'We Can Now Estimate the Effect of Blood Doping'

physics defiant wrote:

No, you don't get to vary your argument rules at will. Try again without just repeating what you already said.

I am not changing the rules.

If you want to show that EPO causes radically faster times, a pre-requisite is that radically faster times happened, and the burden is yours to show the relation.

I claimed that for most of the world, the non-Africans, this pre-requisite of radically faster times did not happen in the EPO-era. This is true regardless of doping regime. I have met this burden.

As you can see, for the 5000m it took two decades for non-Africans to advance 8.6 seconds, while East Africans advanced by 15 seconds in 6 years, and 20 seconds in one decade. This after both groups experienced the same "radically faster" 20 second improvements pre-EPO era.

We just looked at the 5000m, but the 1500m and the marathon give two different stories for non-Africans:

While the 5000m shows steady, but slow, growth until 2010,

the 1500m for non-Africans essentially maxed out in 1985-86, with athletes like Coe, and Cram.

Despite even larger number of elite performers, non-Africans could not replicate the depth of quality after that era.

In the marathon, 2000 is the year where non-Africans stopped getting faster, until recently with 2:06 performances from Moen, Rupp, and a few Japanese runners.

You may argue that they non-Africans could have doped to the same times as East Africans, but the fact is, they did not achieve the same times, and were consistently 2-3% slower across all events.

You may argue that is because non-Africans doped less, or not at all, and I would say: fair enough, maybe, maybe not, need more data.

You keep repeating the same stuff. We get that you don't get it.

I hope you are taking allergy drugs that may or may not also work on Africans with allergies.

You are like a dog with a bone too. Why don't you bombard rekrunner with questions about who meant what with "widespread"?

Or better yet, ask Gleaves and Leigh-Smith.

You should see the data of personal drops in time in the WW era.... forget about fastest times and look at personal ability.

Because YOU want to appeal to authority and put so much emphasis on single paragraphs in peer-reviewed papers, please do remember the Gleaves paper when you think whom to quote the next time about prevalence of blood doping in the 1970s.

Your previous comment referring to WADA was essentially the same as what I had said. What is different is not the statement, that included WADA's inclusion of the term "potentially performance enhancing", but your interpretation of it, to mean that a prohibited drug may not be performance enhancing at all. And that is your consistent approach to doping in elites - they don't gain from doping. For the reasons I gave above, that is an incorrect inference from the use of the term as it is employed by WADA.

The only area in which I could possibly agree with anything you have said is that studies of doping offer only limited information, and the reason for that is because elite athletes and doped athletes - who may be the same - don't offer themselves up as subjects for study.

What I don't agree with is your drawing firmer conclusions than are valid from the data i.e. that highly-trained elites won't gain an advantage from doping. It is because the data derived from the studies is limited that WADA and other anti-doping experts turn to wider evidence, from doctors, pharmacologists and others involved in the sport, to determine whether a given drug is likely to enhance performance. The approach is more like a court case, where the evidence will include anything that is considered relevant. Very few court cases will be based on a single item of evidence - like an academic study - to discharge an onus of proof.

But by maintaining that the studies are really the only evidence that you consider relevant (along with your historical data), you set up the case against the dopers to fail. And then you effectively use it to prove the obverse argument, that doping for top elites doesn't help them. Both arguments are false.

The most telling argument against your position is the sheer prevalence of doping amongst elites that has occurred over many years. If only a few athletes doped we might infer that doping was not seen by most as effective (excluding the other argument that they were ethically against it), but when thousands have done it over generations of athletes and still do it - and with professional guidance - the best inference we can make is they find it works for them. What we don't have is an exact measure but only estimates for how much it benefits them.

Aragon wrote:

Because YOU want to appeal to authority and put so much emphasis on single paragraphs in peer-reviewed papers, please do remember the Gleaves paper when you think whom to quote the next time about prevalence of blood doping in the 1970s.

I did what? Source?

And no, you are not my boss.

physics defiant wrote:

You should see the data of personal drops in time in the WW era.... forget about fastest times and look at personal ability.

Of course. It was fun though proving rekrunner wrong again using rekrunner's own method.

But as you have seen, now looking at the top 5 times is useless according to rek because now we don't know which of those times were doped. Instead we are now supposed to either look at the top 8, not top 5, or 13:02 as a cut-off, for whatever reason. He doesn't even try to appear serious anymore.

casual obsever wrote:

Aragon wrote:

Because YOU want to appeal to authority and put so much emphasis on single paragraphs in peer-reviewed papers, please do remember the Gleaves paper when you think whom to quote the next time about prevalence of blood doping in the 1970s.

I did what? Source?

And no, you are not my boss.

If your case about prevalence of blood doping in a given time period (or performance boost) is based on an opinion by someone (Leigh-Smith), that is appealing to authority. In this context it is dishonest if you know that someone (Gleaves) with more similar or more speciality in the arena (a historian focused on the history of blood doping) has a contrary opinion and you just neglect the guy altogether and prefer the "right opinion".

Check out these two threads, where the Gleaves's opinion and at least one clear error (Anquetil didn't blood dope) were brought into your attention. It is funny how you write in the link below having no dog in the fight whether Gleaves or Leigh-Smith is right, but somehow the historian ended up in the memory hole (lol):

While Leigh-Smith "widespread after 1968"-view is based on Eichner (who is far more reserved in his paper), one can only speculate how much Leigh-Smith's written views are coloured by the erroneus belief that a French cyclist was blood doping in the early-1960s.

Aragon wrote:

If your case about prevalence of blood doping in a given time period (or performance boost) is based on an opinion by someone (Leigh-Smith), that is appealing to authority.

Nope. That prevalence is based on my own observations and opinion, and when rekrunner falsely accused me of just assuming this, I provided an independent reference.

Dishonest? You crack me up .

Fact is, I wrote in your link pretty much the same as I wrote here:

Both Leigh-Smith and Gleaves were expressing their informed opinions, and might also have used "widespread" differently.

I don't see any contradiction there.

But how come you didn't mention Ekblom-Åstrand this time? Still don't like it?

You don't necessarily see a contradiction, whereas I do see one, because regardless of some (possible) idiomatic use of the word "widespread"...

The first alleged use of blood boosting in sport was in the 1960s, when a French four times winner of the Tour de France (1961–1964) was named as one of the first cyclists to use the technique. Widespread use among endurance athletes (especially running, cycling, and cross country skiing) started after the 1968 Olympic Games

... isn't the same as...

... in the doping world where rumours spread faster than practice, the relatively few cases that have surfaced indicate that it is unlikely blood transfusions for athletes had become widespread prior to the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

You have backed up your claim about widespread blood doping in the 1970s (even in the 1960s) with the first paragraph from Leigh-Smith. If the two authors have the same assessment about the issue, you should be able to use Gleaves instead of Leigh-Smith, but it seems ridiculous to claim that blood doping was widespread possibly in the 1960s and certainly in the 1970s because Gleaves wrote that "it is unlikely blood transfusions for athletes had become widespread prior to the 1984 Los Angeles Games".

And I do like Ekblom-Åstrand work because they solved some mysteries of the oxygen uptake system and how Hb, total Hb, blood volume etc. were connected to performance and paved the way for other researchers to carry out their research in the same arena, even when one eminent US runner of the 1970s told me a year or two ago that he saw "no reason why their blood infusion work was carried out in the first place, it had no scientific purpose".

I also understand why most scientists didn't find their early work conclusive or even dismissed the findings from the beginning and seriously saw the controlled double-blind papers with more subjects to be scientifically more reliable on the issue of whether blood doping increased performance. It is easily forgotten that there were exactly three subjects in the 1972 cohort in which Vo2Max boost was seen, whereas some skeptical papers had up to twenty subjects.

physics defiant wrote:

You should see the data of personal drops in time in the WW era.... forget about fastest times and look at personal ability.

You don't apply this standard when you say "those guys became radically faster when EPO came out".

The standard you apply is relative change to the era before.

When I applied the same standard, I got a laundry list of criticisms explaining how "relative to 1990" is the wrong metric.

If it is wrong for non-Africans, it is also wrong for Africans. As you said, we must look at "personal ability", and we must look at "the data of personal drops".

Unfortunately, we don't have controlled observations of the data of the personal drops of World Record athletes like Geb, El G, Komen, Bekele, Kipchoge, etc.

We don't even have the pre-requisite data that they took EPO.

casual obsever wrote:

physics defiant wrote:

You should see the data of personal drops in time in the WW era.... forget about fastest times and look at personal ability.

Of course. It was fun though proving rekrunner wrong again using rekrunner's own method.

But as you have seen, now looking at the top 5 times is useless according to rek because now we don't know which of those times were doped. Instead we are now supposed to either look at the top 8, not top 5, or 13:02 as a cut-off, for whatever reason. He doesn't even try to appear serious anymore.

It may be fun, but it is not serious.

You did not prove anything. Any attempt to suggest a link between widespread blood doping and performance requires you to establish both.

You are missing the blood doping data.

It is not a question of "now we are supposed to look at". Both my method, and these numbers, come from the January 2018 thread where:

- 1990 cutoff: 13:02.08

- Quantity 5 Continents: 8

- Quality 5 Continents (Top 5): 12:56.09 (0.77%)

You can see I already based any opinions or conclusions after calculating an 8 second improvement of non-Africans. This was for two reasons:

1) Quantity of 8 was significantly lower then 91 East Africans or 104 Africans (East + North).

2) Quality of 0.77% was significantly lower than the 2.6% of East Africans and 1.5% of North Africans.

Don't forget that non-Africans vastly outnumber East Africans (4-5.6%) (1990 and present) and North Africans (2.9-3.1%)

With respect to your showing of a "radically faster" times from non-Africans pre-EPO, we see three significant flaws:

1) there are some doubts as to how "widespread" blood doping was. It appears the best examples "physics defiant" could come up with were Italians who did not produce the best times of their era.

2) the 17 second jump from 13:22 to 13:05 is of significantly lesser quality than a 20 second jump from 13:02 to 12:41.96.

3) East Africans displayed similar decade for decade improvements in the '70s and '80s, without blood transfusions, undermining any suggestion or implication that non-Africans improved as a result of widespread blood doping.

If I might interject in relation to the paragraph you quote of Gleaves, as follows:-

"in the doping world where rumours spread faster than practice, the relatively few cases that have surfaced indicate that it is unlikely blood transfusions for athletes had become widespread prior to the 1984 Los Angeles Games"

Are you (or Gleaves) taking it as persuasive that

a) "rumours" - or their relative absence - are evidence of the extent of blood doping,

b) that the number of cases that have actually surfaced are evidence of the same,

c) that this changed at the 1984 Olympics because of a discernible change in the previous two indicators?

No -- adding the word "potential", and adding two other factors "dangerous to health" and "spirit of the sport" changes the essence.

This isn't about what you think my interpretations are. You want to conclude, from the fact that WADA bans it, and that so many athletes take it, that blood doping must be a significant factor in the fastest elite times. For the reasons you gave, this is not a strong basis to draw any conclusions.

You appeal to physicians, pharmacologists, and scientists, but they are not saying blood doping has pushed elite times beyond the reach of the most talented clean athletes. In fact, most scientists who have researched this agree with me, and not you, when they say it would be incorrect to draw any conclusions on elite athlete performance.

I don't maintain that studies are really the only evidence. I also used public data such as historical performances, and doping statistics by country, from official sources like WADA's website.

The best inference from your telling argument is that faith in doping to achieve what clean training cannot is widespread. You think it is only a question of positive magnitude and we are quibbling about degree of benefit, but the question is still open as to whether the net physical benefit is positive, zero, or negative, for the elite athletes in question, when they are in their top shape.

Armstronglivs, we have to face two different situations :

a) The list of prohibited substances / practices from WADA is based on the "idea" that who wants to use them wants to try to enhance his performances with some ecternal help, and for that reason this is against "the ethic of the sport".

b) The effectivness of blood manipulation as agent for enhancing the performances.

About the point one, I fully agree with you and with WADA. There is a list, athletes HAVE to know the list, there is a rule, and everybody who doesn't follow the rule MUST be sanctioned.

We can discuss the level of sanctions. For example, NEVER (or very rarely) in the antidoping rules we can find the word "dosage", and without that word, the scientificity of all the action against doping doesn't exist. In several cases, the petrcentage of some illegal substance is so small that can't, absolutely, help the athlete to enhance his performance.

This means that, if the athlete is not totally idiot, the illegal substance comes from some mistake not depending on the will of the individual (for example, contamination by food, at the moment accepted in many cases from USADA, or assumption of normal medicines for normal sicknesses that have inside small percentage of illegal substance for the antidoping rules). However, also in these cases (that are the most part of cases regarding kenyan athletes of third level banned for steroids in very little percentage, that, of course, not being protected by lawyers such as American, MUST be guilty for WADA and for letsrun posters….), the period of ban is the same of the ban of some athlete using scientific doping with top doctor supporting him.

But, apart the necessity to have more deep investigation before taking the final sanction, IN THIS CASE ATHLETES MUST BE BANNED, IF WE SEE THEY ACT AGAINST THE SPIRIT OF THE SPORT.

This is, for example, the case of Meldonium. WADA never had any experimentation about Meldonium. Only. during the first edition of European Games in Baku, they discovered almost 500 athletes, of different sports, using this drug, WHOSE EFFECT NOBODY OF WADA KNEW.

For that reason, BEFORE TRYING EVERY SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH, in spite of the explanation directly received from the doctor who created the drug, WADA DECIDED TO PUT MELDONIUM IN THE LIST OF PROHIBITED SUBSTANCES from the 1° Jan 2016, following a very simple reasoning : IF SO MANY ATHLETES OF DIFFERENT DISCIPLINES TAKE THE DRUG, IS BECAUSE THEY WANT TO TRY TO ENHANCE THEIR PERFORMANCES, SO WE PUT MELDONIUM IN THE LIST BECAUSE SHOWS THAT MANY ATHLETES ARE AGAINST THE ETHIC OF THE PORT.

In this case, I agree with the sanctions, ALSO IF MELDONIUM IS USELESS IN THE MOST PART OF THE DISCIPLINES PLAYED BY THE ATHLETES (or somebody can tell me that there is some drug that can benefit at the same time a Marathon runner, a hammer thrower, the captain of the Volley team, Tennis players, wrestlers, and at the end specialists of double-trap where the shooters must stay completely motionless ?).

This is a typical example of athletes taking doping following their "belief", and not some scientific reason.

But we are not speaking about the general effects of doping. I think nobody can deny that, without steroids, is not possible to reach the same level of muscle strength, with training only, and the NUMBERS in athletics (no WR in all the events of strength after 1988) clearly show that reality.

Instead, we are speaking, SPECIFICALLY, aboy blood doping, and many coaches of top athletes agree with me that, if we have continuity in the training in altitude with high volume and high intensity, in the case of athletes "respoders" (so, not for everybody), the physiological modifications inducted with training can't be increased using EPO or looking at the auto-transfusion, because already at the max possible limit, reached through another road.

Why another road ? Because we can see in many WR holder using only clean training that, for example, Hct and Hb are not very high, so the direct connection between these values and the level of the performances doesn't exist. In many athletes training with me, that authorized me to go inside their OOC tests, for example, I could see levels of Hct absolutely not connected with their real shape, with levels without fluctuations, and with the higher values when they were out of shape.

This is something researchers never consider, and is something very easy : they have already the results of OOC tests, and of test in competition. With a very simple work, create for every top athlete a profile of "shape" for every season, and connect the values with the current shape of the athletes. If you do this, everybody can discover how Hb and Hct are not directly connected with the level of athletic performances, that depends on several other factors, too.

rekrunner wrote:

physics defiant wrote:

You should see the data of personal drops in time in the WW era.... forget about fastest times and look at personal ability.

You don't apply this standard when you say "those guys became radically faster when EPO came out".

The standard you apply is relative change to the era before.

When I applied the same standard, I got a laundry list of criticisms explaining how "relative to 1990" is the wrong metric.

If it is wrong for non-Africans, it is also wrong for Africans. As you said, we must look at "personal ability", and we must look at "the data of personal drops".

Unfortunately, we don't have controlled observations of the data of the personal drops of World Record athletes like Geb, El G, Komen, Bekele, Kipchoge, etc.

We don't even have the pre-requisite data that they took EPO.

How convenient.

From another thread:

He was a 14:00 guy at Pomona, then becomes a 13:03 guy, and gets 4th at the WC 10,000 - right behind Geb, Moses Tanui and Richard Chelimo. The one where he was there on heading into the last lap before Geb dusted everyone? Right.

Yeah, the guy who had 1 - count 'em 1 track all-american certificate in D2 is suddenly the guy who is hanging with Geb and Moses Tanui on the last lap of the WC 10k.

Look, here's the 1989 D2 NCAA 5k results:

5,000-meter run - 1. Brian Radle (S.E. Missouri)-14.03; 2. Rodney Dehaven (South Dakota St)-14.05; 3. Rob Edson (Keene St)-14.14; 4. Doug Hanson (North Dakota St.)-14.14; 5. Scott Hatch (Keene St)-14.15; 6. Jesus Gutierrez (Cal St. Los Angeles)-14.16; 7. Stephane Franke (Cal Poly Ponoma)-14.18 8. Jimmy Hearld (S.E. Missouri)-14.20.

within 2 years this guy was able to make the WC 10k final in Tokyo (and finish 12th.)! He couldn't beat Scott Hatch from Keene St. and a couple years later he's on the last lap with Geb?

I don't know Dr. Gleaves nor have I ever corresponded with him, ergo I do not know how he has reached his conclusions.

But I agree with him that (particularly ex post-facto) rumours without corroborative evidence are generally unreliable even when I do believe blood doping having been somewhat more "widespread" by the early 1980s than he seems to think (when there were at least random cases in Finland, Soviet Union, Italy, USA, West Germany, and many blood doping researchers complained that blood dopers wanted them to help with the method, and by 1976 with certainty at least one olympic gold medal was in the hands of a blood doper).

Of course everyone understands that the known handful of blood doping cases are each one usually only a fraction of the cases in a given country/team/sports. But it is equally intellectually lazy to think that blood doping was prevalent after 1971-72 for the reason that "everyone knew it". Even if the Swedes were believed to be right in their research (consensus was against them), it showed only that bodies of sub-elite athletes could make use of the extra 6-7 % of extra red blood cells, increases considered to be possible to get with high altitude training.