Covett, you are blinded by your loyalty to Coe and Ovett wrote:
Coevett wrote:
Yes they did. There was never a 800m race between 1978 and 1983 where a fit and healthy Coe or Ovett would not have been clear favourites, and they only lost championships in that period either to doped opponents (Beyer 78), or because they were ill or absent through injury (ex. Coe in 82 Euros).
Juantorena was not a factor after surgery at end of 77, and it wasn't until Cruz in 84 that the torch was passed.
If it were your neck on the guillotine Coevett, you certainly would not bet Coe was clean in the 1970s and 1980s. Beyer dirty and Coe clean? No. If you were to tell me both Beyer and Coe were dirty and I would agree.
Well neither failed tests, so we have to rely on known circumstantial evidence.
Evidence against Beyer :
1/Competed under the most notorious state sponsored doping program in history, run by a brutal Marxist dictatorship that spent half its GDP on coming first in medal tables to 'prove' the ideological superiority of Marxism.
2/His name was indeed found in a Stasi list of doped athletes.
3/His coach was closely associated with another coach subsequently jailed in unified germany for doping children in the DDR.
4/His coach himself was convicted and fined in unified Germany of feeding his child athletes dangerous and illegal drugs.
5/Came out of nowhere to beat the two best 800m runners in the world at Prague and ran one of the fastest times in history at the time. Ran patchily for the rest of his career, to say the least, aside from 1981. The story that he 'injured his foot playing football in 78, and was never the same' comes from his criminal coach. There is no way of confirming this story. It's just as likely he suffered complications from all the doping, or simply the doping regime was 'spot on' before Prague.
Evidence against Coe :
1/ He was fast. Freaking fast. And white. Kenyans are genetically superior to white hobby joggers and yet only 2 Kenyans in nearly 40 years have ran faster.
2/ He was ill for a long period with a blood virus problem. That virus can be transmitted through blood transfusions, although if Coe was blood doping, it would involve only is own blood being taken out and put back in again.
Cirumstantial evidence that Beyer wasn't doping :
1/ He's a maths/physics teacher now. (???)
Circumstantial evidence that Coe wasn't doping :
1/ His progression was entirely normal, especially for his build (i.e. much slighter built teen than Ovett or Cram).
2/ He ran times as close to his pbs at an 'advanced age' AFTER much better testing for doping (and blood doping made illegal) as you would expect.
3/ He is now president of the IAAF. It would take the psychology of a psychopath to take on that role if there was real dirt waiting to be discovered on him. A simpleton would be aware that Russia has probably spent millions on trying to uncover evidence of doping and they clearly haven't found anything. Not to mention all the journalists over the last 40 years.
4/ UK did not have a doping culture in middle-distance back then. It's clear that the athletes after Coe, Ovett, Cram were not doping despite nearly the whole of the rest of the world drowing in EPO. It's hard to believe that in the 1980s the Brits were doping themselves silly, and yet then in the 90s none of the Brits were doping when EPO was even legal and undetectable for a time.
In short, these guys on this forum (and there is a lot of you) who insist that British athletes from a largely amateur era were 'just as dirty' as athletes competing under Marxist doping regimes or Third World Kenyans or Moroccans who live in ultra-corrupt societies with little or no testing and EPO sold over the counter in high street pharmacies.....well you have some serious psychological issues.