Armstronglivs wrote:
Aragon wrote:
Actually I make no such a claim because according to Iljukov's theory, technically the boost could be zero for high altitude male residents.
As it is well known by now, all the blood doping research is blood doped subjects vs. non-doped ones and not vs. altitude trained, therefore it isn't clear that at least some athletes could not get most or all of the blood doping boost with legal means.
If that were so I would have expected times in the 70's and 80's, when altitude-training was well-established, to be at least equal to the 90's and 2000's when blood-doping and EPO were a commonplace. But we don't see that. Times continued to improve exponentially long after altitude-training became a necessary feature in the sport. Something else was adding to performance. That suggests that even altitude-trained athletes were finding ways to make significant gains. I doubt that this was simply attributable to training.
We also see that since testing improved for blood-doping and EPO in the mid-2000's that performances on the track have generally fallen away compared to the era when such doping was subject to less effective control. This relative decline is also observable amongst altitude-trained athletes. They aren't running as fast as they were in the 90's. There are some exceptions - many of them women - and they tend to be from countries with poor anti-doping control, and on the roads, with the marathon in particular. I might suggest that some of these changes might be explained by micro-dosing becoming the norm, to beat the biopassport, as was indicated by the investigation into Russian athletes.
Blah blah blah blah blah. Does thermoregulation even exist. Or did I just make it up?