Alex Hutchinson calls out CANOVA over study confirming EPO works on Kenyan runners

Renato, your math about the Kenyan group is not quite accurate, because those appear to be standard deviations, not ranges, but I see your point.

You are not fair to the researchers though when claiming that they never look at training. This of course depends on their specialty; Stephen Seiler or Veronique Billat or Scott Trappe are some examples in this context, while Yannis Pitsiladis is an EPO and testo expert. It just so happens that we discuss an EPO article here, not a training article.

Kablooie wrote:

Renovate Kenya wrote:

You should maybe start telling Kenyans they don't need to dope. Save your vitriol for them.

Curious that Kenyans hold so much respect for Canova and his training, and yet as evidenced by the slew of positives that have been coming out of that country, seem to hold little faith in his 'public' hypothesis on what is being discussed.

+1

When I say "not strong opinion", it's the words themselves, like "estimated", and "may", which weaken it. "Estimate" is a synonym for "guess", and "may" also implies "might not", without contradiction if it does not occur. How is it "interesting" for anyone to say "I guess something might happen"?

What's up with this? wrote:

rekrunner wrote:

You prop up this "opinion" attempting to give it weight coming from a "qualified researcher" because it appears in a meta-analysis.

It's not a very strong opinion, including a bunch of wiggle words, "it can be estimated that elite athletes may improve performance by up to 3%".

What puzzles me more, is not the opinion itself, but that you keep it calling it "interesting", and linking the paper. What about this opinion of a qualified researcher, given the shown lack of basis for it, makes it interesting?

So why should your opinion of less the 1% have any more weight than this? You're not even a qualified researcher with your "strong opinion." So what gives rekrunner? Only your opinion counts now?

Where do I start with this? It really is a static or straw man argument. Firstly, previously you were using 5% and calling it medium, here you use 4% which is fine, although for the Olympics or World Championships they use up to 10% as a range for genuine qualification times. Why? Because so many of the women's records are drugged beyond realism. And we can say the same about the men, for 1500m nobody since the ABP has run under 3:28.41 that hasn't been tarnished by drugs, so this pushes the 4% out to 3:36.65 which is about the 2017 qualification times.

Event Men's Women's Field size

100 m 10.12 11.26 56

200 m 20.44 23.10 56

400 m 45.50 52.10 48

800 m 1:45.90 2:01.00 48

1500 m

(or mile) 3:36.00

3:53.40 4:07.50

4:26.70 45

5000 m 13:22.60 15:22.00 40

10,000 m 27:45.00 32:15.00 no size

qual. only

Marathon 2:19:00 2:45:00 no size

qual. only

3000 m steeplechase 8:32.00 9:42.00 45

100 m hurdles — 12.98 40

110 m hurdles 13.48 — 40

400 m hurdles 49.35 56.10 40

Personally, I don't believe the sub 12:50 or sub 26:30 times to be remotely realistic. Using Berega and his 12:43 as the ABP best (which I think is a sick joke) elite jumps out to 13:13 which was a rare pre epo time.

Anyhow the truth is doping has gone on for 50 years, if six athletes do 4 doped up performances p.a. that's nearly 1000 in 40 years. If we asked all the manufacturers of the various steroids, testosterone products, hgh, and epo (including that made in China) we would find an overwhelming majority of their sales went to athletes for performance enhancement and it has been that way for many,many decades. Look at the drugs busts in the last 18 months alone? According to Dick Pound, who would know, they're only catching 1% so multiply by 100 to get the actual scale of the potential cheating. Personally I hope Rudisha is clean, but I find it funny that Bett is running 1:43, from the same country and was world class, but was dirty however we shouldn't be suspicious of a sub1:41. It is just the 100m repeating itself; Bolt is clean but Blake, Gatlin, Gay, Greene, Johnson, Montgomery, and Powell are all dirty. Oh Please.

This is not direct to you, but you well know that there is some poster who continues to insist that the advantage is more than 4% and that the clean record are 4% slower than the official record.

This was written several times by Mindweak and accepted by other posters.

My aim is to show how ridiculous is that thesis.

And frankly I don't understand what you wrote. The time limits for Olympics of WCh are nothing to do with doping, but with a statistic situation in order to have a number of participants well defined, that can allow to create a clear timetable.

You mix something statistic (connected with the organization of the Championships) with something connected with doping, but this is not the reason of the standards for big Championships.

About what you think (record doped or not), this is not significative and important, because, as you say, you THINK.

The difference between the most part of posters here is that they THINK.

Instead, somebody working for 50 years in athletics, who had the opportunity to coach athletes belonging to a lot of different Countries, and at every level, doesn't think, but KNOWS.

And I know that there is doping among the top athletes, there is doping about the medium level, there is doping about the amateurs, there is doping about young students, BUT THERE ARE CLEAN WR, AND IS POSSIBLE RUNNING AT THE TOP WITHOUT TAKING ANYTHING.

I repeat again, and again and again : THE FACT MANY ATHLETES USE DOPING DOESN'T MEAN IT'S NOT POSSIBLE TO RUN ALSO FASTER IN CLEAN WAY.

If taking doping you have some improvement on one side, but some loss on another side, the final effect on the performance is the same, and this is exactly what happens at maximal level.

But the problem is that is not possible to speak about percentages of improvement OF THE PERFORMANCES if you don't connect the study with the training. You can speak about what you can see : increase of VO2 max, increase of some blood parameter, BUT NOT INCREASE OF THE PERFORMANCE.

We are not discuss an EPO article, we discuss the effects of EPO on the performances, and it's not possible to discuss this without involving training.

About some of the scientists you named, I had the opportunity to work with Veronique Billat when I was the Technical Scientific Director of the Italian Federation. She and her group made a research with 400m runners using, at the beginning, speeds on the treadmill absolutely useless (slower than 6' per km) increasing the speed using too high steps, and the final result was not connected with the reality. I had to explain them the CONNECTION between training, qualities and biomechanical attitude of the athletes, and HOW to modify their protocol in order to have a final result in some percentage REALLY connected with the activity of the athletes.

Till when researchers are not able to use new protocols, and to study the REAL training, all their results are without any connection with the practice, and are absolutely useless for determining any real chance of the athletes looking at their athletic performances.

I have yet to see some research by Peter Snell. Is not that he doesn't try because well knows that lab tests and researches with some subject without precise definition can't say ANYTHING about the real athletics activity ?

If you ignored this obvious truth before this study, you'll ignore it after.

ROIDnato CaCERA wrote:

If you ignored this obvious truth before this study, you'll ignore it after.

Go Eliud!Go Kenya!

rekrunner wrote:

When I say "not strong opinion", it's the words themselves, like "estimated", and "may", which weaken it.

"Estimate" is a synonym for "guess", and "may" also implies "might not", without contradiction if it does not occur.

How is it "interesting" for anyone to say "I guess something might happen"?

"Estimated" is also a synonym for "approximated," "predicted" & "calculated." So knockoff the wordplay.

You're getting really annoying with your self-centered pretentious & confrontational attitude. You remind me of one of the guys in the Grandmasters running club I belong to who constantly wordplays and trys to outwit everyone...he's real anal to say the least.

So here's one for you: I think the 3% in Malm et al is conservative (I would have thought you and Aragon would have embraced such a conservative figure. Lol) . I'm seeing 4% + jumps in time over a year or two with some prolific dopers such as Ramzi, Mourhit, Boulami & Co. And there's some similar jumps with the Spanish Armada dopers. And don't forgot that super-responder Lombard with a ~10% improvement in 21 months on rocket fuel.

I couldn't care less whether an estimate is conservative or not but only whether it is based on anything or not and Malm's own literature barely back up his claims about elite athletes of which one source specifically warns not necessarily to extrapolate the findings.

The sentence where he uses the meaningless almost 3 percent change in running/XC skiing speed to estimate that a TDF rider would be over two hours faster with rHuEpo means that he hadn't thought the issue through when neglecting air resistance, draft effect etc of cycling and thinking that a percent is a percent.

Correct, in theory, but in practice, a researcher would never make sheer guesses in a peer-reviewed article. That would be pointless, and even if a professor would be that dumb (unlikely though possible), the referees would insist on removing that statement.

Rather, it is common to write "may" when something clearly appears to be like that, without being proven.

As is also common, references were provided to back that up.

In conclusion: while the statement does remain an estimate (which includes 2% as a valid option) based on actual data, it shows what some smart and experienced neutral observers think (namely the authors and the referees).

I don't need to play with the words -- there are no synonyms which could help add strength to such a non-committal opinion. For some reason you think I'm objecting to "3%", but I'm asking how it is "interesting", when hedged so heavily.

When you like to serial-quote everywhere the Lance Armstrong lecture from a few years ago ("During that lecture Lance says clearly - I can't emphasize enough the word 'clearly' - that EPO increases performance by 10 %, yes he says '10%', '10 %', '10%', that is one and a zero!"), here is a different opinion about efficacy of blood doping from a person whose credibity is considered to be undamaged from the testimony he gave some three years ago:

Two or three seconds on a 1,500 m race isn't 10 %, not 5 % and not even the "conservative" 3 % and I'll hope that you remember this "opinion" when you link to your other "opinions" in the future, fair enough?

The summarized literature of Malm et al is dubious (or at least limited), but because I don't want to be accused in the future of withholding any material that is in contrary to my views, it is indeed possible that Christer Malm bases his views (among the literature) on estimates of insiders because he has been at least at some point of time a student of Dr. Björn Ekblom who has researched both blood reinfusion from the late 1960's and rHuEPO in the late 1980's and early 1990's.

The Swedes haven't published any time trial research and it is interesting that Ekblom, Åstrand and the other insiders have expressed very little and occasionally contradictory statements about the efficacy of blood doping and there appears to have been very little attempts from their part to magnify its "real" efficacy on performance.

You may want to differentiate between blood doping with blood and blood doping with EPO. Just maybe. They are not exactly the same thing.

Ramzi was dropping more than just a few seconds.

Renato is being silly with his observation that the Marathon is done at sub maximal exertion levels.

Yep, but if you raise the max and still only go at say 85% then that's better than the previous 85%.

you apologists are hilarious wrote:

You may want to differentiate between blood doping with blood and blood doping with EPO. Just maybe. They are not exactly the same thing.

The consensus view is that they are essentially the same thing for the following reasons:

1) Body can't discriminate against elevated hematocrit level achieved through blood doping vs. rHuEPO (I can give you academic literature to read if you like, there is even one paper that addressed this issue directly from 1991)

2) Use of blood from donors and high-glycerol freezing makes it possible to infuse as many blood bags as possible and to elevate Hct as high as possible (Some cyclists had up to ten blood bags stored at Fuentes's clinic and Swedish researchers elevated Hc leves to +60 % via reinfusion with this technique in the mid-1980's).

Aragon wrote:

you apologists are hilarious wrote:

You may want to differentiate between blood doping with blood and blood doping with EPO. Just maybe. They are not exactly the same thing.

The consensus view is that they are essentially the same thing for the following reasons:

1) Body can't discriminate against elevated hematocrit level achieved through blood doping vs. rHuEPO (I can give you academic literature to read if you like, there is even one paper that addressed this issue directly from 1991)

2) Use of blood from donors and high-glycerol freezing makes it possible to infuse as many blood bags as possible and to elevate Hct as high as possible (Some cyclists had up to ten blood bags stored at Fuentes's clinic and Swedish researchers elevated Hc leves to +60 % via reinfusion with this technique in the mid-1980's).

EPO is fresh new blood. Blood doping is old half worn out blood.

New blood works better or the body wouldn't bother replacing it at such a rate.

Interestingly Michael Ashenden refers to all types of blood doping under his vague umbrella term, because his definition of blood doping is the following only a paragraph earlier: "Essentially, it is increasing the number of oxygen-carrying red cells in the circulation. You can do that either by transfusing them directly into the bloodstream or you can stimulate the bone marrow to produce more red blood cells than it normally would. By having more red blood cells it increases the amount of oxygen that can be transferred to exercising muscles and so it helps performance."

His 1 % figure sounds very low figure even to me when one knows that one can elevate hematocrit levels very high even under the current ABP-program. But to quote the words of one brilliant LR-poster not too long time ago, we shouldn't complain and whine about opinions, but instead write emails and make phone calls to them. "It's a professional opinion by qualified researchers in the field. If you don't like their opinion why don't contact the authors and criticize them..."