Doesn't Russian Doping Scandal Prove Canova is Right about EPO?

Mr. Obvious wrote:

Zed wrote:

Maybe EPO has a major effect on cyclists, and much less on runners?

Difference in performance before/after EPO hera is important between the two sports.

It is possible. I confess that I am not all that interested in cycling and have only a passing knowledge of it.

There is scientific literature from clinical trials that show that EPO works in running.

I do not know if it is more or less than in cycling., but if you make contributions in that area I'll be happy to read them.

comparing the two sports, i think EPO helps endurance but especially recovery.

In cyclism there isn't a big difference in peak performance in time trials or climbs. But in EPO era they did it in longer time trials and in stage races, everyday seemed the first day for the athletes (so this has relationship with something like harder and frequent workouts).

But to go faster you must be stronger, and i think other substances have more importance, like hormons for example.

Zed wrote:

Mr. Obvious wrote:

It is possible. I confess that I am not all that interested in cycling and have only a passing knowledge of it.

There is scientific literature from clinical trials that show that EPO works in running.

I do not know if it is more or less than in cycling., but if you make contributions in that area I'll be happy to read them.

comparing the two sports, i think EPO helps endurance but especially recovery.

In cyclism there isn't a big difference in peak performance in time trials or climbs. But in EPO era they did it in longer time trials and in stage races, everyday seemed the first day for the athletes (so this has relationship with something like harder and frequent workouts).

But to go faster you must be stronger, and i think other substances have more importance, like hormons for example.

Oxygen-vector doping with EPO was the single most game changer in the history of cycling. Look no further than Dane Bjarne Riis: He admits to using the EPO/HGH combo starting in 1993 and goes on to win the prestigious Tour de France in 95. Where was he prior to 93? A pretty average domestique. His superhuman rides through the high mountains was the result of EPO/HGH. He's also has one of top 10 all-time fastest ascents up the legendary Alpe d'Huez (on his Wikipedia page, you can see his incredible jump in performance on his Grand Tour time line):

Another famous rider, Italian Marco Pantani, benefited greatly becoming a "superhuman" climber. He was a high responder who adapted very well to O2-vector doping. On his Wikipedia page you can see the data on his Hct values where he fluctuates between a 40.7% baseline to over 58%. He holds the top three (3) fastest ascents up Alpe d'Huez, and is the last rider to win the Giro-Tour double in 98. He was also a client of Dr. Conconi. And of course there's Armstrong, who transformed from a sprinter & classics type rider to one of the World's best climbers and 7 time TdF champion post-cancer when he sought the services of Dr. Ferrari.

Low-octane doping prior to the 90s wouldn't have, and hasn't produced that kind of sustained submaximal performance through the high mountains. Low-octane PEDs (e.g., T, steriods, cortisone) have a minimal effect on endurance performance. The Thomsen et al EPO study with amateur cyclists showed for some test subjects a ~12% increase in VO2max, ~13% increase in wattage and improved time to exhaustion by ~54% .*Results were from only about a ~20% increase in Hct levels.

So, rocket fuel combined with HGH & T had a major effect on cyclists who were good responders. There's a lot of good literature on this when EPO & HGH was introduced into the peloton in the early 1990s. It literally turned the cycling world upside down 😮

we can't see the same impact on running.

We have not a direct comparison because big runners abandoned 5000-10000 races, but half marathons and marathons have their recors in post EPO era.

10000 record 2'38"/km (Bekele, but simil to Gebre and komen)

HM record 2'46"/km (Tadese)

M record 2'55"/km (various athletes :-) )

they are pretty comparable

When someone is the first part of his career a domestique and the latter part a leader suddenly improvoring in GC standing remarkably, it isn't that easy to establish whether someone was a domestique because he was at the middle of the pack or whether he was at the middle of the pack because he was a domestique. Using the GT data you seem so much like to refer to, one actually can easily see emerging climbing abilities for Riis already in 1980s and it is rarely mentioned that Riis actually won a mountain stage in the 1989 Giro D'Italia (Stage 9).

While rEPO could explain many things and one is very tempted to conclude that the 1990s improvement in speeds of Tour de France is solely based on the wild use of rEPO with some 4/5 of the Peloton allegedly using it and many teams having cyclists with hematocrits of 55, 60 and above, I find it still strange-to-say how the average speed of the Tour de France improved year-after-year even after health checks and rEPO tests were introduced in 1997 and 2001 respectively with the fastest Tour being in 2005. The fastest Giro D'Italia is actually the 1983 edition (38.94 km/hr), well before the introduction of the alleged "game changer". One contributing factor for Tour times improving could also be that Vuelta a España was moved from late spring to autumn in 1995, so until then if one wanted to participate to two GTs in a year, TDF had to be the latter of the two.

(I am the first to admit that I know next to nothing about the routes or the circumstances of neither the 1983 nor the 1989 Giros, so anyone may feel free to correct me if there were some factors I should've taken into account before referring to them)

Offtopic of an Offtopic, but one shouldn't always consider the lowest value of any dataset as the "baseline". In Pantani's example, his biographer Matt Rendell writes that "[a]ssuming the 40.7 per cent figure for March 1994 is abnormally low, perhaps owing to an inhibition response to the initial experimental course of r-EPO we may hypothesize that for early that year, the figures of 43.4 per cent (dated 4 January 1994) and 42.8 (for 4 February) are likely to represent natural values..." (The Death of Marco Pantani, p. 289)

The improvements aren't for some test subjects but the mean of the group. The research paper gained a lot of publicity and the results are indeed remarkable. In light of how to generalise results of amateur studies, it is interesting to read the thoughts of physiologist Ross Tucker on how to extrapolate the results to elite athletes:

There is no discussion on how Tucker reaches this arbitrary figure of "three percent improvement" for Contador, but apparently even he is truly confused by the results and arbitrarily assumes away 3/4 of the presumed potential improvement for an elite. These are just random thoughts from Tucker, but if he is correct in assuming that elites respond differently, the improvement might as well be zero percent, which has pretty much backing up as his figure of three percent.

Great,Yes, you have identified the kind of procedure you would need to follow in order to support your claim.Now all you have to do is round up a bunch of PED-naive test subjects (I would suggest at least 10 subjects) and train them all so that they are in sub 13 5000m shape. Then subject them to an appropriate course of EPO (perhaps the same protocol used on the recreational runners) and then test them again. Collect your data, have it peer-reviewed and then publish it. I look forward to the results of your experiment.In the meantime, I hope you will stop with this unscientific, hand-wavey nonsense such as "Bekele ran faster than Baumann, and this proves that EPO didn't work for Bauman and then we can conclude it doesn't work on Bekele either." It is not an argument that should be advanced by anybody who wishes to be taken seriously.

rekrunner wrote:

How fast did these kidney patients run a 5K with a hematocrit of 32?

whitewashed wrote:https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/1986567

"These data show that androgen therapy significantly augments the action of exogenous EPO such that lower doses of EPO are sufficient for an adequate hematopoietic response."

Are you trying to imply that is not relevant because the study was done in patients? Of course treatments originally used on patients have never been used to enhance performance in athletes ....

Aragon, I find your thoughts on this interesting. I know I am pretty firmly in the "EPO works until there are studies proving it doesn't" camp and I would maintain that position.

I do think the sort of "EPO benefits gradually fade with increasing fitness" theory is plausible. Plausible, of course, does not mean proven, which I think you would agree with.

I would even agree, based on your posts/links in here that there is even some (weak, IMO) evidence indicating that it might be so. Maybe evidence is too strong. Maybe suggestion that makes it a viable/interesting topic for further study.

I don't think Tucker is trying to make a definitive or scientific statement, just a speculation. Of course he is perfectly capable of speaking for himself.

I don't even necessarily believe that Renato is wrong in his contention. I just don't see a lot of evidence backing up his statements. I think it is a pretty extraordinary claim which requires some pretty extraordinary evidence to move it anywhere past "speculative hypothesis."

rekrunner wrote:

7 winners out of 12 races means that 17 winners of the London Marathon over the same 12 years did not have any suspicious blood values in the leaked database. We've seen altitude training can cause suspicious scores.

whitewashed wrote:

Well, some are arguing that they have indeed discovered this secret:

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2015/aug/09/seven-london-marathon-winners-in-12-years-doping-suspicion

"Athletes with suspicious blood scores are said to have collected more than £3m in prize money for winning city marathons."

Did you read the article?

rekkedrunner needs some help:

The organisers of the London and Chicago marathons have told the paper the International Association of Athletics Federations, and the national anti-doping authorities failed to tell them that some athletes were competing with blood that appeared so heavily doped as to threaten their health.

The marathons worst affected were Chicago, London, New York and Boston. In London, seven first places, six second and seven thirds were taken by athletes with blood tests deemed suspicious by experts who analysed the leaked database. However not all the tests were taken at the time of the marathons – some date to other points in the athletes’ careers.

That is 20 runners with suspicious blood tests just at the London Marathon.

He insisted that, although the organisers were paying “thousands of pounds” for athlete testing, they were not told of the results by the IAAF, and had been unaware of the suspicious data.

“The IAAF needs to do more to stop people from starting who have blood values that are out of normal range.”

The experts concluded that some of the athletes ran the risk of a stroke or heart attack by using blood transfusions or banned red-cell-boosting drugs, which had the effect of making their blood so dense that they should have been seeking hospital treatment rather than competing.

The leaked database contains more than 12,000 blood tests, from 5,000 athletes including many household names. The test scores – which can suggest, but not prove, illegal doping – were analysed by Michael Ashenden and Robin Parisotto, experts on doping, who concluded that a third of all medals in the Olympics and world championships endurance events were won by athletes with suspicious blood results.

When an abnormal result was present, the entire profile for the athlete was extracted from the data base and evaluated in its entirety.

Further, as attested to by the IAAF’s published article, it was possible to make an allowance for ALTITUDE where necessary because the altitude of the testing location depicted in the database followed a distribution similar to that of the altitude of the training location.

Here is what Lord Coe said at the time:

“There is nothing in our history of competence and integrity in drug-testing that warrants this kind of attack”, Coe (pictured) told the AP. “Nobody should underestimate the anger at the way our sport has been portrayed. The fightback has to start here. We cannot be portrayed as a sport that is in any way dragging our heels. The use of that database, however it got into their possession, displayed either breathtaking ignorance or a level of malevolence around a set of readings you can simply cannot extrapolate beyond. The idea that my sport sat there either covering up wrongdoing or just being incompetent could not be wider of the mark.”

"...How to tackle the issue is likely to form one of the battlegrounds during the election of a new IAAF President to replace Lamine Diack, who dismissed the claims as a “joke” at a media conference in Malaysia…"

Dr. Fuentes from Operation Puerto with the 211 bags of blood also said that some of his clients included WINNERS OF THE LONDON MARATHON.

For example:

"My medical relationship with winners of the London marathon... including pre-race treatments." It is not clear who he was talking about, though Spaniard Abel Anton won the race in 1998. Anton is now a senator for the ruling People's party along with Marta Dominguez, a world champion middle distance runner who shook off doping allegations after being arrested in 2010. She is now banned after more bad doping stuff with Operation Galgo in Spain, which was before Operation Rial with Jama Aden, Genzebe Dibaba, and Tirunesh Dibaba with the 62 used syringes, 23 syringes preloaded with EPO and 6 vials of different kinds of EPO…in Sabadell, Spain.

It is just a coincidence.

Trial evidence showed that Fuentes's dealings with cyclists routinely included blood auto-transfusions to increase red blood counts and the use of EPO and other substances that are now banned.

He also offers to reveal the keys to Spain's eruption on to the Olympic medal table, with its record haul at the 1992 Barcelona Games, described as the result of a mysterious process that he calls going "from tolerance to success".

ridiculo = rekrunner

You have stated in some of your posts that there was no proof of EPO at the Sabadell hotel. You said that it was vitamins and minerals.

Scroll down in this article to the photo of what was found in the Sabadell hotel. You can see EPOTIN and the syringes below it say Aranesp (darbepoetin alfa), which is a synthetic EPO made by the biotech company Amgen. The nesp stands for "novel erythropoiesis stimulating protein."

http://www.elconfidencial.com/deportes/atletismo/2016-06-26/dopaje-sabadell-jama-aden-operacion-rial-mossos-doping_1222935/?utm_source=dlvr.it&utm_medium=%5BECTwitterNocheAutomatico%5D

O'Boy (Irish).

Hey rekkedrunner.

This is fun.

The World Anti-Doping Agency and cycling's governing body announced Wednesday that they are in possession of samples of blood and plasma bags seized and stored as part of the Operation Puerto case.

The UCI and the World Anti-Doping Agency said in a joint statement that the samples have been stored in an accredited laboratory outside of Spain

Last month, a Spanish court ruled that more than 200 blood bags in the decade-old case should be handed over to sports authorities for investigation. Spanish officials said, however, that no retroactive punitive sanctions could be pursued against any athletes because the statute of limitations has expired.

In its ruling last month, the Madrid Provincial Court said the bags containing blood samples and plasma should be given to the Spanish Cycling Federation, WADA, the UCI, and Italy's Olympic Committee.

The move came 10 years after police seized 211 coded blood bags from the Madrid clinic of sports doctor Eufemiano Fuentes, revealing a doping network involving some of the world's top cyclists.

Speculation has been rife that the release of the bags, which have been stored at a lab in Barcelona, could stir up another scandal if identities of new athletes are revealed.

Are they finally going to release the names after more than 10 years???

O'Boy (Irish).

PERIOD.

Update rekkedrunner:

https://sports.yahoo.com/news/agencies-operation-puerto-blood-samples-180732027--spt.html

PERIOD.

Go rekkierunner:

According to Purdy, 12:50 for 5K is harder than 26:50 for 10K. We should expect around the same, or slightly more, for 10K.There are 64 performances (by 30 athletes) below 12:53, 9 of them (by 9 athletes) 2009 or later.We have seen in the last decade that much of the talent is skipping the track and going to the roads, so the jumps in 5000m and 10000m have been replaced by depth at the top in the marathon.I have been right here. Also non-existent is the data that says EPO is a significant factor in sub-12:53s and sub-26:50s. Linking the fast track times to EPO still requires leaps of faith. The ABP can see longer lasting effects reducing the need for frequent out of competition tests. The reasons for the lack of out of competition testing in Kenya and Ethiopia are very much the same reasons it would be difficult to setup and maintain an EPO regime, especially on the scale that it needs to be to produce the depth of fast runners it does, even from the juniors.

Altitude adjusted OFF scores of female Not-That-great-britain runners:

http://sportsscientists.com/wp-content/uploads/2015/09/Capture-400x256.png

I know that you will like this one from my favorite magazine…which is the Irish Mirror:

http://i4.irishmirror.ie/incoming/article6915888.ece/ALTERNATES/s1200/PaulaMain.jpg

It is just a coincidence.

O'Boy (Irish).

Aragon wrote:

[quote]Redemption wrote:

Oxygen-vector doping with EPO was the single most game changer in the history of cycling. Look no further than Dane Bjarne Riis: He admits to using the EPO/HGH combo starting in 1993 and goes on to win the prestigious Tour de France in 95. Where was he prior to 93? A pretty average domestique. His superhuman rides through the high mountains was the result of EPO/HGH. He's also has one of top 10 all-time fastest ascents up the legendary Alpe d'Huez (on his Wikipedia page, you can see his incredible jump in performance on his Grand Tour time line):

When someone is the first part of his career a domestique and the latter part a leader suddenly improvoring in GC standing remarkably, it isn't that easy to establish whether someone was a domestique because he was at the middle of the pack or whether he was at the middle of the pack because he was a domestique. Using the GT data you seem so much like to refer to, one actually can easily see emerging climbing abilities for Riis already in 1980s and it is rarely mentioned that Riis actually won a mountain stage in the 1989 Giro D'Italia (Stage 9).

He may have won a mountain stage in the Giro, but it pales in comparison to his 96 Alpe d'Huez time which stands at 9th on the all-time fastest ascents. Riis is used as the best evidence of a rider gaining a significant performance benefit, almost to point of incredible, from the synergistic effects of EP0 & HGH (i.e., the often characterization of "donkey to racehorse" analogy). Are you suggesting that 02-vector doping with HGH didn't have a significant effect on his progression toward improved climbing ability and eventual Tour champion? IOW, if he hadn't resorted to high-octane doping, do you think he would have shown exceptional climbing ability, evenually winning the Tour anyway?🤔

Donkey to race horse is not quite how I see it, in the 90s in cycling it was a question of big, muscular time trialers like Ullrich and Indurain suddenly climbing with everyone except Pantani. That changed the "natural order of things" but it was not really a question of talent or lack of it, just what kind of talent was important.

Why did the Tour speeds continue to go up until 2005 even with some EPO controls and health limits? There are several books by dopers from that period published. Blood volume expanders (Hemohes...) may have originally been the way to beat the maximum hemocrit limits, and after initial EPO tests became available it was blood doping, microdosing EPO, and a better understanding of how to improve performance with doping (the Ferrari touch). And then right before 2006 was Operation Puerto with all the blood bags...

Blood passport only came a few years later, and the leaked list of suspicion scores a few years back was pretty depressing reading when it came to the Tour favourites.

HIF stabilizers inhibit the enzyme prolyl-hydroxylase, which is involved in the degradation of HIF-1alpha by the ubiquitin proteosome pathway. Increased levels of the transcription factor HIF-1alpha increases the transcription of the gene for EPO and increases endogenous EPO production, so it acts just like EPO in a pill. It is in phase 3 clinical trials right now. It has not been approved in the United States for prescription or sale. There are other HIF stabilizers being developed by other companies.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26846333

A CYCLIST (What a surprise!!!) has already tested positive for the HIF stabilizer roxadustat (FG-4592) made by the company FibroGen. He stayed within the limits of the ABP because they make the limits very large in the ABP to avoid false positives, and they are even larger with the altitude adjustment.

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/26808067

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/22362605

Normal range in hemoglobin for a female is 12.0 g/dL to 15.0 g/dL. Paula had an OOC test on Feb. 7, 2012 in Monte Carlo, Monaco and had a hemoglobin level of 16.2 g/dL, which is way over normal range. Paula also said that she has a history of anemia (low hemoglobin levels), so that makes it even more implausible.

Paula can say she just came from altitude or just say that she always uses an altitude tent, and then she gets to use the higher altitude cutoff score, so her OFF score at the time of 109.35 is just under the altitude cutoff, and the score passes…even though it is still really high and suspicious.

That is why I never used that suspicious 2012 score.

I used the 21.88% increase in hemoglobin in only 2 days from 12.8 g/dL to 15.6 g/dL in 2003 at the World 1/2 Marathon championships!!!...with an OFF score that went from 82 to 114.87 in only 2 days!!!

WOW = WOW

O'Boy:

https://www.facebook.com/hypo2/photos/a.181731141864880.32731.154386924599302/1186318168072834/?type=3&theater

It is just an extremely volatile Italian = Irish Coincidental Synchronicityâ„¢.

WOW = WOW

rjm33 wrote:

I used the 21.88% increase in hemoglobin in only 2 days from 12.8 g/dL to 15.6 g/dL in 2003 at the World 1/2 Marathon championships!!!...with an OFF score that went from 82 to 114.87 in only 2 days!!!

While I don't particularly like the way you treat this thread as your own personal blog with flooding it with material with almost zero connection to the subject thus rendering it almost unreadable, I'd be interested whether you have a source for the Hb concentration figure of 12.8 g/dl for Paula Radcliffe for 2 October 2003.

In trying to verify whether your allegations are true, I tried to locate the original source and googled "Paula Radcliffe" and "12.8 g/dl". All [sic.] the 26 references that Google returned were letsrun.com- pages into which every single one had one rjm33 contributing.

If you examine the top 100 all-time fastest Alpe d'Huez climbing times, with the exception of five (5) ABP-era riders, all are held by riders from the 90s & 2000s; during the era of widespread EPO & blood doping use (not one Tour champion or any climbing specialist from the 70s or 80s is on the list; no LeMond, no Merckx, no Fignon, no Hinault, etc.):

The explosion of Alpe d'Huez climbing times began in the mid-90s which coincided with the widespread use of EPO & HGH in the peloton, and only after the ABP was implemented in 09, did times revert back comparable to those in the early 90s, when EPO was first introduced (but still faster than anything in the pre-EPO era).

Now back to the main topic: Have you found any of Savinova's pre-08 times to compare with her times when she started on the Russian rocket fuel program? As I previously pointed out with one of her training partners, Stepanova, there's evidence of an incredible, unbelievable, mind-blowing improvement with her times that coincided with her usage of EPO/steriods/HGH.

According to the McLaren report, Stepanova initially began using EPO & Turinabolan through her coach (Mokhnev) in 2007 where her 800 baseline time was 2:13, and previous PB was a pedestrian 2:08.47. A year later on the high-octane program she improves to 2:03.47...a 5 second improvement from her PB! And another year later in 09, she sets a PB of 1:58.99...another improvement of just under 5 seconds, and a total improvement of near 10 seconds in approx 2 years! 😨. Though she nevered medaled in a WC or Olympic event, her incredible transformation was good enough to put her in finals of the 2011 WCs. And in the report, one of the Russian Women's mid-D coaches said they could not have won any medals (Savinova & Poistogova) without "pharma"...no kidding!

wada_independent_commission_report_1_en.pdf