US Doping problem in sprints

Ethiopia's performance in the 1980s was even much worse than Kenya

Wut??

You should acknowledge that Kenya boycott the 1976 and 1980 Olympic Games, and that Ethiopia agreed to boycott the 1976, 1984 and 1988 Olympic Games, was in the midst of a horrific famine that led to over one million deaths, and was also under a government that killed nearly a million more via political oppression and violence.

There are plenty of doping issues in East Africa today but one could hardly argue that the above were ideal conditions for successful athletes in that era.

Yes, backpedaling. First you claimed there was a gap, then, when proven wrong, you claimed that the non-Africans weren't better.

Now you go back to claiming there is a gap, despite the above....

Again: Aren't winners better? Aren't world record holders better?

If your super Africans were that much better than Coe, Decker, Baumann, Yunxia, Schumann, Radcliffe, Shobukhova, Ingebrigtsen, Wightman, Kerr, Hocker, and Gressier, that there is gap, how come the above set world records, won Worlds, won Olympics, and or were dominated for a few years in major marathons? You are just plain stubborn now, with no argument of any kind.

You also have no argument in claiming that Hocker and Gressier only became Olympic champs because of supershoes. What a stupid point of yours.

And I am not interested in your drug smokescreen. As if Coe, Decker, Baumann, Yunxia, Schumann, Radcliffe, Shobukhova, Ingebrigtsen, Wightman, Kerr, Hocker, and Gressier doped more than your holy Africans! What's your evidence for that? On both sides, there are proven dopers and strongly suspected dopers.

And before you argue that those are "only" a dozen runners, the list goes on and on, as you should know.

I don’t believe that anyone is questioning the talent of Ingebrigtsen, Coe, Crammy, Kerr, Wightman and so on. All among the best the world has ever seen. However, you are more likely to find a person of that level of talent in just a handful of tribes in east Africa than you are anywhere else on the planet.

One would think so, yes indeed. But Rekrunner just claimed (just because he can't admit that he was wrong again):

"There is still a significant gap between Coe, Decker, Baumann, Yunxia, Schumann, Radcliffe, Shobukhova, Ingebrigtsen, Wightman, Kerr, Hocker, and Gressier compared to the best runners of East African descent"

Again, I said "with rare exceptions ... the best runners are of East African descent". No one has proved that to be wrong.

"better" is not "best". "better" isn't even necessarily "good". "better" is relative, while "best" is absolute.

Your list of runners are not the best runners in their events, with the exceptions of Yunxia and Ingebrigtsen in 3000m. For example, in the 800m, Coe is 8th best, behind 4 East African descended athletes, and in 1500m Coe is 50th best. And so on.

I did not claim "Hocker and Gressier only became Olympic champs because of supershoes". It is normal I have no argument for an argument I do not make.

I did not claim that your list of athletes doped more than Africans.

I did claim that doping wouldn't be powerful enough to bridge the gap to the best East Africans, with the possible exception of steroids for women in shorter events.

C.R.E.A.M- WuTang Clan

You started all these smokescreens about "better", "supershoes", and "what has doping potentially contributed to the distance performances of the much larger populations of non-East Africans". And then all the backpedaling, again.

And now you are trying to save face with redefining "best" to mean the current world record holders, out of nowhere, and "significant gap" equals less than 1 second.

You are the one pedaling all over the place, apparently because you don't know what "best" means. In any case "numerous" is not a contradiction of "rare".

I have consistently maintained all along that "with rare exceptions ... the best runners are of East African descent" and "Drugs are not powerful enough to bridge that gap, with the potential exception for steroids for women in shorter events."

This is consistent with the results of a thread I started way back in Jan. 2018, where I quantified the gaps for 6 men's events and 5 women's events. For the men, the "best" East Africans, relative to 1990 performances, generally outnumbered non-Africans from 5-continents combined, by a factor of 10 (uncorrected for population size), and the quality gap of the best 5 runners ranged from about 1% to 2.5%, depending on the length of the distance. For the women, the picture is different, as the East African women arrived late to the track and the roads, and steroids have a significant supranatural effect. But there is still a significant quality gap among the best, from 1500m to the marathon.

Scroll back one page and you can see that "wang junxia" was proud to have found one of the exceptions I said existed -- only making my point -- while claiming "better drugs are definitely good enough to bridge your racist so-called gap". This wasn't historically true in 2018 (excepting women and steroids). Since that thread in 2018, in the era of supershoes, the gap has shrunk in some events, like 1500m, and widened in others, like the marathon. This also reflects a shift where many of the best East Africans have skipped the track and moved directly to the roads. In that timeframe, only Ingebrigtsen has completely bridged the gap in the 3000m and the 2-mile events. The obvious changes here are the supershoes, and a new form of bi-carb. I see no evidence of the existence of "wang junxia"'s "better drugs" helping non-Africans bridge the gap.

Much of these "arguments" follow the same predictable pattern -- arguing against a strawman point I didn't make, then arguing with me about what my point was in the first place.

QU is my family name, yunxia is my first name. Please educate yourself you little cockroach.

Even though I was 3000m World Champion and ran 8:12 twice within 24 hours back in 1993, I was never the best in the 3000m, not even the best in my country, my comrade WANG Junxia was.

But I was the greatest 1500m runner, establishing the World Record at 3:50.46 that lasted for 22 years.

All those achievements running without drugs, wavelight or supershoes. Just hard training and some natural caterpillar fungus.

Sure. There's no conclusive evidence that the Chinese women doped, just strong suspicions about two meets held in China.

Since then, the East African women have caught and passed Qu Yunxia, and they are close to passing Wang Junxia.

Clearly you are the worst poster of them all. Coe worse than Hoppel and Tual etc. over 800, and worse than Hoey and Laalou and Girma and Choge and McSweyn and so on over 1500???

And so on. And so on.

Rare exceptions?

Consecutive global distance finals without EA win:

1500: 5 (5 runners)

Steeple: 5 (2 runners)

5000: 4 (2 runners)

10000: 1

It’s clearly become a lot rarer for East Africans to win (or even make the podium) than not win, this isn’t the 1990s.

It's like you are trying to be obtuse. In the current era, you have to consider the supershoe effects when performing such intergenerational comparisons.

In the 800m, East Africans Kipketer and Rudisha were better than Coe. In the 1500m, Lagat was better than Coe. Even Farah was better than Coe.

Is that true for the women? It's also not the 2000s, or the 2010s. We are in the supershoe era now. The environment has changed, but the talent has not.

People seem to object to the word "rare" perhaps thinking it downplays the recent non-African performances too much, rather than acknowledging that the statements were not meant to be universal or absolute. This misses the point.

The statements were meant as an overall generalization of talent of the respective populations in the various events. When I reviewed nearly three decades of the fastest performances between 1990 and 2018, relative to 1990 performances, East Africans outnumbered both non-Africans and North Africans by about a factor of 10, each, with a talent gap ranging from 1% to 2.5%. I considered rare exceptions to be runners like El G, Paula Radcliffe before the supershoe era, and Jakob. How many of your global finalist winners threatened world records? How many do you consider to be better than Lagat, or Kemboi, or Bekele?

The statements were meant to set the context for the next statement about the relatively limited power of drugs. Whether you prefer "numerous" over "rare", drugs are still not powerful enough for these recent global finalist winners to bridge the talent gap to the best East African runners in their respective events.

Indeed, arguably the recent spikes in non-African performances in the supershoe era, including your global final champions, doesn't appear attributable to drugs, but in significant part, to the shoes, unless you consider bi-carb gels as a drug.

You also can't win if you don't play. East African winners have been dwindling on the track as far back as 2010, as East Africans started skipping the track and going to the roads. Mo Farah may have more global 5000m and 10000m medals, but I don't consider him better than his predecessors Bekele and Geb. But I do consider Mo better than non-East Africans perhaps with a few exceptions like Jakob, and Fisher and Young.

Global finals are highly variable, for a number of reasons, and they are relative to the current competition and the conditions and the race on that day, and the path of attrition it took to get there. Centrowitz won gold with a time of 3:50, but I wouldn't consider him the best in the 1500m, but rather that he beat more talented runners on that day in a tactical race.

In the supershoe era, the gap has narrowed somewhat in the shorter distances on the track, but has widened in the longer distances on the roads.