You should stop saying 3:34 when it was 3:34.91.
You should stop saying 3:36 when the mile conversion is low 3:35s.
With respect to "Who has done it, or even come close?" the answer is -- no one -- clean or dirty -- not even Keino.
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You should stop saying 3:34 when it was 3:34.91.
You should stop saying 3:36 when the mile conversion is low 3:35s.
With respect to "Who has done it, or even come close?" the answer is -- no one -- clean or dirty -- not even Keino.
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Armstronglivs wrote:
...it still leaves us with the problem that he easily exceeded his best time at the distance at altitude, when other altitude-trained runners did not (and have not since, to my knowledge), and Keino himself had shown in the 5000m that, like his fellow competitors, he was clearly affected by altitude. We also might add to that his immediate prior medical infirmity and that he had competed in two previous events. As I have said, I might have accepted a 3.37-38 performance from him that day (allowing for a couple of seconds drop-off from his best because of altitude) but his 3.34.9 at altitude is probably sub-3.33 at sea-level. That I find hard to accept.
If I am not mistaken, Jim Ryun was one who exceeded his performance at altitude at least when compared to his 1968 times, because his 3:37. 79 at the final was his best of 1968 and his mile best of 3:55.9 in 1968 is 3:38.41 converted to 1500m time using the widely used coefficient of 0.9259. He wasn't that super-impaired by altitude at least in 1500m, so it raises the question how much naturally acclimatized Keino was if at all.
As far as I know, there is no disagreement among physiologist who have dealt with the issue on these two things:
1) The effect of altitude on endurance performance is more detrimental the longer the distance, therefore Keino could've been significantly slower at 5000m when the distance is over three times longer than the 1500m.
2) There is a huge difference in individual responses in the magnitude how altitude affects the physiological response to altitude. As early as 1969 Bengt Saltin and his coauthors try in in one research paper find answer to the "observed large differences in performance at altitude between athletes of equal capacity at sea level" proposing that it is mainly lung diffusion capacity at least in elite level athletes whose hematocrit level is similar.
The question had two aspects -- doping connected with an unnaturally implausible performance at altitude.
Armstronglivs wrote:
@rekrunner
You asked earlier if there is an East European male in the distance events between 1960 to 1989 that I might suspect of doping. As doping their athletes become policy in the Eastern Bloc from the early 60's I might put it another way. I can't think of any Eastern Bloc runner on the podium in that period who probably wasn't part of the state programme. Why would they be, if it was a requirement imposed on them?
Building on "that might remove your requirement that a "wonder drug" of some sort would have been required", and taking it one step further, it might remove the requirement for any drug at all, as the small increase in question becomes within the scope of plausibility. I think I'm going to leave it there, with that last thought. I appreciate your continued politeness, even if we didn't agree on some basic points.
Armstronglivs wrote:
You ask what kind of drugs could have been used by an athlete such as Keino to boost his performance at Mexico. The drugs that were becoming common in the 60's were anabolic steroids, synthetic testosterone and a variety of blood-stimulants such as amphetamines - the latter being especially favoured by cyclists to aid endurance. A combination of those drugs in an athlete trained at altitude (natural blood doping, if you like) could easily have a significant effect, and testosterone and amphetamines can be very quick acting. (Lance Armstrong is an interesting example of an athlete who tested very high for testosterone. And, in another context, so is Caster Semenya. Testosterone is great for distance events, as much as it is for the strength events).
I take your point that Keino's time at Mexico is closer to the ball-park of his best at sea-level when equated with his best mile times. In one sense, that might remove your requirement that a "wonder drug" of some sort would have been required to have boosted his performance at Mexico, as the differential was not so great. On the other hand, it still leaves us with the problem that he easily exceeded his best time at the distance at altitude, when other altitude-trained runners did not (and have not since, to my knowledge), and Keino himself had shown in the 5000m that, like his fellow competitors, he was clearly affected by altitude. We also might add to that his immediate prior medical infirmity and that he had competed in two previous events. As I have said, I might have accepted a 3.37-38 performance from him that day (allowing for a couple of seconds drop-off from his best because of altitude) but his 3.34.9 at altitude is probably sub-3.33 at sea-level. That I find hard to accept.
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rekrunner wrote:
Subway added we don't know the full extent of "roids from the 60s", but then we see that it was the 70s and 80s where 1500m times really dropped, thanks to the British trio of Coe, Ovett, and Cram, and probably due to factors like track surface changes.
Well yes, in the 70s doping was already quite professional, and a matter of national pride. On top of that, (legal!) blood transfusions became more common.
As for "roids from the 60s", see for example here, blow by blow:
http://www.kawasaki-m.ac.jp/soc/mw/journal/en/2006-e12-1/01_kremenik.pdfAt the 1968 Summer Olympics held in Mexico City drug use rumors abound.
...
In 1969, in an article for the West German publication Die Zeit, the West German discus thrower Brigitte Berendonk says that the use of anabolic steroids is common among decathletes, discus throwers, shot-putters, weightlifters and half of the runners and jumpers. And the four-time U.S. Olympic discus champion Al Oerter says that the use of anabolic steroids is now so widespread that a young athlete must use them to stay on top [37].
I'm surprised rekrunner isn't better researched in this area, unless he's burying his head in the sand & ignoring history.
Clearly roughly half of the runners focus on endurance events and half on sprint events with the gray area somewhere between them, so with the (right or wrong) assumption of the 1960's that steroids were used to add muscle strength, Berendonk could be right and endurance athletes generally still not using them.
I could name several Scandinavian strength athletes taking steroids in the late 1960's, but why literally zero endurance athletes have admitted taking steroids in the 1960's and we know with certainty about zero cases. I can name a few endurance athletes from the 1970's, but Kip Keino broke the 3000m world record with a huge margin in 1965 and if that was a result of accumulated effect of elevated training load via steroid use, when did he start to dope? 1961? 1962? 1963?
I didn't comment on Keino, just cited (indirectly) Berendonk and Oerter, who also didn't comment on Keino. I am just providing general background here.
As for 1961? That late? That pdf starts with "the first documented doping case" from the 1904 Olympics, a British marathon runner using strychnine (and brandy and egg-white).
Further: "By 1935, however, synthetic testosterone is invented."
...
"The 1950's see many instances of the existence of drug use in Olympic sport."
These statements here, from the 50s, could have been from this decade:
"This kind of unsupervised and rampant use of drugs becomes the norm as the years go on. Authorities are unwilling to punitively sanction drug use in sport"
Compare that with statements from this time:
Sunday Times, 2015:
"The use of the performance-enhancing drug EPO is known to have been rife in cycling in the early 2000s. However, the database shows that in some of those years the proportion of abnormal blood test results recorded in athletics was significantly higher than in cycling"
Ashenden:
“Often, two out of the three medallists had probably engaged in blood doping during their career.” Criticising the IAAF for catching and punishing only a tiny fraction of these athletes despite being aware of the scale of the problem, Ashenden accused it of “a shameful betrayal of their primary duty to police their sport”."
Pound:
Dick Pound, ex WADA President:
"you can miss two tests simply by not answering the door if you're on something."
"There is no general appetite to undertake the effort and expense of a successful effort to deliver doping-free sport."
"There's this psychological aspect about it: nobody wants to catch anybody. There's no incentive. Countries are embarrassed if their nationals are caught. And sports are embarrassed if someone from their sport is caught."
Same old, same old.
Aragon wrote:
Clearly roughly half of the runners focus on endurance events and half on sprint events with the gray area somewhere between them, so with the (right or wrong) assumption of the 1960's that steroids were used to add muscle strength, Berendonk could be right and endurance athletes generally still not using them.
Actually Berendonk specifically mentioned "Sprinter" in Die Zeit, which seems to have been translated wrong by Kremenik et al..
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casual obsever wrote:
As for 1961? That late? That pdf starts with "the first documented doping case" from the 1904 Olympics, a British marathon runner using strychnine (and brandy and egg-white).
Further: "By 1935, however, synthetic testosterone is invented."
...
"The 1950's see many instances of the existence of drug use in Olympic sport."...
There are two anachonisms in your post. First, there is is no universal "doping" or "drug use" but different methods of which some are invented earlier than the others and some are used later than the others. Correspondingly statements such as "drug use was prevalent" mean nothing as such without further clarification.
If you assume (also totally anachronistically) that endurance athletes used testosterone/steroids almost from the moment they were invented in the same way as their modern counterparts of the late 20th century, how about blood doping? Transfusions were invented in the 19th century and the practice was relatively safe around WW2, so do you also maintain that blood doping was actually used already in the 1940's or 50's and if not so, why?
And once again, while there is a lot of evidence and gossip about the use of different types of performance enhancing products from the 1960's and earlier from endurance sports (particularly cross-country skiers and cyclists were quite open about the practice), I am not aware of any confessions or other evidence from the 1960's or earlier about testosterone/steroid use. This should be contrasted to the 1970's where there does exist confessions and other evidence (East Germany) from the 1970's and later.
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Armstronglivs wrote:
... I also know from what athletes of that era have told me that doping was already widespread in field events and strength-related events. It may not have yet become "prevalent" in middle and long distance running, but it would be naive to think that stimulants like amphetamines, that were being used in cycling, for example, were not finding their way into track. Doping in the 70's was not without precedent, and would not have simply arisen overnight. Whether prevalent or not, doping was definitely occurring in the 60's.
I think that it is beyond reasonable dispute that amphetamines were used by cross-country skiers and by road cyclists as early as 1940's because there are plenty of confessions, inquiries and even surprise doping testing from mid-1960's which established that its abuse was quite prevalent. But there is a marked difference in the nature of road cycling and cross-country skiing when compared to track running, because cycling events last several hours and even the shortest men's cross-country skiing events last 45-50 minutes (15 km) and the longest olympic distances up to three hours (50 km).
In this regard, it is interesting how one Finnish cross-country skier described in the 1980's his amphetamine use and the mechanism that had taken place two decades earlier: "I never skied a 50 km grand competition without [methamphetamine]. When shortly before the 40 km point when the fatigue hit, you took a large cup of spiked berry juice, you could go the last 10 km with a good speed".
In the case of Keino and his superior 1500m at México and his 3000m WR, we are discussing an event lasting like 4-8 minutes where the concept of fatigue is really different and correspondingly even the benefit of amphetamine can't directly be extrapolated from the prevalence of its use in cycling and skiing even when the substance was a part of post-WW2 western culture on very many levels.