Amby Burfoot says it out loud - Chepngetich is doping

Isn't the very acronym PED ambigous Orwellian doublespeak?

Athletes take many banned substances, both with and without intent, negligence, fault, or knowledge. This does not mean the banned substances are "performance enhancing". Even WADA doesn't go that far.

To establish that drugs are actually performance enhancing requires an undertaking that has rarely been attempted, or successful, without a laundry list of limitations and confounders.

I might be unaware of recent busts.

Who is the fastest known doped woman? Shobukhova at 2:18:20?

Who is the fastest known doped East African woman? Jeptoo at 2:18:57?

Maybe when the guy who knows more about what I believe than I do gets back to me I'll need to re-evaluate this post but till then, I don't have enough experience here to have a completely solid belief. But those drugs are often expensive. Many come with significant health risks. About a dozen years ago I had some chats with a woman who had once been one of the best 800 runners in East Germany. She told me there were many, many, former DDR athletes with serious doping induced health issues. And there is always the risk of detection and suspension for users.

With all that going on it's hard to understand why people would use them unless they were solidly convinced the drugs would improve their performances. But sure, maybe they're all mistaken. Or maybe there's a Placebo Effect at work.

No one is ever going to have conclusive answers to questions about how effective or ineffective drugs are in terms of improved performances. But they still require dealing with.

In a sort of parallel example, dietary supplements are a multi billion dollar industry in the US but there's no conclusive evidence that any of them do much of what they're marketed to do. But the FDA does do some regulating in hopes of keeping some of the more dangerous ones off the market.

The point I wanted to make is that using the term PED is itself presumptuous, and is not a wholly accurate description of the substances WADA decides to ban.

But fair enough. I'm not going to tell you your beliefs are definitively right or wrong, so long as we can agree what are beliefs and what are not. I think you are right to stress the health concerns from harmful side-effects -- all the more reason to be certain that the desired effect is "proven". Imagine a feedback loop when performance doesn't improve so athletes/coaches/managers/husbands decide to increase the dose.

Of course some of the banned substances can be performance enhancing, especially for women in the 800m, and there is some scattered evidence suggesting a potential effect for some of the WADA banned substances. WADA is very non-commital, suggesting they evaluate three criteria to ban substances, with no obligation to announce or defend or prove which criteria were met, if any. We shouldn't take it for granted that we understand the unpublished justifications of decisions made behind closed doors.

The supplement industry is a good analogy at helping us understand how willing athletes and non-athletes are to look for and use unproven solutions in a pill, and how lucrative that can be to exploit. Note that the supplement industry is largely unregulated by the FDA. From the FDA website:

"Before you decide to take a supplement, you should know that the FDA does not approve dietary supplements for safety and effectiveness or their labeling before they are sold to the public. Dietary supplement companies are responsible for ensuring that their products are safe and accurately labeled."

This makes it easy to understand why athletes would use them, especially athletes from cultures that looks for solutions in a pill, especially when soundly endorsed by unscientific rumors. In the case of DDR, (and in Russia/Soviet Union), it was not the athletes deciding to take the health risks, nor always aware of the risks. Didn't you just say something similar about Kenyans -- it is the coaches and agents deciding the risk and athletes having a trusting nature?

As fast as Bekele

I know when someone is impervious to knowledge so there's no need to try to get you to understand what Burfoot said and the whole thread is about.

"pro women who are not doping" surely you jest...

I did say that it's possible that many Kenyans caught doping were given something to take by a coach or agent and didn't know it was illegal. But even if the athlete knows what s/he is taking I'm not ready to condemn them to hell for it. They cannot afford airfare to races where they could win money unless they do something in Kenya that convinces someone to fund their way to overseas races. The competition to do that is fierce and if I had no particular education or skill, a family to support, and a belief that I had some real running abilty and could get myself to races where I could set myself and family up for life by taking an illegal drug I'd have a moral dilemma. I might feel like it would be wrong NOT to dope and be able to give my kids a secure future especially if many of the people I'd have to beat to get that future are doing it. But it's still wrong and should be punished.

When you get to the business of trying to decide how effective a thing is at improving running performances it's a quagmire because among other things, people respond differently to different stimuli. Studies done on if the new shoes make people run faster and by how much seem to show improvement in the range of 2 to 4 percent and that there some people who don't improve at all. I expect studies on the effectiveness of drugs would show the same thing. Pain relievers rarely work for me. I never found a pain reliever that did anything for headaches. They'd go on all day no matter what I took for relief. If my wife gets a headache she'll take a Tylenol and a half hour later the headache is gone. The drug is the same but the results very different. It seems logical to me then that not every athlete taking EPO is going to get the same result,

One of the first athletes we are sure blood doped was a Finnish steeple chaser called
Mikko Ala-Lepplilampi. He did it pryor to the Munich Olympics and said it got him to run 35 secinds faster than he'd have done without doing it. But he surely could be wrong and not understanding what really got him those 35 seconds or he could be bang on the mark. But even if he is it doesn't mean that everyone could get a comparable improvement.

There was never any need to get me to understand what I already understood.

I was merely correcting some of your errors by pointing out the contradictions between the horse's mouth and the jawbone of the ass.

I think you touched on an important aspect of the doping problem in Kenya -- the exploitation of financially desperate athletes. I know I am the resident contrarian, so I know what I suggest will not be popular -- most people tend to think the Kenyan success is the result of doping, but I think that the large talent pool combined with the economic desperation attracts both local and foreign exploiters in high numbers that would not be possible in any other country.

When we talk about potential PEDs for the women's marathon, and we want to start talking about high responders versus low or negative responders, recall that Paula's marathon records of 2:17 and 2:15 stood for 15 years (women's only) and 16 years (mixed) before someone else bettered them. Paula broke 2:18 in 2002, and 15 years later, Mary Keitany became the next women to break 2:18 (dopers Shobukhova and Jeptoo did not). The way I see it, whatever anyone thinks of Paula, among the rest of the world, the highest doping responder was never able to break 2:18 (until the era of supershoes). Shobukhova was the closest, but still nearly 3 minutes behind.

So assuming Paula's records were "enhanced", where were all these high responders to doping for the next 15 years? And if her records were all clean, again, where were all the high responders to doping for the next 15 years?

Paula's great times were at the end of the free-for-all blood-doping era. Later athletes had it harder. Fact.

See also El G and Komen.

Plus, Paula's off score jumps are well documented, as is her likely doping status in 2012. Keitany was also on the likely doping list. All coincidence? I think not.

So, Paula was the most talented highest responder to blood-doping until 2005. Then with better tests and later the ABP, blood-doping got harder and harder.

IF you take blood-doping out of the picture, you need to explain why no one was better until 2018.

And of course you need to claim that Paula's repeated 20% increases in HGB some 60 minutes after 32 - 70 minute races are due to dehydration, and the concurrent 20% decreases in ret% are coincidence and caused by measurement errors. And at the same time, despite such huge dehydration and measurement error effects in those years, only 14% of all athletes ever recorded suspicious values... shouldn't that be 100% then?

WITH blood-doping, you only need to explain why no one was better until 2005 (better Epo test) or 2009 (ABP). And the above values are a consequence of hard core blood transfusions.

You have a much higher tolerance for going back and forth here than I do but I'll bight but with nothing very definitive. Radcliff's record was mysterious for a long time. It seemed like it should have opened the floodgates to times in its general vicinity, like what happened with the men's record after Salazar finally got under Clayton's time. (Yes, the course was soon found a bit short but the barrier had been broken again by the time that was discovered.)

I remember asking Lorrain Moller what she made of Radcliffe's record, why it was so much faster and had stood for so long. She said she didn't know, said it could well have been drug aided but had no idea. I believe Radcliffe had male pacers for the entire distance and not all of the subsequent ones did.

But one thing I have learnt about doping in Kenya is that the issue goes beyond drugs. It's hand in hand with corruption, protection, bribes, retaliation, and who knows what else. Maybe in those years the networks that protect some current female dopers weren't set up yet. So much of this is clandestine I doubt we'll ever have enough information to get anything like definitive answers.

Burfoot is confusing the variation of men's marathon times with the very different variation in women's marathon times. Chepngetich's time is a 1.3 sigma improvement in the women's time, statistically expected and hardly worth ranting about. Women's marathon time progression has more than 3 times the variability that men's marathon progression has... maybe that's what has Mr. Burfoot confused? An improvement of 117 seconds in the men's time would be a 4.4 sigma improvement... statistically unlikely... but we're not talking about men's times here.

Mr Burfoot needs to look at the women's data to remove his confusion and to reconsider his position.

Do you really think Amby doesn't look at women's data? I'd bet there's almost no onewho posts here who looks at anywhere near the amount of data that he does. Just because he doesn't draw the same conclusions you do doesn't mean he's not looking at some of the same things.

Forget jawbone - only someone with the brain of an ass doesn't understand the title of the thread.

"Amby Burfoot says it out loud - Chepngetich is doping".

It is becoming evident that Letsrun's all out war against any non-white medalist, world record is going to a continuing occurance from now on. I first noticed it during Paris, which is ironic because their were more white distance medallist and even champions there than at any recent Olympics. It's like a high they wanted to keep experiencing. If one white guy wins, it must mean we are better at distance running and therefore every time a black, or dark skinned guy wins it must be because we were cheated. I am already anticipating the meltdown that we will see here when Graham Blanks does not repeat as xc champ. It was stolen from us!!!