TrackCoach wrote:
Jamaica definitely have superior talent; they don't need dope to run fast...no more so than Americans, Trinadads, Bahamians or Brazilians for example. Having good genes helps but that is never the complete picture in athletics. The small nation of Taiwan is excellent at table tennis because it is what they covet, plain and simple. With that said, the thing that has always concerned me by about Jamaica starting in 2008 is the swiftness, the variety of athletes and the manner is which they became so good. And, as soon as there was a reliable test for a particular endogenous steroid, and Jamaica was forced into testing, there was a precipitous decline in the men. Yet, the women continued to preform well. The OOC steroid dosing requirements for women are so small that that you have to have a non partisan and very aggressive AD program to catch these women. If it was just a matter of genes, having a large talent pool and superior coaching, etc., there would be no reason to expect a nation would go 1-2-3 in the 100m dash and the men are shut out. Almost universally, when a nation is good at a sport, both the men and women are good. I saw this same pattern with the East Germans women of the 70s and 80s and the Chinese women of the 90s, where it was just the females who where good. I am certain WADA has done a statistical analysis and has seen the pattern, but it is not about what you know, but what you can prove and Jamaica absolutely no record of catching high profile athletes.
The point made about the effect of doping on women versus men is well noted, but it is still very much circumstantial evidence and it ignores the fact that historically the women have always been consistently competitive, while the success of the men has always been cyclical. There have been 2-3 Jamaican women represented in the sprint finals ever since the 80s, and in or around the medals, regardless of how the testing protocols have changed, it’s no flash in the pan.
Bolt was generational, everyone saw him coming from a mile away. That he led a generation of other extremely fast Jamaican men naturally raises eyebrows, but let’s not forget that Powell was already competitive on the international stage for one complete Olympic cycle before the men began sweeping the sprints.
As for the men, while they have declined in the flat sprints, their current sprint hurdle depth is better than it has ever been and they have an elite long jumper as well, so we can see that the talent is still apparent in other speed-explosive events.