there and then enter the system with their baseline already practically off the charts.

Do it like Komen, good one.

Yes, studying doping full throttle like some heroes 10+ years ago, with Hct increases of 20 - 30%, for several months, would indeed be interesting.

There are health concerns though, and nowadays typically permission from Wada when athletes are involved. Some authors explicitly wrote that they were concerned about thrombosis.

That's one way, yes. Another one is to increase your Hct gently from season to season, until you reach the supposedly ideal percentage, whatever that is.

In parallel, talk about ostrich blood and altitude, so it appears "believable".

casual obsever wrote:

Do it like Komen, good one.

It is a good one...but I believe rekrunner thinks this speedster is clean. Just wait for his comments when he makes his morning rounds - London time. ?

There are two published studies originating from the material collected from the 1989 spring-summer rHuEPO research by Björn Ekblom and Bo Berglund from Karolinska Institutet, of which the one with the %ret data was published in the link I provided whereas the paper focusing on the performance side has the Vo2Max/TTE/submaximal HR data etc with no %ret data.

On the Malm et al estimate (made by one or more of the five coauthors), my last words are that Christer Malm's area of speciality and focus for the last years has been the detection of autotransfusions and even when the 2016 study wasn't a breakthrough, one researcher who has followed the subject closely for decades finds his approach to detect autotransfusions the most fruitful thus far.

I think I have never even addressed whether the 3 % estimate is right or not, but my reasons not finding the estimate made in the introduction (to frame the problem/give raison d'être for their work) not too thoroughly considered are part of the record now and not worth repeating here.

Good basic overview of rEPO & T use by endurance athletes by an exercise physio. Plus this guy is great - imagine the looks on his face listening to JonO insist 02 has no effect on the working muscles. ?

https://youtu.be/o5uNN8fwCQE

Thanks - with the "funny" gold medal survey...

The 2018 review mentioned by Aragon is instructive too. For example, table 1 summarizes the key data of some 10 - 12 Epo studies. Further down, they discuss and provide links to possible synergic effects.

See doi 10.1080/00913847.2018.1402663

casual obsever wrote:

Thanks - with the "funny" gold medal survey...

The 2018 review mentioned by Aragon is instructive too. For example, table 1 summarizes the key data of some 10 - 12 Epo studies. Further down, they discuss and provide links to possible synergic effects.

See doi 10.1080/00913847.2018.1402663

Yes...and I had posted this review a few times about a month ago only to have rekrunner criticize it, especially the part where an estimate was given of a reduction of about 3 seconds in 1500 with elites (pg 17). It also noted that rEPO "seems to be able to increase sub maximal more than maximal aerobic parameters."

"However, Wilkerson et al. did not observe any effects of rHuEpo on VO2 kinetics [55]. Despite a 4 weeks’ treatment of 150 IU/kg weekly of rHuEpo increased Hb (15.8 g/dL to 16.8 g/dL), Hct (43% to 48%), VO2max (47.5 mL/min/kg to 50.8 mL/min/kg) and peak power output (311 W to 332 W), the VO2 kinetics was not affected by rHuEpo. In particular, the Phase II time constant remained unchanged as also indirectly shown by the lack of significant effects of rHuEpo on blood lactate. Interestingly, the authors observed a 22% increase in time to exhaustion and tried to quantify to what extent this improvement may affect performance in 1500 meters run, suggesting a reduction of about 3 seconds in overall running time in elite athletes."

As an aside, when did I call you "extreme"? If I did, it is for other reasons than subtly biasing statements in your favor. Lately I call you Mr. "half-the-facts" -- whatever I may or may not have said in the past, I guess today I would say you are only half-extreme. You might think I'm some opposite extreme, because I spend a lot of words pointing out what you neglect or ignore or downplay. We rarely discuss where we have common ground. What is clear, when uncertainty gives you a choice, you choose to select the worst possible interpretation, and then downplay or ignore the uncertainty that allowed it. This is why I doubt any use of the word "moderate". Sometimes this motivates me to take the opposite possible interpretation, because I still can based on the facts. So to be clear, when you talk about Rupp, Bolt, and Farah, and say "your doubts (that they are clean) are very very small", because of things like all these "strikes" against Farah, are you just attempting to justify your "suspicion"? If we are talking about being suspicious, that's a pretty low bar. For me, "suspicion" is something that happens before a fact-finding investigation, and conclusions with increased certainty come after. Because it occurs before fact-finding is complete, this justifies claims of assumptions, faith, and imagination. I don't recall ever saying "nothing to see here". This usually comes from others, trying to predict my response. Much of what separates me and you, is determining the role uncertainty should play, in forming our conclusions based on what is known to date. You seem to think it is something you are free to choose to ignore, and (I guess) it's an exaggeration, or extreme, to acknowledge they could completely undermine your conclusions. The unmeasured errors in your "real values" are just as real. Another difference between me and you, is how you characterize things like the IAAF bribery, again using what is not known to your advantage. From two rather detailed investigations our knowledge of the bribery has clear boundaries, with respect to timing and the players and the victims. Anything beyond that exceeds our knowledge -- there are many words for this, like imagination, and bad faith. Based on the investigations (what we know), the briberies started after the ABP (by some members of the IAAF, but not on behalf of the IAAF). When I talk about "not real" values, this was before procedure changes, before the ABP. So "at that time" can not really be applicable to both IAAF briberies, and "not real" values. And before the ABP, it's hard to imagine what role bribery should even play, with respect to these "real values", when there was no applicable rule or threshold violation, or anything else, to cover up or bury or hide. Regarding my extreme position, extremism is defined by the views itself, and not by how many people share these views. I don't believe I deviate that much from what is actually done today in anti-doping based on the established anti-doping science.

When you look at Duressel's PhD you can find the recorded OFF-Scores for both the Scotts and the Kenyans in Table 4.1. Scotts went from 83 (baseline) down to 56 (Week 2 EPO) up to 122 (Week 2 post EPO). Kenyans went from 97 (baseline) down to 74 (Week 2 EPO) up to 117 (Week 2 post EPO). I guess triggering the ABP alarm is highly dependent on the timing of the blood tests.

casual obsever wrote:

...Their average Hct increase is however very similar to Ashenden's 2011 paper, where no participants triggered an ABP alarm, and to the recent story on Kenyans improving by 5%.

Before you quote the Sgrò et al paper too much because the word "elite" is mentioned, checking out what Wilkerson and his coauthors wrote in their "smoking gun" sentence in the 2005 paper is always not too much demanded:

A 22% increase in time to exhaustion at a constant work rate is equivalent to a ∼1–2% improvement in time trial performance over an equivalent distance (Hopkins et al. 1999). This is similar to the effect predicted by Birkeland et al. (2000) and translates into a reduction in the time to run 1500 m of ∼3 s in an elite athlete, an effect that is certainly likely to be meaningful.

While I tend not to put too much value on estimates, from the paragraph above it is far from clear whether the researchers even claim that the results from 47.5 Vo2Max subjects can be extrapolated to elite level athletes or whether they just want to give more understandable context about the magnitude of the TTE change when their 3-4 minute test is translated to actual speed improvement.

The reference in the Sgrò paper that rHuEPO "seems to be able to increase sub maximal more than maximal aerobic parameters" appears to have been mainly based on 2007 paper titled Prolonged administration of recombinant human erythropoietin increases submaximal performance more than maximal aerobic capacity in which Vo2Max increased only by 13 % after rHuEPO administration whereas the subjects rode 54 % longer on a submaximal time-to-exhaustion test at 80 % intensity. While I can't locate the source, I can recall one physiologist/commentator commenting that it is customary that TTE protocols translate to time-trial speed at coefficients of 10-15, so the 54 % improvement would be around 3-5 % in speed which wouldn't be extraordinarily high when compared to the change in Vo2Max.

I don't have a dog in either of the fights and the Sgrò et al paper is an interesting look into the literature and on the trends of present and future research. But please don't use the fancy word "meta-analysis" to describe it time-and-time again because it is a review and you don't appear to know what you are talking about.

If you want a meta-analysis on rHuEPO, here is one from the Netherlands where there is data from multiple of sources and there is some fancy statistical analysis conducted.

My criticism is that an estimate, and a suggestion, was not measured, nor a finding of the study.