Jake Wightman says he and Neil Gourley were finishing "middle of the field in races” as teens. Now both are WC finalists

Coevett wrote:

Well I guess it's one way of confirming your belief that everybody dopes.

Nearly every athlete elite at 25 will have improved more from 18 - 25 than Jakob from age 18 - 20, so that means every athlete is doped, including athletes who were around before doping was really a thing such as Bannister, Elliott, Snell etc.

You've also accused Jakob and the likes of Max Burgin of doping because of fast times achieved young. But when an athlete reaches those times at 25 after years of training, then that's doped too. Even though Herb Elliot would obviously have reached those kind of times at 25 on cinder tracks. Or you think that Herb Elliot running 3:36 on cinders at 20 after one or two years of training is an example of completely normal development and he wouldn't have improved much more even with Snell to race against?

It doesn't follow that because many athletes between 18-25 will have improved greater than Jakob from 18-20 that they must therefore have doped. I am not holding anyone to Jakob as the clean standard, but as a point of comparison for younger athletes. The question I ask is what enables an athlete like Wightman at age 26 to close within a second over an athlete like Jakob when he was a much much slower athlete at a similar age? That doesn't presume that Jakob is the measure for everyone else or that he is necessarily clean. In a sport afflicted with doping for many years I look at extremes - either of absolute performance or rate of improvement - and ask how they are achieved if they appear to be anomalous or an outlier. To go from being an unexceptional athlete in one's teens - "middle of the pack" - to being amongst a handful of athletes on the planet falls into that category. So how is it done? (Despite your comparison with Elliott, he never went from average to the best in the world; as soon as he focused on the sport in his late teens his rise was meteoric, speaking of an exceptional talent.)

I think Wightman's improvement from his teens is an outlier performance. I also think some teen performances themselves - Burgin and Jakob - raise questions about how they are achieved when they are so very far ahead of their peers.

My questions aren't proof; they are doubts about any extremes I observe in sports that experience a high level of doping. This thread effectively poses the question by its observation of how far Wightman and others have come. We wouldn't be discussing the issue otherwise.

The 3:29 in Monaco is more like a 3:32 and should be discarded. We know the track produces super fast times because it's got spring loaded underlay.

The comparison with Walker doesn't really work for me. He didn't start seriously running until he was 19 and yet within 2 seasons he was a national 800m champion, the distance that was then his specialty. His speed and power was conspicuous from the earliest. He barely ran the 1500/mile in that period - much like Snell early in his career. He was still relatively a novice when he ran 1.44.9 for the 800m at the Commonwealth Games in 1974, and 3.32x behind Bayi over the 1500m. He was only 22. He likely peaked the following year with his 3.49.4 mile. His meteoric rise if anything resembles that of Elliott - and Snell.

The figure of 1 in 3 doping comes from surveys conducted in 2 World Championships - some estimates put it at 4 in 10. Indeed Michael Phelps has recently said that this is his estimate of likely doping at the next Tokyo Olympiad. We are all speculating here, because doping is a largely invisible practice in which most offenders escape detection. But every expert assessment I have seen indicates that it is far greater than that detected through enforcement.

I am not claiming Wightman is doping; I am asking how do athletes like him make the enormous improvements he has off a fairly humble talent base - he is no Elliott, Snell or Walker - and further ask whether it reasonably raises the question of ped's. Of course there are many others of whom the same questions could be asked.

Not quite. That survey, published in 2018, is from 2011, thus after the start of the ABP controls, not at the height of the EPO era. It also does not say 1 in 5 at the World Arab games, but 57% at the Pan-Arab Games 2011 and 44% at the IAAF Worlds 2011.

And no, this does not prove that everybody dopes. It proves that 43.6% dope, likely more. Not that that is only about the 12 months leading to Worlds, so it does not capture those who stopped doping in 2009 when the ABP was fully instated.

The article states directly (quoting the Results part of the abstract in full):

WCA: Word Championships in Athletics 2011; PAG: Pan-Arab Games 2011

See Sports Medicine 48, 211–219 (2018)

Not sure why Armstronglivs keeps saying 1 in 3 either. Its 43.6%, so roughly 4 in 9 or 1 in 2.

TBH, that only 50% of athletes at the pan Arab games admitted to eating peas and carrots only shows that many Arab runners lie even when anonymous. The guy who took the survey probably found himself walking back to the hotel at sub 4 minute mile pace simply because of all the EPO he inhaled just listening to these guy's answers.

Point is, the survey is irrelevant. If you think that 53% of Arabs admitting cheating proves that there is a greater than 50% chance of either Jake Wightman or Nick Willis being a doper then I don't know what to say.

Incognitoed wrote:

TBH, that only 50% of athletes at the pan Arab games admitted to eating peas and carrots only shows that many Arab runners lie even when anonymous. The guy who took the survey probably found himself walking back to the hotel at sub 4 minute mile pace simply because of all the EPO he inhaled just listening to these guy's answers.

Point is, the survey is irrelevant. If you think that 53% of Arabs admitting cheating proves that there is a greater than 50% chance of either Jake Wightman or Nick Willis being a doper then I don't know what to say.

The danger of when you rely on only one source of information. Regardless of the dubious nature of your analysis of the championship surveys other expert assessments put elite doping at high levels. WADA has suggested between 15%-39% of elite athletes. Other experts in the antidoping sphere maintain a consistently similar assessment, that doping at the top is widespread.

runderun wrote:

He's exaggerating a little, but he was finishing at the mid- to-lower end in Scottish championships which I guess is the equivalent of a state final.

Scotland is a country, you can't make it 'equivalent to an American state' just because of its population