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

rekrunner wrote:

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.

You can call everything a coincidence as much as you want, the trends are against you here.

"leaps of faith"? To assume doping when doping was undetectable, when doping was common, covered up by your testers, encouraged or even organized by your government, seems natural.

Also the data are supporting the doping theory.

Examples: some records from the 'roid area still stand, for example the fastest non-African 800 male and female times are indeed from the 80s.

Why didn't anyone break those during the 90s, 00s, 10s? Coincidence, despite better tracks, shoes, training, or was doping indeed limited by the enhanced 'roid testing?

Likewise for the EPO era. We all agree, I hope, that EPO is more advantageous for the longer distances compared to steroids. That's biology: endurance becomes more important, compared to strength.

Again, look at the non-African times. Examples: the fastest male and female 5000 are from the 90s, with the male a convicted, and the female an admitted doper. Coincidence, or does blood doping help in long distances?

Or the marathon. Fastest non-African male from the 98, fastest female from 2003, known for her wide variations in hemoglobin concentration, who couldn't come near that time within S E V E N minutes after the introduction of the 2nd generation EPO test. Coincidence, or does blood doping help in long distances?

Now for the Africans. That's easier to monitor, because for all intents and purposes they win the important long distance races. But, do they? Well, there is our friend Liliya, who was quite dominant in the marathon after the introduction of the ABP. Was she clean? No, she was one of those protected by the IAAF in exchange for cash. Convicted doper. Coincidence, or does doping help in long distances?

Ok. Back to the Africans. Well, the decline in track performances in recent years, i.e. after the introduction of the ABP, is well documented. Which leaves as with the marathon. No progress on the women's side since the EPO era. There was a 2:18 in Boston, run by EPO cheat Jeptoo...

Leaves as with the men. Last world record by a newcomer in 2014, after the ABP, who barely raced before, and was thus barely tested. That a newbie can break the record also demonstrates that the marathon record is somewhat weak. This is further underlined by Bekele almost breaking it, despite having slowed down significantly over the last several years (sorry, rjm).

No Kenyan world record whatsoever since Kenya got under fire and had to improve its doping controls.

Oh well. Let's call of that a coincidence and believe in the clean sport and the good human heart.

This is the kind of experiment that would help us determine if "EPO helps Kenyans at the top" or "EPO cannot help Kenyans at the top".But these are not really MY claims. The first one is popular mythology, requiring leaps of faith, and the second one is Renato’s.I claimed that the data doesn't exist "at the top". Every discussion about EPO at the top is largely an unscientific one, filled with speculation. In the world of scientific study, top times and top athletes don't exist. And you can’t get their without several ASSUMPTIONS which may or may not reflect reality.I claimed that, from a top down perspective, non-Africans did not reap the powerful game-changing benefits of EPO, that East and North Africans purportedly received. If we statistically trend non-African performances from 1985 to the present, and compare that to East Africans, we will not see the same pattern. I suggest this doesn’t stand well with arguments of the type "we know it works for East Africans, because it works for non-Africans”, because, at a world level, the way it worked for non-Africans seems unremarkable.The support of my claim can be found in statistical analysis of the data we do have.I claimed that these observations supports Renato's claim.I’ve seen many excuses why it didn’t happen for non-Africans, but this only reinforces that it did NOT happen for non-Africans, so undermines any argument that relies on observations of non-Africans.Comparing Baumann (best non-African) to Bekele (best) shows that a narrow focus on EPO, or any drugs, ignores more significant factors that explain top performances from East Africans. Once we acknowledge other, more important factors, we may find that EPO was only a minor influence at best, or not at all, or who knows, a negative factor.I see Baumann like this -- ASSUMING he also took EPO, and ASSUMING he took these drugs in 1997, we can assume Baumann tried to use drugs to compete at a world level, and yet only managed to place fifth in his race, and 41st athlete of all time. This is indicative of the strongest "weight of evidence" (requiring two leaps of faith) that drugs work at the top. With several ASSUMPTIONS, we could hypothesize that drugs helped him be the best he could be, but it is a FACT that he still FAILED, by a lot, to compete at a world level.

Redemption wrote:

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.):

http://www.climbing-records.com/2015/07/three-riders-make-it-into-alpe-dhuez.html?m=1

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).

The compilation of historical fastest Alpe d'Huez times is seemingly convincing of the rEPO-epidemic and one shouldn't dismiss it altogether as one shouldn't dismiss the estimated Watts/kg figures published a few years ago by Antonio Vayer.

But in the end the dataset isn't a homogenous group of times one comparable to another even when they measure the ascent of same length. Aside from possibly different weather conditions and no references to possible draft effect, the position of Alpe d'Huez within the each Tour is different and so is its relative value in the race and hardness.

When you compare the three record editions by Pantani (94, 95, 97) to the last three editions (11, 13, 15), you can clearly see that the position of Alpe d'Huez within the Tour is obviously later in the recent editions when the cyclists should naturally be more exhausted:

1994 16th stage, five days after a rest day, fifth in a series of a mountain stage + two flats + two mountains.

1995 10th stage, two days after a rest day, second in a series of two high mountain stages.

1997 13th stage, two days after a rest day, right after TT.

2011 19th stage, four days after a rest day, fourth in a series of three high and one medium mountain stages.

2013 18th stage, three days after a rest day, right after a high mountain stage and a TT. The Peloton climbed Alpe d'Huez twice.

2015 20th stage, four days after a rest day, fourth in a series of four high mountain stages.

Aside from the 1994 seemingly hard edition, my reading is that the circumstances were almost certainly more favourable for the cyclists in 1995-1997 than in 2011-2015. In fact, if you look at the Wikipedia-article, there is a clear tendency for Alpe d'Huez to be earlier in the race circa 1995-2005 than before or after that ten year period. You have even some fast editions (2006) right after the rest day as one where the climb is the first mountain stage in the race (2001) and some of the data (2004) are calculated from TT-results if follow the material correctly.

Again, the prevalent PED-use reaching endemic proportions around mid-1990s could be a contributing factor, but my opinion is that one is comparing apples to oranges when making too easy conclusions from the speeds alone.

Kenyan Track distance records

1000m

1500m

1 mile

2000m

2miles

3000m

5000m

10000m

Every record is over 15 years old

If there wasn't an Epo era these records would have been surpassed by new talent .The switch to road doesn't explain it away.

I'll say explicitly it's irrelevant because there are no race times.Many athletes have tried things, but have they worked?

whitewashed wrote:

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 ....

Yes I read the article. Given how "suspicion" was defined, and determined, I was unimpressed at the time, and even less impressed when the WADA IC published their report. No need to repost the contents of the link in its entirety, nor all the rest of the irrelevant links.Note that 20 London Marathon podium finishers over 12 years is 20 out of 72, meaning 52 out of 72 podium finishers were not found suspicious.

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.

rjm33 wrote:

Did you read the article?

rekkedrunner needs some help:

...

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

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rekrunner wrote:

Note that 20 London Marathon podium finishers over 12 years is 20 out of 72, meaning 52 out of 72 podium finishers were not found suspicious.

This would only be true, if you assume that

a) all values are known and

b) an increase in off-score from e.g. 82 to 99 is not suspicious.

rekrunner wrote:

I'll say explicitly it's irrelevant because there are no race times.

Many athletes have tried things, but have they worked?

whitewashed wrote:

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 ....

It is relevant because people were taking nandrolone with EPO in an effort to pass the EPO test (through using a lower dosage) which was first introduced at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. In some cases people were messing up and testing positive for nandrolone itself. Look at the sheer number of elite distance runners who have tested positive for nandrolone since 2000.

To my knowledge, 12.8 g/dl was never written anywhere.http://www.paularadcliffe.com/statement-september-2015/indicates an "increase of 2.8 in Hb ". Subtracting that from the "leaked" post-race value of 15.6 gives a pre-race value of 12.8. Note, her autobiography gives a lower pre-race value of 12.0. Both samples were collected according to the less stringent (and error prone) pre-ABP standards of 2003.

Aragon wrote:

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.

That's not at all correct. I said:- The EPO they found has not been linked to Jama Aden.- Spanish newspapers (see for example your "el confidencial" link) report they did not find EPO in Aden's room.- Spanish newspapers (see for example your "el confidencial" link) report the police found Aden with "non-doping" products.- Key witnesses David Torrence and Hamza Driouch both told us that Aden offered them "vitamin" shots, and they actually DID NOT KNOW what was in the shots.- I'm not sure I ever said minerals.

rjm33 wrote:

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.

...

Too bad.

we were making such progress.

You have totally backslid into making unscientific junk statements with no facts in evidence.

Oh well.

Yes "leaps of faith". Even if you think it is natural, you are still assuming -- at least you admit it.This is primarily a thread about EPO for the men. Indeed, historically steroids for women have proven very effective, but this gives us no insight into EPO effectiveness for the men.What I find wrong with your examples, in a thread about male performance and EPO:- The non-African male 5000m record holder was convicted of steroids, not EPO.- The non-African female 5000m record holder (this thread is about the men) was not convicted of doping, and we don't know if she took EPO or steroids or a cocktail of many things.No way to use these examples to show anything about EPO or "blood doping".- The fastest non-African marathon from 1998, is just one minute faster than Carlos Lopes from 1985. One minute for the whole non-African global population (especially when "doping was undetectable, when doping was common") from 1985 to present is not a strong case for EPO effectiveness.- Paula, Shobukhova, Jeptoo? (This thread is about the men). We know Paula's "suspicious values" (the ones we know about) came well after her world records. That actually supports an opposite theory that blood doping slowed her down. From the leaked database, we saw Shobukhova's suspicious values were orders of magnitude higher than Paula's. We know Shobukhova and Jeptoo took EPO, yet they were still both some 3 minutes slower. Does that sound like EPO was a successful strategy? If it wasn't the world record solution for Jeptoo and Shobukhova, what is the basis for thinking EPO (or blood transfusions) helped Paula (without assuming the conclusion), particularly given her relatively low "altitude threshold" suspicious values? (Note it's a leap of faith to think she had even higher values before that we just don't know about).- Men's marathon. Really -- that's the best you've got? Kimetto wasn't ABP tested, and 2:03 is a weak time because Bekele was injured? Yikes. The fastest "potentially EPO connected" marathon time is Erupe at 2:05:03.

No. 72-20 = 52 even without these assumptions.Did you read the article?

casual obsever wrote:

rekrunner wrote:

Note that 20 London Marathon podium finishers over 12 years is 20 out of 72, meaning 52 out of 72 podium finishers were not found suspicious.

This would only be true, if you assume that

a) all values are known and

b) an increase in off-score from e.g. 82 to 99 is not suspicious.

This is still not relevant in a discussion about performance, until you link it to faster race times. Maybe Nandrolone+EPO is a powerful combination. Then we should be able to see it in race times.Just the same, Nandrolone itself is an anabolic steroid derived from testosterone.

whitewashed wrote:

It is relevant because people were taking nandrolone with EPO in an effort to pass the EPO test (through using a lower dosage) which was first introduced at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. In some cases people were messing up and testing positive for nandrolone itself. Look at the sheer number of elite distance runners who have tested positive for nandrolone since 2000.

rekrunner wrote:

To my knowledge, 12.8 g/dl was never written anywhere... Subtracting that from the "leaked" post-race value of 15.6 gives a pre-race value of 12.8. Note, her autobiography gives a lower pre-race value of 12.0. Both samples were collected according to the less stringent (and error prone) pre-ABP standards of 2003.

Rekrunner, thanks for the clarification. That certainly clarifies the origin of the Hb value. In the first place it raised truly a red flag that I didn't encounter this figure after going through the IAAF response and through some material by Ross Tucker. Regardless of what conclusions to make of this figure, apologies for rjm33 for implying in any way that he was getting the figure from nowhere.

rekrunner wrote:

No. 72-20 = 52 even without these assumptions.

Did you read the article?

casual obsever wrote:

This would only be true, if you assume that

a) all values are known and

b) an increase in off-score from e.g. 82 to 99 is not suspicious.

That was in a response to a response to ... to this article:

"The leaked database contains more than 12,000 blood tests, from 5,000 athletes including many household names."

a) Nowhere in that article I saw a comment that all values of all London marathon podium finishers were included in that leaked database - how can you know that they all were?

b) Apparently they used the IAAF's suspicion scale. Thus, everything below 100 would not have raised an eyebrow. However, I admit that the article is not exactly clear what the border of suspicion was.

As for your other comments: this thread is about "Doesn't Russian Doping Scandal Prove Canova is Right about EPO?". Canova has explicitly included the women in his arguments, so I don't see why you want to take them out now.

If you insist that only those distance records can be considered dirty, where the runner was caught doping directly thereafter, then literally no records were dirty, and all of the changes in different doping eras are coincidental. That's what you are saying, right?

But every year that passes where the old records from the roid and the EPO and pre-ABP eras, African or non-African, remain untouched, makes them more suspicious, and the argument of lacking proof and all of that being coincidental looks increasingly ludicrous. That is a simple question of statistics.

whitewashed wrote:

It is relevant because people were taking nandrolone with EPO in an effort to pass the EPO test (through using a lower dosage) which was first introduced at the Sydney Olympic Games in 2000. In some cases people were messing up and testing positive for nandrolone itself. Look at the sheer number of elite distance runners who have tested positive for nandrolone since 2000.

The key problem when trying to generalise the research to elite athletes is this. The patients with end stage renal disease tend to be naturally heavily androgen depleted, so the therapy is simply substituting their own androgens and not elevating the level unnaturally high. It is far from certain that athletes with their androgen levels in the normal range gain the same advantage from the rEPO + nandrolone cocktail.

And your allegation about "sheer number of elite distance runners who have tested positive for nandrolone since 2000" being high isn't that impressive either. From the Wikipedia list, I counted only some 10 endurance runners/walkers tested positive since 2000 of whom only Ali Saïdi-Sief, Andrea Longo and Claudia Ștef were even somewhat familiar names.

Cheers to you guys fighting the good fight. And I mean both sides of the argument: if there wasn't opposing viewpoints, there wouldn't be the exchange of knowledge to put the facts out there. And that's what's great about all the arguments I've had, is the everyone brought their best facts and analysis to the table.

It was a November resolution to give up internet forums/social media, but the NBIGP updates brought me here. Haven't read much of this thread, but just wanted to say to everybody to keep pressing, keep pressing. And "everybody" includes everybody, the rekrunners and rjm's and aragons and everyone else.

rekrunner wrote:

We know Paula's "suspicious values" (the ones we know about) came well after her world records. That actually supports an opposite theory that blood doping slowed her down.

Again, only if you assume that her values during her WR's were lower. Quite a leap of faith, in my humble opinion, with zero evidence. Paula has decided to keep those values secret... despite repeatedly announcing to be transparent before all of that. Pleading the 5th, so to speak, but nothing to see her, right?