I'm on the fence as to whether he doped or not. Going back to the his performance and progression, Bol improved his time by .5s for the 800m in 5 years. Pretty poor return if he was doping. You would have thought after doping for 6months+ and seeing virtually no difference in performance he would have knocked it on the head. Compared that to Lagat who dropped 15s off his 1500m time in 3 years. And looking at cyclists, their FTP has been recorded to improve by as much as 45-50% after a period of EPO doping.
The average increase is certainly less than 45-50 %, likely closer to 5 or 10 %. It isn't even clear if any professional cyclist ever has increased his FTP by that amount with EPO.
In one academic paper, the increase in Watts at Vo2Max increased by ~12-13 % after EPO, the boost that would be at FTP almost certainly less (they don't tend to increase one-to-one). Tyler Hamilton increased his Watts at FTP from 371 to 392, only by 5.7 % after his 2001 EPO treatment.
Festina rider Christophe Bassons has the highest figure in his book (AFAIK) when he describes one doped cyclist increasing his power output (unclear if watts at Vo2Max or at FTP) from 325 to 430, by stunning 32 %. There is always some seasonal flucluations from OFFseason to INseason if the second hand information is even accurate.
How about you read the pdf? I did. In this day and age, even my grandma can access a pdf that is formally behind a paywall.
I hope i am right.
here is section from my upcoming article
Sports Integrity Australia stated on February 14, “The relevant rules require a WADA-accredited laboratory to obtain a second opinion from an expert on the WADA EPO Working Group before any AAF or ATF for Erythropoietin Receptor Agonists (such as recombinant EPO) can be reported”.
Even if a B-sample analysis does not support the A-sample analysis, Sports Integrity Australia could still lay a charge against an athlete for “using” EPO, along with the same penalties.
While Article 2.1 of the World Anti-Doping Code means that an athlete cannot be charged if the A and B samples do not match, Article 2.2 allows for an athlete to be charged with ‘use or attempted use’ of a prohibited substance or method under Article 2.2 of the Code, even when the samples don’t match.
Chris you are way more on top of this than me, but do I have this right:
- 2.1 - athlete cannot be charged if A & B samples do not match
- 2.2 - athlete can be charged with use even if the samples do not match.
I know you are paraphrasing, but don't these conflict with each other?
Chris you are way more on top of this than me, but do I have this right:
- 2.1 - athlete cannot be charged if A & B samples do not match
- 2.2 - athlete can be charged with use even if the samples do not match.
I know you are paraphrasing, but don't these conflict with each other?
yes, i should have said
While Article 2.1 of the World Anti-Doping Code means that an athlete cannot be charged with an Adverse Analytical Finding if the A and B samples do not match, Article 2.2 allows for an athlete to be charged with ‘use or attempted use’ of a prohibited substance or method, even when the samples don’t match.
damn, thanks for picking that up. Me bad.
This post was edited 6 minutes after it was posted.
I'm on the fence as to whether he doped or not. Going back to the his performance and progression, Bol improved his time by .5s for the 800m in 5 years. Pretty poor return if he was doping. You would have thought after doping for 6months+ and seeing virtually no difference in performance he would have knocked it on the head. Compared that to Lagat who dropped 15s off his 1500m time in 3 years. And looking at cyclists, their FTP has been recorded to improve by as much as 45-50% after a period of EPO doping.
His 2 best times were 1.44.56 and 1.44.96 prior to 2021. He was only a fringe international until then
In 2021 he ran a bunch of 1.44s (best 1.44.00) and became a serious medal threat. His 2021 form suggested to me in the right circumstances he could run mid 1.43s. I reckon he actually improved 1% .
Has Bol been wearing Super spikes? If so, when did he start? Does that need to be factored in when considering his progress? Does that explain your one percent?
A couple more points - from memory, Bol looked very comfortable in the OG heat and semi and certainly could have gone under 1.44.
Did Covid with the disruption to track seasons, cross country seasons and varying lock downs disadvantage athletes from either hemisphere?
I'm on the fence as to whether he doped or not. Going back to the his performance and progression, Bol improved his time by .5s for the 800m in 5 years. Pretty poor return if he was doping. You would have thought after doping for 6months+ and seeing virtually no difference in performance he would have knocked it on the head. Compared that to Lagat who dropped 15s off his 1500m time in 3 years. And looking at cyclists, their FTP has been recorded to improve by as much as 45-50% after a period of EPO doping.
The average increase is certainly less than 45-50 %, likely closer to 5 or 10 %. It isn't even clear if any professional cyclist ever has increased his FTP by that amount with EPO.
In one academic paper, the increase in Watts at Vo2Max increased by ~12-13 % after EPO, the boost that would be at FTP almost certainly less (they don't tend to increase one-to-one). Tyler Hamilton increased his Watts at FTP from 371 to 392, only by 5.7 % after his 2001 EPO treatment.
Festina rider Christophe Bassons has the highest figure in his book (AFAIK) when he describes one doped cyclist increasing his power output (unclear if watts at Vo2Max or at FTP) from 325 to 430, by stunning 32 %. There is always some seasonal flucluations from OFFseason to INseason if the second hand information is even accurate.
that's 325w to 430w for the long climbs, like 45'
this is exceptionally rare given the athlete in question almost surely went from about 40% hct to about 60%. sure sounds like Riis.
but yeah it's possible
someone with an ftp of 325w at 43% that boosts to 49% would see a much more modest gain, naturally, with an expected output of 353w give or take a few % (346-360w)
that sort of increase in power for a runner would translate to going about 4-6% faster at those sorts of aerobic-dominated paces, so it's very significant
I'm on the fence as to whether he doped or not. Going back to the his performance and progression, Bol improved his time by .5s for the 800m in 5 years. Pretty poor return if he was doping. You would have thought after doping for 6months+ and seeing virtually no difference in performance he would have knocked it on the head. Compared that to Lagat who dropped 15s off his 1500m time in 3 years. And looking at cyclists, their FTP has been recorded to improve by as much as 45-50% after a period of EPO doping.
Maybe if he started doping the day after he set his pb 5 years ago, which is rather unlikely.
He looked done for a couple of years, then was looking like a possible gold medalist last year. He turns 29 next week. He had a full season in 2019 and ran a best of 1:45.6 and went out in the heats in the World Championships.
Hi 2017 pb was a bit of an outlier. 8 of his 10 best times came in 21/22 at the age of 27/28, which is unusual for an 800m runner.
Doesn't prove he was doping but it's EXACTLY what you would expect from a guy who turns to doping, or risks doping a bit more than before, when he realizes he is on the decline and turning 27.
I get that - I guess it's just a bummer that in this case the "atypical'ness" was close enough to resemble the signature of synthetic EPO. That's unfortunate but you are right it does happen (naturally abnormal results). I look forwards to seeing Bol back to his best and running in the 44's and making global finals.
Are you guys going on about "atypical" connecting the dots with the earlier, good posts in thread? Wise Old Man in Post #17 didn't talk about "atypical" results, but do you think the 7 positives in the non-dopers looked like? I'm guessing "atypical". That should be a good defense that a couple "atypical" results is consistent with being a non-doper. A doper would have two positives - atypical results are not consistent with having taken EPO in the study.
Wise Old Man wrote:
The exogenous epo assay seems particularly poorly performing. I’d have to go back to the old thread to find the study, but if I recall it was a randomized experiment where athletes were randomly assigned to receive typical doping doses of epo or not. All the athletes were then tested. There were something like 330 assays run. 14 tests came back positive as the “A” sample. 7 were positive in the dopers and 7 in the non dopers. When the assay was rerun “B”, all the 7 dopers were positive again (true positives) and none of the 7 in the non dopers were confirmed (false positives.)
One should take with a heavy dose of salt the figures provided by Christophe Bassobs. Two outlier figures of dubious reliability showing a measured watt increase in four months from pre-season to IN-season by 32 % doesn't mean that all the boost is due to EPO even if the figures were accurate. People tend to change their training from winter to spring particularly to increase their FTP.
There is also plenty of room for an error in calibration even if the 325 Watts in the first test was the highest potential during the test.
what were the levels and what was the atypical finding? what does 'match / not match' mean ie what are the tolerances since at ultimate accuracy, no two test can ever 'match' perfectly. someone said '160%' but offered no evidence.
the most quoted person in this thread, a suppsoed wise old man and md, only speculated on something he thought he remembered - quite why that is getting so much credence is beyond me.
summary; insufficient evidence available for anything other than idle speculation.
my best guess; guilty; looks virtually identical to lance.
PAGE is a standard protein gel electrophoresis assay.
This text is damning from the assessment of PAGE performance:
“In the absence of a convincing alternative explanation for the observed discrepancy in the outcome of the screening and confirmation procedure, variability in assay performance needs to be considered as an explanation as well.”
What is the level of certainty that should be required to ban a person from earning a living in athletics? 90%, 95%, 99%, 99.9%, 99.99%?
+1
Both EPO tests for urine seems to be prone to errors (false negatives and false positives). The study you linked earlier says that both tests for EPO have "a false presumptive finding rate of 4.3% and 6%" -- i.e. known false positives. Conducting a B-sample test with the same false positive rate, means the expected false positives will be 0.2% and 0.36% -- maybe not enough for a false positive in 100 samples, but we can expect a few B-sample confirmed positives over thousands of tested samples.
Has it ever happened? Besides the (in)famous cases of Lagat and Marion Jones, one only need to dig into the cases of Vojtěch Sommer, Steven Colvert, and Benedikt Karus, to see how A-samples can falsely test positive from the complicated testing process itself (e.g. control samples bleeding into an adjacent track during the test procedure) or read up on the criticisms of the whole testing and adjudication process from Prof. Erik Boye. One of the issues facing accused athletes is that WADA labs hides the raw data used to convict the athletes, providing only their subjective reports from their own experts. Another is that any attempts to get a second opinion from another WADA lab is hampered by a restriction on WADA labs to cast any doubt on other WADA labs.
Nearly two decades later, people don't really seem to understand what happened with Lagat, although the details were published here at letsrun back in 2004, at the time he was cleared. It was a real embarrassment. The EPO test was in its infancy, with the processes still be worked out. Briefly, both A and B were "positive", but the B-sample failed to confirm the A-sample, because the bands were further shifted and in different positions compared to the A-sample. Re-examining the A-sample bands showed that it didn't really match the EPO controls either, and the conclusion was that both test results were invalid/inconclusive due to enzymatic activity shifting the bands out of the endogenous regions. This likely was accelerated by the samples being transported in a hot-car for 40 hours, and a long delay (luckily for Lagat) of several more days before putting the B-sample in the freezer.
Here is a link from 2019 where the "sportsscientist" Ross Tucker invited the guest speaker Erik Boye to speak on the topic of scientific integrity, and it is a good starting point, if you keep clicking through the links.
This is a guest post by Norweigian scientist Erik Boye, in which he raises concerns about the imbalance in power in antidoping and how it erodes confidence in the antidoping system
I'm on the fence as to whether he doped or not. Going back to the his performance and progression, Bol improved his time by .5s for the 800m in 5 years. Pretty poor return if he was doping. You would have thought after doping for 6months+ and seeing virtually no difference in performance he would have knocked it on the head. Compared that to Lagat who dropped 15s off his 1500m time in 3 years. And looking at cyclists, their FTP has been recorded to improve by as much as 45-50% after a period of EPO doping.
Given that Coe from 1981 is still ranked #3 all time, when are we going to abandon this notion that a PED even exists for the men for the 800m?
Athletes progress and improve all the time due to training, and sometimes moresoe due to comeback from injuries.
I'm on the fence as to whether he doped or not. Going back to the his performance and progression, Bol improved his time by .5s for the 800m in 5 years. Pretty poor return if he was doping. You would have thought after doping for 6months+ and seeing virtually no difference in performance he would have knocked it on the head. Compared that to Lagat who dropped 15s off his 1500m time in 3 years. And looking at cyclists, their FTP has been recorded to improve by as much as 45-50% after a period of EPO doping.
Given that Coe from 1981 is still ranked #3 all time, when are we going to abandon this notion that a PED even exists for the men for the 800m?
Athletes progress and improve all the time due to training, and sometimes moresoe due to comeback from injuries.
So Coe still being one of the fastest proves peds don't work, but Koch and Kratchilova still being the fastest do NOT prove that peds DO work??
what were the levels and what was the atypical finding? what does 'match / not match' mean ie what are the tolerances since at ultimate accuracy, no two test can ever 'match' perfectly. someone said '160%' but offered no evidence.
the most quoted person in this thread, a suppsoed wise old man and md, only speculated on something he thought he remembered - quite why that is getting so much credence is beyond me.
summary; insufficient evidence available for anything other than idle speculation.
my best guess; guilty; looks virtually identical to lance.
Lance was clearly guilty.
However, if you read about EPO samples you'll see that time degrades the accuracy.
The samples in Lance's case had sat for years in uncontrolled conditions in the French lab.
There is a lot of monkey business in dope testing. Iliken it to politics
Our treatment regimen elicited a 10% increase in total haemoglobin mass equivalent to approximately two bags of reinfused blood. The passport software did not flag any subjects as being suspicious of doping whilst they were receiving rhEPO."
Details in the pdf. You are welcome.
"Quick google" for the win, well done.
The details I could find acknowledged one limitation was that it didn't include a "washout period", and since "RET% is at its nadir 10-14 days after rhEPO injections cease", "This trade-off almost certainly diminished the sensitivity of the ABP component monitoring OFF-hr score".
In another paper, these scientists also developed an "ON-hr score" for when an athlete is "ON" EPO, i.e. "whilst they were receiving rhEPO". It should be unsurprising that an "OFF" score might fail to detect when athletes/subjects are "ON" some form of blood doping, as that study terminated too "early", for the OFF-hr score to detect it.
PAGE is a standard protein gel electrophoresis assay.
This text is damning from the assessment of PAGE performance:
“In the absence of a convincing alternative explanation for the observed discrepancy in the outcome of the screening and confirmation procedure, variability in assay performance needs to be considered as an explanation as well.”
What is the level of certainty that should be required to ban a person from earning a living in athletics? 90%, 95%, 99%, 99.9%, 99.99%?
+1
Both EPO tests for urine seems to be prone to errors (false negatives and false positives). The study you linked earlier says that both tests for EPO have "a false presumptive finding rate of 4.3% and 6%" -- i.e. known false positives. Conducting a B-sample test with the same false positive rate, means the expected false positives will be 0.2% and 0.36% -- maybe not enough for a false positive in 100 samples, but we can expect a few B-sample confirmed positives over thousands of tested samples.
Completely incorrect.
They do a screening test to see which samples MIGHT test positive, and the rest they can sign off on. This means they can efficiently eliminate all the clearly negative samples, they can focus on only the few suspicious ones for the actual confirmation testing and determination or not of an adverse finding.
This is the process of testing ONE sample. If there was an adverse finding and the athlete wants to test the B it goes through the entire process again
You geniuses are quoting the results of the screening test. When you come to these conclusions do you not stop to think whether it is even remotely plausible. You're claiming essentially one in every 20 A samples in clean athletes would test positive. Wasn't Bol alone was tested 20 plus times last year. Everyone would be getting done
So, once again, the ACTUAL false positive rate shown by the EPO test in the study is ZERO.
Recombinant human erythropoietin (rHuEPO) is used as doping a substance. Anti‐doping efforts include urine and blood testing and monitoring the athlete biological passport (ABP). As data on the performance of these methods ar...
Given that Coe from 1981 is still ranked #3 all time, when are we going to abandon this notion that a PED even exists for the men for the 800m?
Athletes progress and improve all the time due to training, and sometimes moresoe due to comeback from injuries.
So Coe still being one of the fastest proves peds don't work, but Koch and Kratchilova still being the fastest do NOT prove that peds DO work??
Irekrational.
These aren't "proofs". And once again, PEDs must be "PE", i.e. "works", or we couldn't rightfully use the acronym. The key verb here isn't "works" but "exists".
Of course, I can't rule out that GB athletes like Coe, and Ovett, and Cram, were using steroids and blood transfusions and any other cocktail of drugs combined, in 1981, but I note here that Peter Bol was accused of using EPO, so the whole EPO-era becomes relevant.
I expressly said "the men for the 800m". Both Koch and Kratchilova set women's records, and Koch was for the 400m, not 800m.
I don't doubt the existance of PEDs for women, for the 400m and the 800m. Note similarly the Russians and Chinese succeeded with women, but not men. Among the women, we can find plenty examples of likely doped non-Africans running fast. But even then, "proof by examples" is not a "proof".
The details I could find acknowledged one limitation was that it didn't include a "washout period", and since "RET% is at its nadir 10-14 days after rhEPO injections cease", "This trade-off almost certainly diminished the sensitivity of the ABP component monitoring OFF-hr score".
In another paper, these scientists
Excellent, you read the "phantum" pdf, well done. I appreciate you confirming this, so TheRealTaro can stop insulting me.
But now you mention another paper without providing a link. TheRealTaro will be all over you now with his profanities.
P.S. I recommended google to TheRealTaro because TheRealTaro just scolded another poster for asking a question instead of using google.
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