What would Hicham El Guerrouj have run if he used EPO / other drugs?

First of all, you have the best handle on this forum. These two guys were who I followed as an 11 year old in 1980. then…..their names blend together with the “O!”

If I had to bet my life, I would wager on the side of doping, not just his world record, but most world class efforts…..in any sport. However, I am not having to bet my life…..therefore, personally, I would never say for sure anybody is guilty of something I am not 100% sure of. Even if I did know something about someone, I would probably not contribute.

seeing that doping has been around forever, and always will be, I wonder about Coe, Ovett etc. because they were heros, I would hope not….but who knows??

By the way, which of the two did you prefer? I was more of a Coe guy, but then I had a college teammate who trained with Ovett at the PHX TC in Brighton.

1500/mile consecutive #1 rankings. Pre-EPO era: Jim Ryun -2, John Walker -3, Steve Ovett-2, Sebastian Coe -1, Steve Cram -2. EPO era (no testing): Nouredinne Morceli -7, Hicham El Guerrouj -7. Since an effective EPO test was implemented in the 2008 season, no runner has been #1 more than 3 consecutive years.

Probably like a 7:15 3000m

you're kidding right? your obviously young and naive.

Exactly what he did is my guess, but I don't understand how that all works but my fan middle age man guess is whoever won had the best combo of talent, training, health, drugs

Claiming that 'everybody dopes' is to my mind worse than claiming a specific individual doped (a guy who set WRs during an EPO free-for-all era, that can't be beat a quarter of a century later with massive improvements in tech).

I listed the reasons why El G likely doped. If you can list a similar number of reasons that Coe and Ovett doped, or Nick Willis doped, or Herb Elliott doped, I may be persuaded that they doped.

He stole it. It was used years before he even found Letsrun.

He'd have run the exact same times he ran in the 90s. He used any and every drug he could get his hands on.

If you're claiming El G was head and shoulders above everyone else due to doping, are you also saying he had access to a drug no one else in the world had then or has since?

At his "peak" (read into that whatever you will), with wavelight driving and ensuring the quality of his human pacers and then the guidance for him when they dropped out, he would have run in the 3.24.9-3.25.1 range for 1500m.

He had 5 sub 3.27's - 1 of them splitting under 2.45.0 (Rieti in 02 and this doesn't even account for the other time he split under 2.45.0 in 2001 when he exploded and ran 3.29) and the other 4 were split over 2.46.0 so he never was able to hit that optimum 1200m time for him which would have been in the mid to low 2.45's. And remember this was the era where pacemakers were lunatics and wouldn't just run the first laps at crazy speeds (anywhere between high 52's and low 54's on any given day) they would run that first 400 extremely inefficiently often getting out as fast in the first 150m as quick as a modern day 800m would.

The drug part of this is irrelevant because he was almost certainly on something, but the real interesting hypothetical is how much quicker he runs through massively improved race execution and the increase in efficiency he would have got from that.

absolutely Coe is a get along guy catering to the big boys pompus club in the English private school tradition.

on other words he bathes with the pigs on a daily basis, hence the stink.

that said, Coe is the best in comparison to the dispicable / disfunctional leaders of federations of the various countries.

at the end pf the day, they are pigs at the trough, and Coe is there as a somewhat different animal, substantially cleaner than the average pig.

1/ Assumes out of thin air that EVERYBODY DOPES.

2/ Ignores the fact that the prevelent doping in that era by Africans had a massive demotivating effect on non-African runners.

El G was the best out of North Africa, Iberia, and the Kenyan Rift Valley. And even then, he triumphed at the Olympics once in three attempts.

If EPO testing hadn't been introduced, the ABP introduced, and testing started in Kenya, you are kidding yourself if you think the ethnic makeup of the Paris final would remotely resemble 2000 or 2004.

As I've often explained, but still seems to go over the heads of some of the dullards here, the idea that 'El G (or whoever) beat guys who were also doping, therefore it doesn't matter' is completely false.

This is because, 'all the top guys are doping, dude' can mean two different things.

It can mean that Ngeny, Lagat, Cacho, etc etc were all doping as well as El G.

Or it can mean that literally every pro runner dopes, which is hugely unlikely.

If 50% of guys in the natural 3:30 - 3:34 range are doping full-throttle with EPO, then those 50% are absolutely going to demolish the non-dopers, including the 'natural' 3:34 guys over the 3:30 runners, as we saw with Katir.

And then f tards here will claim - 'but the guys who came 2nd, 3rd, 4th, and 5th were all doping, so his main rivals were all doping, so he's the greatest ever'...

You are the biggest ftard here. You said no one could have run under 3:29 clean. That's until your boys did it.

But assume a handful of those 'top guys' were/are doping, how come El G's WR has stood for so long? You claim he'd be 3:30 clean, surely in that time another 'natural' 3:30 guy must've been able run better than El G's 3:26 if doped? Of course that's not me saying everyone's doping, but you'd be foolish to assume none of them have with the amount getting busted nowadays.

3.27 - 3.28

Why? Of the "natural" 3:30 guys (if they exist), he could easily be the best responder to doping. And after 2005/8/9?, people had to cut back on EPO. But sure, he could hypothetically also be the fastest if no one else doped (the classical Armstrong fan claim).

I look at it from the other way - if El G could run 3:26:00 clean, then others should be able to a) run 3:28 clean and thus b) run 3:24 doped - but no one did, ever, not even 3:26:30. Ultimately, for El G to be clean, he had to be some 4+ seconds faster than the most talented doper's natural ceiling - hard to believe, very hard.

And sure, go ahead and apply the same criterion to any other WR holder.

You're thinking like a doper.

Why do you think you don't have enough red blood cells to maximise your oxygen delivery?