Hrshrs wrote:
Armstronglivs, I note you say it is a less significant factor, but how do you judge what breathing level is consistent with doping vs that which is not. Did you base that simply on how someone looked on tv? Or did you measure breathing rate and compare against someone else in the race or even same person in a different race?
You ask an interesting question. I never isolate a single factor and say that by itself it conclusively establishes doping by - unless it is a failed drug test. However I see many elite performances as being suspect for a variety of reasons taken together.
An assessment of a possibly doped performance requires some knowledge of the athlete in question, their previous levels of performance, their comparability to their peers and fellow competitors - including their relative place in the history of the sport - the level of the performance being considered, and the practice of doping generally and what it can enable in a given sport.
The more particular issue of breathing requires an understanding of how is this affected by aerobic conditioning and then by doping. Because no elite athlete has volunteered to dope to assist analysis of this issue we have to surmise the effect that doping has on breathing. The answer cannot be exact and will vary for each athlete.
Superior aerobic fitness enables greater oxygen transfer per breath; this means an athlete can prolong aerobic exertion for longer before there is oxygen debt - and observable fatigue. Doping is known to add to this capacity for increased exertion before fatigue. Hence an athlete can run faster and harder for longer before incurring oxygen debt. Studies of cyclists have shown that the time to fatigue can be increased by over 50% in a little over a few weeks of using EPO. That is an enormous increase in aerobic capacity.
What that means is that we will see in a highly talented athlete an extremely high level of performance before the onset of oxygen debt and fatigue. Indeed they may show no shortage of breath until the end of a race, when a finishing sprint may push them into anaerobic effort. But then they may recover as quickly as the sprinter who has just run a 100m. If you combine that apparent effortlessness with outlier performance (for that athlete at least) then that is consistent with doping. Often, their fellow competitors know this. If it looks too easy - too good to be true - it probably is.
However a more direct answer to your question of at what point in a race do we see in an athlete's breathing an indication of doping I would suggest the answer is that we don't see any change at any time during the race - and that is the point. There is no sign of the kind of fatigue - that includes breathlessness - that we see in most athletes, either during the race or afterwards. The reason for that is they have not expended their aerobic capacity even if their muscles have used up most of their glycogen - in a similar way that a weightlifter at full exertion doesn't run out of breath.
So when I see a runner achieve 4.44 over 2k - that no one has since got near - and shown no fatigue in achieving this - including running out of breath during the race or after - I would bet the house, the car and the dog he is on something.