rekrunner wrote:
It's funny when we look at East African performances, and the big breakthroughs in the 1990s, the technique used is to compare their 3% gains against the previous era, and this is used to "prove" the 3% benefit, or the 1:00 benefit, that scientists predict.
But when we use the same technique for non-Africans, and we come up with small figures, like 0.3%-0.8%, this is considered misleading.
It looks like you are arguing that the natural limit for non-Africans for 10K is truly around 27:44-28:08, and runners like Barrios, Lopes, Mamede only achieved their best times because they were fully doped. While at the same time, the natural baselines for Africans were better than the times of Henry Rono's 27:22 of the '70s, and once the Africans really started doping, they could shatter previous records, bringing it down to 26:17.
I've said it many times that this is really a concession that the East Africans are inherently physically superior, something I would not argue against. Once you've conceded that, it hardly matters whether doping is providing a 1 minute advantage or 10 seconds, because the significant factor is that Africans are simply physically superior than non-Africans by some 30-60 seconds. This better explains why Rosa, Hermans, and Brother Colm succeeded in Kenya and Ethiopia -- the depth of quality of the raw material was just that much better.
But this is also pure speculation, playing out one possible scenario.
We could speculate, as others do here, that Africans and non-Africans actually have the same baseline (a Wejo-esque 28:00), and the difference is just the quantities of drugs the Africans can get away with. This puts in doubt the assumptions of high doping prevalence with a large benefit, not to mention the intelligence of non-African athletes and their coaches, for being unable to figure out the doping combination in a way that many Kenyan schoolboys can, when they were getting their butts kicked for decades.
Not sure why you want to place any importance in the Kenyan marathons of the 70s and 80s. The East African "explosion" in the marathon started in 2003 with Tergat, then really took off with Geb in 2007. Excluding Ryan Hall's wind-aided performance, Tergat's 2002 performance of 2:05:48 put the marathon world record out of every non-African's reach ever since, while Africans have brought it down a further 4 minutes.
casual obsever wrote:
Exactly. Thus, it is very misleading to compare that alleged 1% improvement to the 3% of the Africans. In the 70s and 80s, the Europeans were head and shoulder above the Kenyans + Ethiopians with respect to training, doping, nutrition, and even participation in distance running. That's why Rosa et al. had so much success after moving there.
Look up Kenyan marathon times of the 70s, and try to remember the best Kenyan marathon runner of the 80s.
Then try to find the best female Kenyan marathon runners of the 70s and 80s.
Or use a history book to read about East Africa in the 70s...
Again misleading, because Schumacher compares EPO to clean times, and you compare Barrios (whose national record is 29 years old!) with Rupp ("likely doping", testo spike while in marathon training, testo medication as teenager, likely prohibited method user etc.). Is your point now that Barrios was clean and Rupp an EPO user?
That old unbroken records - from such a dirty times - are extremely suspicious, as is Rupp. It would only be consequent to assume that either both were clean (then your 24 s are a consequence of better technology + training and maybe more talent) or that both were dirty (then your 24 s are a consequence of better technology including doping + training and maybe more talent). Neither would disprove Schumacher's claim.
Finally, Barrios' record is from 1989 not 1981, so he might already have used EPO.