Olympic Marathon Silver Medalist Eunice Kirwa Busted for EPO Doping

Aragon wrote:

... and your argument against my reasoning was what...?

I honestly failed to see it, and your modus operandi seems to be that when you have nothing else to say, you succcumb to this endless series of soporific "lol's" or questioning other people's motives or background.

I haven't asked about your credentials, because seriously I couldn't care less about it, I already now that your knowledge about exercise physiology is next to none. I argue about issues not about the people who made allegations.

BS...you also argue about people and you know it. You've been disparaging & demeaning with people on several occasions who either a) offer an opinion that 02-vector can provide a significant performance boost with elites and b) people who diagree with your platform that doping provides a much lower boost in performance.

And so your knowledge about exercise physio is so superior because you read up a little on the subject using fancy physiology terms and get all pedantic? You don't have background in the field (nor are you even a coach)...but you're trying to impress everyone on these forums as if you're a "PhD" in the field of anti-doping or something.

I reference and quote from a senior member of the IAAF anti-doping expert panel that provides expert testimony at the CAS hearings as well as reviews data from ABP flags that are suspicious for doping (I don't pretend to know more than him). Schumacher and the other experts on the panel should be applauded for weeding out the CHEATS in the sport that are ruining it for the clean athletes! Show some respect for the panel that has a hard enough job as it is trying to stay on top of the anti-doping countermeasures being utilized by dopers.

Bottom line for today's head butting with you: I reference Schumacher's paper published in the "The Lancet Haematology" stating that "blood doping can increase endurance performance by 6–8%, which is a substantial amount in elite sports, where the winning margin is usually less than 1% for most competitions" -- and you go into full criticism & discredit mode. Really Aragon...now please tell me how many papers you've had published?

Renato Canova wrote:

I know about WR clean. This is not an opinion, but is a FACT for me (maybe unbeliable for somebody else), who was / are the coach of some WR holder.

800m : 1'40"91 - 6% (6"05) = 1'34"86

3000m steeple : 7'53"63 - 6% (28"43) = 7'25"20

Marathon : 2:01:39 - 6% ( 7:18) = 1:54:21

Now, some of you can suppose that ALL these WR are doped, so you can ADD to the current official WR the percentage of 6% for deciding which are the first CLEAN times :

800m : 1'40"91 + 6% (6"05) = 1'46"96

3000m steeple : 7'53"63 + 6% (28"43) = 8'22"06

Marathon : 2:01:39 + 6% (7:18) = 2:08:57

.

So here's the problem, a scientist may indeed find a dramatic gain of say one minute over 10,000m but the starting point is likely not going to be a time when they are in peak racing condition because you are unlikely to find a clean athlete willing to cheat in "broad daylight." A good example would be a 27:37 10,000m man who in early season shape may log in a time of 28:10 but with a transfusion or copious amounts of epo and lots of sharpening, may after time x log in with a new best of 27:12. So the elite athlete really has only gained 25 secs but the scientist following standard methodology found 58 secs. But this comes back to the legality issues of testing the effectiveness on current elite athletes.

I haven't brought up my background hence have I zero reasons to answer any question relating to it (which is only vaguely a question from your part if you answered it).

Some guys could've reported your posts for personal attacks, but I do tolerate personal attacks and random bitching and whining particularly for tactical reasons, because it is just more rope for some people who have lost arguments to figuratively hang themselves.

I have zero reasons to discuss also about my views on the importance of the work of Parisotto, Scott, Ashenden, Schumacher and others, whose knowledge on directly ABP-related material I have very little reason to question. While I have my doubts about the anti-doping system, I have rarely questioned their sincerity.

But where do you again see a flaw in my reasoning?

ABP case:

- High stakes: Very high risk either in destroying career of a clean athlete or one's own career in the industry, the opinions must be reliable.

- Body of data available on doped and clean elites with clean preference values, normal fluctuations etc.

Opinion about how PEDs boost performance with elites:

- No risk of nothing, no consequenses of being wrong, as an independent detail this has almost zero influence on a specific case. Whether one is wrong is also borderline impossible to prove.

- Very little or no direct scientific data available, never any thought process revealed how and where the estimates came from, the estimates usually have words such as "may improve" and "up to".

There is a lot of the pot calling the kettle black here. If that is the standard for posting, this whole discussion would cease to exist. Virtually everyone here is not an expert on either of the topics of anti-doping, or elite performances, and have not written papers on either topic. And, hypocritically, dismissing the opinions of experts is essential for pots like you. With respect to personal experience and direct knowledge of how to produce elite performances, Renato is the ONLY credentialed poster here (the only one left), and look how routinely and easily he is dismissed by those lacking the credentials you now demand. Over the history of letsrun, many talented coaches have posted here -- Renato, Antonio, Hadd, JK, Tinman, Jack Daniels. I cannot recall any one of them (or any credentialed elite coach) ever supporting a notion that EPO could further help the performance of the 13:xx, 27:xx and 2:05:xx runner, by a magnitude of 3%. Several of them have supported altitude training. (Regarding the connection of VO2max to performance, Jack Daniels found VO2max so problematic at predicting performance, he had to engage Jimmy Gilbert to mathematically develop the VDOT formula to remove oxygen from the equation.) During the IAAF scandal, the expertise of Saugy was instantly dismissed here by the same small band of unknowledgeable, unexpert posters. Tellingly, all the energy was spent on fabricating a checkered history and not one word was spent addressing the substance of the statement of the existence of confounding factors, which still stands today unchallenged. The ABP research findings of Schumacher and Ashenden and Parisotto were frequently downplayed, or ignored, by this same small band, when it supported arguments of false positives, preferring instead to cling to their initial prejudice. It's a sign of a lost argument, when you attack the person, or put another person on a pedestal, while not addressing the content of what was said. The substantive value in Schumacher saying something (as well as Aragon) is not WHO he is, or even his expertise, but how well the statements are supported by objective external facts, repeatable observations, and sound logic. But the real problem here is not Schumacher's words, or credentials, but in unexpert pots like you taking words provided in one context, applicable to other narrow contexts, and projecting them into a different context, real world elite performances -- something Schumacher did not do. On the contrary, anti-doping researchers often caution against taking their results and projecting them onto elite performances. When scientists couch their statements with words like "can improve", "our opinion is that it is highly likely", and "up to 1 minute", these are sweeping statements that require one example to make them true statements, rather than statements of general rules that can also be applied to elite athletes with no real evidence of blood doping. I wonder if Schumacher would agree with how his couched statements in a CAS hearing are being used here, to contradict an elite performance expert with direct experience.

This Is Getting Ridiculous wrote:

And so your knowledge about exercise physio is so superior because you read up a little on the subject using fancy physiology terms and get all pedantic? You don't have background in the field (nor are you even a coach)...

This Is Getting Ridiculous wrote:

I think it's ridiculous that you try to discredit the likes of Schumacher, a scientist with impeccable credentials, and other anti-doping experts that sit on the IAAF anti-doping panel that not only provide expert testimony in CAS hearings but review on a regular basis any passports that are flagged by the software! Look up the number of peer-reviewed papers that Schmaucher has had published in prestigious journals. Now please tell me how many papers you've had published?

+1

Actually, I got quite a few more than Schumacher (yes I am old), partly in the same journals. I stopped responding here when rekrunner tried to troll me last week for the 157th time with his unique interpretation about the meaning of abstracts - specifically in these journals.

While it was fun for a while to correct his nonsense, enough is enough.

Aragon on the other hand, while he likes to come in here swinging, has at least read quite a few papers, so there's a basis for a meaningful discussion.

Still, I am trying to stay away from these endless blood-doping-doesnt-work-and-Paula-is-clean discussions. Sooner or later they all turn into rekrunner vs. the rest, for Aragon normally doesn't stay long.

Here you touch on two points: 1) In your hypothetical example, we have no way of knowing whether this intrinsic 27:37 man that can improve to 27:12 with EPO exists. We could equally hypothetically come up with an intrinsic 27:15 man who could improve to 27:12, or the intrinsic 27:00 man, who got worse because of the unwanted side-effects of EPO. 2) I'm not so sure I would call that "a scientist following standard methodology". Even rookie scientists know the value of controlling the intervention under observation, both in eliminating uncontrolled factors when possible, and having control subjects. A proper study design would have eliminated this gain of 33 seconds, due to uncontrolled factors, or would have measured it with control subjects. The "legality" and "ethics" is a red herring. We learned Pitsiladas was able to test EPO performance on 20 Kenyan athletes of 7:50 3000m caliber, so it is possible to select much better candidates ethically. Unfortunately that study design allowed these 7:50 (77.5 VDOT) caliber runners to run 9:20 (63.6 VDOT) "clean"and 9:00 (66.3 VDOT), with "EPO".

Subway Surfers wrote:

So here's the problem, a scientist may indeed find a dramatic gain of say one minute over 10,000m but the starting point is likely not going to be a time when they are in peak racing condition because you are unlikely to find a clean athlete willing to cheat in "broad daylight." A good example would be a 27:37 10,000m man who in early season shape may log in a time of 28:10 but with a transfusion or copious amounts of epo and lots of sharpening, may after time x log in with a new best of 27:12. So the elite athlete really has only gained 25 secs but the scientist following standard methodology found 58 secs. But this comes back to the legality issues of testing the effectiveness on current elite athletes.

Where is Coevett btw? Did the Kenyan mafia catch up with him or something?

Well, this is a pretty big change from previous assertions. In any case, this does not seem like a very worthwhile thesis to test, but you go ahead and test it if you like. You are going to need a lot more than 6 athletes, divided into two groups, to have any rigor.

Unfortunately Canova, it is you who is losing your credibility with every new post.

The suggested 6% increase is in a particular individual’s performance. This would mean that if you believe Rudisha doped and got a 6% benefit, that he was only a 1:46.96 athlete clean. IN NO WAY DOES THAT PROVE OR EVEN SUGGEST THAT HE IS THE INTRINSIC WR-HOLDER.

You incorrectly make that assumption. It is easy to believe that there have been clean athletes throughout history who have bettered 1:46.96, including many if not all of those who you name.

The fact that there have been 1,476 athletes under 1:46.96 is NOT evidence that Rudisha’s 1:40.91 was clean.

Same logic applies to other believed-to-be-doped WR’s.

Oooh "troll". I merely pointed out your misleading inaccuracy, even if we go with what is just written in the Abstract. You said "the actual source for that concluded likely more than 43.6%". This was not a "conclusion" -- the authors specifically used the word "suggests", not to mention, refers to a "Sensitivity Analysis" which clearly gives another estimate. I think you agree that 50% is significantly larger than 43.6%, but somehow I am the one that was wrong for pointing out this grade school math mistake. And as you already know, it wasn't a simple "rounding error", but a misleading combined average of World Championship athletics, and an Arab only multi-sport event where Athletics was one of 28 events. We are always in threads about blood doping for distance runners, but somehow it is wrong to bring "scientifically proven" estimates of blood doping into the discussion, but seemingly not wrong to bring in a study that combines men with women, includes sprints, fields, and walking, includes all forms of doping, and merges high doping countries with low doping countries, (ignoring that 50% was the result of including 27 other non-athletics events) all to produce one global number, that may or may not represent Kenyan men and women in distance running taking EPO. You say you are correcting my nonsense, but you cannot do that with highly misleading misinformation.

casual obsever wrote:

I stopped responding here when rekrunner tried to troll me last week for the 157th time with his unique interpretation about the meaning of abstracts - specifically in these journals.

While it was fun for a while to correct his nonsense, enough is enough.

Aragon on the other hand, while he likes to come in here swinging, has at least read quite a few papers, so there's a basis for a meaningful discussion.

Still, I am trying to stay away from these endless blood-doping-doesnt-work-and-Paula-is-clean discussions. Sooner or later they all turn into rekrunner vs. the rest, for Aragon normally doesn't stay long.

i remember about 4 years ago,amal tuka went from a 1.47 athlete,to a 1.42,or thereabouts.the right combo of drugs can bring mammoth gains.to my knowledge tuka is still running,but is much slower.

+1

I trust Schumacher over some internet randos.

You are all wasting your time arguing over academic papers. If you want to see what EPO does you should have been watching the final of the French Open.

But it is "internet randos" telling you what Schumacher's statements mean for elite distance runners. You are just picking which "internet randos" you agree with. The main disagreement isn't with Schumacher statements, but which contexts his "can improve" and "up to a maximum" magnitude of estimates apply, and how well these statements can be projected onto real world elite runners. You have one REAL performance expert saying that 6% for WR level athletes from blood doping is not reality.

LoneStarXC wrote:

+1

I trust Schumacher over some internet randos.

LoneStarXC wrote:

+1

I trust Schumacher over some internet randos.

+1

I trust too as everybody should, still everybody should also have healthy skepticism on estimates and to evaluate how and in what context they originated.

Because there are diverging estimates even among experts (Ashenden, Malm, Eichner, Schumacher, not to mention Heuberger) and even among the same individual (is it minute c:a 3.5 % or 6-8 % with Schumacher?), it is tautology that someone must be wrong, and this pretty much proves that even the best estimates have serious limitations.

I am an "Internet rando" and my "estimates" are worth pretty much nothing, therefore I rarely make any and I do try to back up the few ones with the best available published evidence.

Nothing what I have written about how blood doping affects Vo2Max in this thread has had none estimate from my part and, but I can and occasionally have sourced the material with the literature for everyone to read for themselves.

What other "experts" are here? Oh...I guess you mean experts like Canova? I'm not dismissing any of his opinions on training issues -- so am I suppose to give him a "+1" or something on every one of his training posts? Will that make you feel better? You're certainly not an expert in anything (except trolling maybe. Lol), and I don't agree with most of what you post anyway. Like Coevett said on a post on page #3 -- maybe you spend 2 or 3 hrs a day making an argument that doping doesn't work. And now you get all contemptuous with me because I dismiss the opinions of Canova on doping issues (not training).

Huh? Say what? Take his paper that was published in the Lancet (2014) that I referenced:

Here's the abstract once again:

"Human performance in many endurance sports, such as running, cycling, or cross-country skiing, depends on the availability of oxygen to the working muscle, and thus on the ability of the blood to transport oxygen. Unscrupulous athletes have long sought methods to enhance the oxygen transport capacity of their bodies by increasing their blood volume through blood transfusions or increased production of red blood cells with erythropoietic stimulants; generally referred to as blood doping. 1 With the commercial introduction of recombinant human erythropoietin at the end of the 1980s, blood doping became available to many athletes. Blood doping can increase endurance performance by 6–8%, which is a substantial amount in elite sports, where the winning margin is usually less than 1% for most competitions. This type of blood manipulation has therefore had a substantial effect on performance in all endurance sports over the past decades."

Am I reading this right? He says "Blood doping can increase endurance performance by 6–8%, which is a substantial amount in elite sports." "Elite" means "elite"...right? He doesn't say amateur, or sub-elite, or lower-tier elite...right? Then he says "This type of blood manipulation has a therefore had a substantial effect on performance in all endurance sports."

So, what did I do wrong by quoting and referencing this abstract? ? Was I not suppose to quote from it and just keep this study bookmarked in my phone and not post it? Was I suppose to ad a caveat that stated "anti-doping researchers often caution against taking their results and projecting them onto elite performance?" You tell me from now on what studies to quote from and post since you seem to run the show on these doping threads here.

Again...would you prefer from now on that I don't post any ABP CAS hearings that mention any performance boost from 02-vector doping?

So, Aragon is an "elite performance expert" now? ? I made the comments to Aragon not Canova.

Nitrate wrote:

Where is Coevett btw? Did the Kenyan mafia catch up with him or something?

That's funny. ? What also is funny is Chad (aka/mindweak) posting under his new handle "I got banned."

Regarding "which experts", I listed 5 in my post that are routinely ignored, and/or selectively ignored, by several "pots" here. You are free to post what you want, but be prepared to explain why you think it matters to the point at hand. That's what we do in discussion forums. For example, as previously noted, regarding Schumacher's "paper", it is a commentary on the ABP. He did not measure or even define endurance performance, nor indicate where this estimate comes from, and what it means. There is no way of knowing if he meant 6-8% for elite distance runners, or even what 6-8% even means, because your sources don't say. Similarly, CAS statements about "up to 1 minute" (which implies a 3% *maximum*, seemingly contradicting 6-8% for 10000m) do not specify the basis. Are they based on studies of 33-minute 10K runners, and is the expectation the same magnitude for 27:xx runners? Without these clarifications, the statements are not wrong, but it is not clear how they are applicable to threads here in a running forum discussing benefit for elite performances. There is a scientific way to establish 6-8%, and it is not through CAS, and not through introductory statements lacking a reference, of a comment that did not measure performance. Both of these indirect opinions must have a more direct source as its basis. This is not Schumacher's failure, since he made these statements with a different purpose which does not require this level of clarification. This is your failure for posting papers you cannot explain, that may or may not be relevant to the fastest elite distance running performances.

This Is Getting Ridiculous wrote:

What other "experts" are here?

...

So, what did I do wrong by quoting and referencing this abstract? ? Was I not suppose to quote from it and just keep this study bookmarked in my phone and not post it? Was I suppose to ad a caveat that stated "anti-doping researchers often caution against taking their results and projecting them onto elite performance?" You tell me from now on what studies to quote from and post since you seem to run the show on these doping threads here.

...

Again...would you prefer from now on that I don't post any ABP CAS hearings that mention any performance boost from 02-vector doping?

There is also an earlier paper coauthored by Schumacher titled Detection of EPO doping and blood doping: the haematological module of the Athlete Biological Passport where it reads that "[f]or many years, one of the prime targets of manipulating athletes was therefore to improve the oxygen-carrying capacity of the blood as it offered gains in performance of 5–8%".

Here the actual reference for the (slightly different) estimate is the Ekblom-Goldbarg paper from 1972 which only states that 800 ml blood reinfusion increases Vo2max by 4.8 % and time-to-exhaustion by c:a 15 % vs. baseline.