Joshua Cheptegei is SUSPICIOUS

rekrunner wrote:

In any case, fixing this 8th grade science detail still doesn't fix the failed analogy. Hate to break it to you but rocket science is much easier than human physiology and optimal running performance.

I have "considered that doping has played a part in the improvement of athletic performance in the sport in the last few decades", and found the facts wanting, ambiguous and inconclusive. I suspect this is why you resort to emotions, belief, fallacies and personal attacks to hide this complete failure on your part to engage at an intellectual level.

So it's easier to land a probe on a comet than invent a pill for headaches or to treat inflammation - or any other drug that affects human physiology? Caffeine is a drug; it can help you run faster. You are farcical.

Of course you have found the facts that indicate the effect of drugs on sports performance to be "wanting, ambiguous, and inconclusive". You have never taken EPO or any other ped, you have never talked with a doped athlete, or with an antidoping expert. Instead, you have analysed the abysmally inadequate "data" of a few academic studies and surrounded yourself in a cocoon of wilful ignorance. In the meantime, sports steam on full speed ahead with doping in every kind of discipline and at almost every level, from the recreational and college level to the professional and masters. You are a joke.

If we want to make the link to doping and these superior performance, these are fair points.

Note, I don't argue about women.

Male:

- 800m: Coe #1 non-African, #3 all time, in 1981, four decades ago. Maybe he doped? Is this what revolution in doping looks like? Revolution finished in 1981?

- 1500m: Maybe he doped? 1 second faster than Coe/Cram? Only 3 non-African since Coe/Cram? Revolution finished in the mid '80s, except Cacho, Willis, and Ingebrigtsen?

- 5000m: Busted for steroids two years after his only sub-13 performance, when he took 5th. Maybe he took EPO? Maybe he doped in 1997? Maybe pacing/drafting helped?

- 10000m: Rupp -- Maybe he doped? Under investigation in 2014. 7-year investigation, no stone left unturned. No NOP athlete charged, despite two whistle-blowers, emails, testimony, ...

Female:

- Male hormones in East? Russia? China? Steroids/Testosterone work well for women?

So "you are farcical" and "you are a joke" are the best facts you can muster to support your ideas?

We weren't talking about headaches or inflammation, but the best world-wide all time elite performances.

Studies make a small part of what I have analyzed, and I generally discard their results and conclusions as inapplicable to elite competitors and elite performance, for reasons often found in the disclaimers section.

Do you agree with "casual", regarding his best examples of non-Africans showing your alleged doping revolution?

rekrunner wrote:

- 800m: Coe #1 non-African, #3 all time, in 1981, four decades ago. Maybe he doped? Is this what revolution in doping looks like? Revolution finished in 1981?

As you know, doping, like training and technology (and nutrition), improves in steps (blood transfusion/HGH/EPO/gen doping; training was already discussed; track surfaces and shoes and pacing lights).

So far there has been nothing to reverse the gains in running from better training and technology (which might change, should for example the carbon shoes or the pacing lights be declared illegal).

That is not true for doping. Doping gets harder and harder with more sensitive detection methods, the EPO tests, the ABP, more OOC, better adherence to the rules of the NADOs (e.g., no more warning calls from AKAD or USADA).

Thus, if doping would be irrelevant, the performances should keep getting better and better and better, from year to year, from decade to decade. Yet there are so many old records as above-mentioned.

P.S. You keep mentioning correctly that Baumann could draft in 1993. This however is nothing special that could explain the lack of better non-African performances in the last 28 years. On the contrary, as the leaders continued to get faster for at least several years.

This all seems like speculation and personal pet theories, starting with an assumption that doping is responsible for the superior performances, and looking for facts to support it, and only finding a bunch of "maybe's" in the best examples, and then rationalizing it with more hypotheses.

Among the arguments for doping, there is no consistent consensus -- you and Armstronglivs are miles apart. While Armstronglivs speaks of "revolution in doping", you say "more sensitive detection methods" actually "reverse the gains" -- I guess hiding this revolution, and then Armstronglivs accuses me of not seeing what is hidden. According to you, his revolution is often in retreat.

Regarding "the performances should keep getting better and better and better":

- Given the small amounts of better performances in the 800m and 1500m, in the EPO-era, we should seriously rethink Ramzi-esque blood doping benefits for these shorter distance events.

- We have seen performances gradually improve (for the non-African men) in 5000m (best 5 per Olympic cycle), decade for decade, and to a lesser extent 10000m and the marathon.

Regarding Baumann (I guess you mean 1997), pacing/drafting likely gains him a few seconds -- lots of science behind wind resistance and even pacing -- this is why race organizers use pacemakers for fast attempts. Recall Baumann never broke 13:00 at any other time in his career, including two years afterwards, when busted for steroids. It's not pacing alone that leads to fast times, but pacing in combination with other factors: the race needs to start out at a fast pace, and the non-African must go with the leaders. If the leaders go out faster, fewer non-Africans are willing to go at that pace from the start. Also, among African expats, we also see Canadian based Mo Ahmed, UK/USA based Mo Farah, and USA based Bernard Lagat, all subject to the harder doping and more sensitive testing methods, all bettering Baumann's non-African record.

Recall how many times we've argued "likely more than 44%", as recent as the 2011 World Championship. Combine that with Armstrongliv's "revolution", and we should predict much more than a handful of maybe's among the best examples. This makes me think the assumptions are exaggerated, if not invalid.

rekrunner wrote:

Killeriotttt wrote:

It is interesting that Cheptegei has now implicitly admitted to doping. Cheptegei says doping is like getting a head start in a race and yet he has run faster than anyone else in history. He surely is not so arrogant as to believe he has run faster than others who had a head start of maybe a couple minutes, in his words. Cheptegei has finally owned up to it. There is your evidence.

That is one favorable, self-serving, biased, interpretation.

I note that your evidence rests on what was clearly stated as "opinion" and "belief", a belief I admit is shared among many athletes and fans, without any obvious evidence of correlation. This kind of weak "evidence" appears to be the best you can do.

So the fastest 5000m and 10000m runner in the world says that doping confers advantages similar to getting a head start in a race of “minutes” which can only mean more than one minute and you choose to believe that he would eschew this advantage and still break world records? You really are not playing with a full deck. Of course Cheptegei would be cheating as he believeds that doping is a huge advantage. He would not cede this huge advantage to his competitors and of course he would be a fool to do so. You and Renato are both ill equipped to discuss this subject.

It's always two separate discussions: a narrow discussion of facts versus a popular, but largely uninformed, discussion of beliefs.

Whatever you may want to believe, you are ill equipped with facts. Cheptegei's "opinion" is also not fact.

Your suggestion that he would not "eschew this advantage" is just a self-projection of your character.

It is simply not credible to speak of any advantage of minutes, while non-Africans, world-wide, all-time, struggle to break 13:00, and 27:00, 60:00, and 2:06 over the course of decades, as part of the doping revolution.

Neither are expert on the subject of doping. Neither have any experience of doping, of knowing athletes or coaches who admit to using it, or being advised by those who are charged with trying to eradicate it. Canova is an expert on coaching - but not doping. Rekrunner is an expert in - nothing. Their views on the subject are as well informed as a blind man's dissertation on color.

In the meantime, over decades it has become a billion dollar industry that exploits every possible development in medical science, and is present in every kind of sport at virtually every level. Thousands of sports competitors world-wide are involved - along with coaches, physios, trainers and doctors. It is also largely undetectable - it is estimated there are a hundred or more performance enhancing drugs that can't be detected by testing. Since Marion Jones, Barry Bonds and Roger Clemens' era 20 years ago antidoping experts have seen that an athlete can dope and not fail a drug test. It will be all around you at your local gym - even if you don't recognize it.

Over a decade ago I learned of substances like IGF-1 (Insulin Growth Factor One) that had the capacity to remove fat and build muscle while an athlete slept. Laboratory tests on rats showed that those that did no exercise but were given IGF-1 were bigger and stronger than rats that were trained. We can only imagine what it would do for rats that were also trained. There was no test for IGF-1 outside of a muscle biopsy, which an athlete would never consent to. This drug is only one of the pharmacological array that is being used by athletes.

For a top athlete to forgo doping is to concede competitive advantage. Any athlete who is naturally their equal, but who also dopes, will beat them. Professional athletes today do not compete to lose. As we see also - neither do college athletes and seniors. It is everywhere. Only the non-expert can maintain that it does not play a significant role in sporting performance today.

Is there anything here that does not apply to Armstronglivs, and Killeriotttt, and a dozen or so other posters who post frequently on the subject, trying to defend their beliefs that were formed apparently without facts?

No -- you an expert in nothing -- just a strong believer without any facts nor even able to supply concrete examples.

How do you create a billion dollar industry? Make it a religion and sell hope.

When the topic is whether doping can cause elite performances otherwise not possible, you cannot substitute the missing facts with popularity of beliefs, looking at your local gym, pointing to an industry that profits from a popular belief, and the undetectability of hundreds of drugs. At the end of the day, you need to be able to point to a set of performances and supply a set of facts to show that those performances were only possible with drugs.

What do credentialed experts say?

Doping researchers, through disclaimers in their published work, say they don't really know anything about elite performance.

The only one here qualified in the domain of elite performance tells you that you don't know anything about elite performance.

What does history say? All time performance history over the last 60 years doesn't support a globaly revolution in doping in distance running.

Most boxing fans agree that the heavyweight champions of the 70's (Ali, Foreman, Frazier, Holmes) are 2 or 3 levels above the champions of the last 10 or 20 years. Most boxing fans agree that even the contenders back then, such as Ken Norton and Earnie Shavers, would easily become world champions today. Yet no boxing fan I know thinks that the superior level back then was due to doping (and a lack of doping today). It would be hard to believe that given that the heavyweights of today are generally much bigger and muscled than those in the 70's.

This disparity between heavyweight boxers of the 70's and today is even more stark if you considered just the USA. All the 70's names I mentioned above were American. In the last 10 years the USA has produced ONE world class heavyweight boxer - Deontay Wilder, a man who is famous for having zero boxing skills and one extraordinarily powerful punch, likely fuelled by a combination of chemicals.

You can't objectively measure boxing greatness and skills as you can at face value with athletics. But it would be reasonable to say that its akin to the USA having half-a-dozen 9.6 freaks in the 1970's and just one capable of sub 9.9 today.

But it has nothing to do with doping. I think it was Larry Holmes who said that if he, Ali, Foreman, Norton etc. had started out today, every single one of them would be in the NFL.

Similarly, if Coe, Cram, Ovett had been around today, it's almost certain that Cram and Ovett would have been footballers, and possibly Coe too (or maybe another sport).

rekrunner wrote:

Recall how many times we've argued "likely more than 44%", as recent as the 2011 World Championship. Combine that with Armstrongliv's "revolution", and we should predict much more than a handful of maybe's among the best examples. This makes me think the assumptions are exaggerated, if not invalid.

Recall that you asked for a five, and I gave you eight. Then you discarded the women, and started arguing about the others.

But what do you expect? Whether 31, 44 or 60 out of 100 dope, it is hard to stand out.

If I give you the twenty best dopers, you will rightfully point out that number 21 is only 0.01% behind (also a likely doper).

Small gains in the EPO era? a) there were blood doping and roids before; b) you have to be cherry picking to make that claim; c) why EPO era? Straw man much? The thread is about Cheptegei being suspicious in 2021.

Pre 1990 vs. 1990-2005

Men:

800: 1:41.73 -> 1:41.11

1500: 3:29.46 -> 3:26.00

5000: 12:58.39 -> 12:37.35

10000: 27:08.23 -> 26:17.53

Women:

800: 1:53.28 -> still stands

1500: 3:52.47 -> 3:50.46

5000: 14:37.33 -> 14:11.15

10000: 30:13.74 -> 29:31.78

The EPO era becomes even more obvious when comparing pre 2005 with 2006-2015 (when the EPO tests started to be more established, and the ABP began, but before the shoe revolution).

This thread is about Cheptegei, but you responded to my request for Armstronglivs to provide "examples of this doping revolution, among non-Africans". It was Armstronglivs who raised the point of "doping revolution".

I agreed with the women and doping -- I did not discard them. We can discuss the women if you want, but I think no discussion is necessary.

Maybe you gave me 4 examples of men, but all 4 are maybes because the link to Armstrongliv's "doping revolution" is not obvious.

I only made a point about blood doping for non-Africans for 800m and 1500m. I don't need to stick to the EPO era, but EPO is often considered one of these "doping revolutions" for distance running events.

When did blood tranfusions start? We can roll back to the '60s if you want -- with the times of Elliot and Ryun on cinder tracks -- and the point still stands: I think we need to "seriously rethink Ramzi-esque blood doping benefits for these shorter distance events".

Your stats look like they include African times.

Looking at depth of quality (Top-5 men for each 4-year Olympic cycle) -- your post 2006 milestone is not so obvious:

In the 1500m, non-African men were as fast in 2013-2016 as 2001-2004 -- which were both slower than 1985-1988.

In the 5000m, non-African men got steadily faster until 2012.

In the marathon, non-Africans were the same from 2000-2012, only slowing down in 2013-2016.

Even for East Africans:

In the 1500m, in 2013-2016, the top-5 East Africans were as fast as top-5 in the world from 1997-2000 and 2001-2004.

In the 5000m, East Africans were steady from 1997-2012.

In the marathon, East Africans steadily improved from 1993-2016.

You consistently deny the effect doping has upon top athletic performance.

Do you -

1. - Have personal experience of doping?

2. - Know elite athletes who dope or have doped - or coaches, trainers, physios and doctors who have been involved in doping?

3. - Know antidoping experts and officials, who are charged with trying to eradicate the practice?

4. - Have you conducted peer reviewed scientific research on doping?

If you can't answer all 4 questions in the affirmative you are not in any sense an expert on the practice. Your opinions will therefore lack any expert basis. Yet you make claims that only an expert can make.

No creditable academic expert makes the claim that doping does not enhance elite performance. The most that is claimed is that limited laboratory results for recreational or non-elites cannot be assumed to be the same for elites (who were not part of the research). Lack of knowledge or "data" are slim grounds for scepticism amindst a practice of historical and global dimensions.

Incidentally, I can answer questions 2 and 3 in the affirmative. That's 2 better than you.

You also can't answer all 4 questions in the affirmative so you are in no sense an expert on the practice.

Well done rekrunner on owning this pompous turd.

Since you only discuss EPO and blood doping it appears you know nothing else about the variety of drugs now available to athletes, that are believed to be in triple figures.

You can always be trusted to chime in - and completely miss the mark. I don't claim to be an expert. Moron. But I do know more than someone who cannot answer any of the 4 questions in the affirmative. You do understand that 2 is greater than zero, right? From your answer, I guess not. Thick as a row of planks.

rekrunner wrote:

In the 1500m, in 2013-2016, the top-5 East Africans were as fast as top-5 in the world from 1997-2000 and 2001-2004.

If you were interested for the truth, you would look for correlations of performances with all doping milestones, instead of pointing out an Olympic cycle in one distance where the top runners did achieve similar times post EPO era.

Or at least, look at all data (Olympic cycles, distances) including women of course, as there was never an argument thus far that women benefit more, or less, from blood doping.

Or, you could save your time and listen to the experts including the scientists and coaches who have first hand seen the correlations of doped blood values with performances - apparently this includes Aden and Schumacher but not Canova. But you prefer to brush that aside with your belittling and false 'appeal to the authority' distraction. Trusting the science/scientists is not equal to an appeal to authority.

Or you accept the positive experiences of the literally thousands of dopers over seasons and years, since several decades, including Ramzi, Jeptoo and Kiptum. But you prefer to brush that aside with your belittling and false 'belief/myth/religion' distraction. Making positive experiences is not equal to a religion.

Killeriott wrote:

Joshua ran a 12:35 5000m which meant he was running liken 3 and 1/3 1500m avg 3:46.6 and yet he cannot easily run faster than 3:37 for 1500m. He should be able to EASILY run 3:37. It makes me think he is taking PEDs.

That's really cool.

It would be fun to see him race in lingerie though. Full bra, panties, garter belt, nylons,, etc.

Yeah I'd bet my life that Cheptegei juiced for the WR. No way he beat a juiced WR which was set in prime epo Era by Bekele.