rekrunner wrote:
Showing that an event isn't clean is evidence of prevalence, not advantage caused by blood-doping.
Although the Sunday Times percentages by event is highly informative, especially when comparing the different events with the same measure, there are reasons to be cautious from inferring too much from these medal win percentage values relative to different percentages from a different measure for the whole population of samples/athletes. Just to name a few ...
One issue with the Sunday Times medal count statistic, is that other factors besides blood-doping, which were not measured, could account for the higher medal win percentage, e.g. steroid use among the women in the shorter distance events, artificially inflating the role of blood doping as conferring an advantage.
Another issue is the "once in a lifetime" criteria they used to consider a "medal won" suspicious, where the suspicion was not necessarily linked in time with the medal win.
Another issue that makes it worse is the way they combined "likely doping" with "at the very least abnormal" together, making the previous issue more likely by including borderline readings which might be false positives.
Another issue is that men and women were combined masking any gender specific differences.
And finally, these are combined with the fact that medal winners likely have more blood samples in the database, making the risk of the above issues more likely for medal winners.
As a side note, the period of 2001-2012 wasn't particular fast period for women in the 800m, with the some standouts being Jelimo, Semenya, and Niyonsaba, at least two of which are suspected to naturally possess high levels of testosterone.
The men's side was relatively faster in this period versus the women, thanks to David Rudisha, but still the sub-1:42 1980s times of Coe and Cruz remain near the top of the all time list.
Lol. Čeplak of Slovenia was busted for EPO - *9th* fastest all-time (1:55.19). Graf of Austria was busted for involvement in an Austrian humanplasma blood doping lab - 50th fastest all-time (1:56.64) & Olympic silver medalist.
Russian Mariya Savinova was busted for two (2) ABP hematological-anomalies busts; one at the 2011 WC winning gold and running 24th all-time fastest (1:55.87), and the other at the London Olympics also winning gold. She beat Semenya at both championships. Her Hct levels at both events was about ~11% over her baseline values. There are also two (2) Chinese runners (Liu & Qu) under Ma's army in 93 (suspicion of EPO use) running the 16th & 35th all-time fastest.
What about Jelimo? She runs for Kenya which is a PED-Powered nation with many EPO/ABP busts and a nation listed on the IAAF's "most at risk for doping" list. She could have easily been using EPO. And keep in mind the aerobic/anaerobic energy system contribution for the women's 800 is "70/30%" - so definitely 02-vector doping would be a benefit.
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/15966348-energy-system-contribution-to-400-metre-and-800-metre-track-running/