Is Canova Right About EPO?

El Guerrouj samples were tested until 2013.

Dosen't the Olympic Australian Federation has his samples of 2000 for years?

That simply is not true.

☝️This will be like the 20th time in 5 yrs of participating in EPO/blood doping threads that I've had to correct some of guys on this:

A test for EPO was developed for the 2000 Olympics in Sydney. Several athletes tested positive but no bans were implemented & the identities have been kept quiet to this day:

google.com

Seven in Sydney were EPO positive

Open link

The first male runner to be banned for testing positive for EPO was Roberto Barbi. Barbi tested positive in the marathon competition pre-test after arriving in Edmonton for the 2001 World Championships:

Here's some history for you guys. The very first Moroccan to be banned for testing positive for EPO was Brahim Boulami who tested positive IC when he set the steeplechase WR:

It also doesn't work on people who eat cherries for breakfast every morning, which I pointed out when this whole epo and ped nonsense BS began.

That's not right.

Synthetic EPO was developed to delude more people and to make more money for big pharma.

Synthetic EPO does not help sick people at all. Not at all.

My dad in his later years two decades was going in every week to get a shot of EPO which cost him $1300 every time. Did it help him? NO, it did not.

I told him he'd be better off blended fruit and veggies in the blender and drinking that every day, which would improve his health and help him much more then the BS drugs from the quacks. But he didn't listen. He kept going to the quacks. He kept getting the worthless shots of synthetic EPO, and he died.

Meanwhile the quacks got to keep all their profits.

Im sorry about your dad.

EPO is a crucial medicine for those with chemotherapy induced anemia. There is virtually no other options.

Simple RCTs have shown for decades that synthetic EPO increases hemoglobin even in the most critically ill:

pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov

Efficacy of recombinant human erythropoietin in critically ill patients: a randomized controlled trial - PubMed

In critically ill patients, weekly administration of 40 000 units of rHuEPO reduces allogeneic RBC transfusion and increases hemoglobin. Further study is needed to determine whether this reduction in RBC transfusion results i...

Open link

He sees also that runners peaking show lower blood values, whereas if EPO was magic, they would see peak blood values at your fastest.

Wrong. That's never been proven. Thus you are stating a falsehood.

That's like saying cherries every morning for breakfast should be banned.

Well, okay. It's not that bad but it's bad.

Fine, 2000. We’re still talking about 1999.

His 1999 samples were not being tested in 2013. That’s not how it worked then.

You're posting so called "evidence" from the very same people who produce the EPO and profit from it's use. Therefore they are not credible.

It would be more accurate to say they are making up BS false studies, i.e. lying, solely to enrich themselves. They can't be trusted.

That they are your source shows that you have zero credible evidence.

From the 2000 Olympic 5000m, good candidates for the 7 EPO positive off tests are Ali Saidi-Sief and Mohammed Mourhit (DNS), both of whom were later banned. Who knows about Lahlafi? In the 1500m, there are good candidates in Ngeny, El G, Lagat (after all, he had the positive A test in 2003), and the Spaniards, Operation Puerto and rampant doping being known in the 1990s and 2000s, both in running and cycling.
G
KEN
Noah Kiprono Ngenyi
00:03:32.070
OR
S
MAR
Hicham El Guerrouj
00:03:32.320
B
KEN
Bernard Lagat
00:03:32.440
4
FRA
Mehdi Baala
00:03:34.140
5
CAN
Kevin Sullivan
00:03:35.500
6
ETH
Danial Zegeye
00:03:36.780
7
ESP
Andres Diaz
00:03:37.270
8
ESP
Juan Carlos Higuero
00:03:38.910
9
GBR
John Mayock
00:03:39.410
10
USA
Jason Pyrah
00:03:39.840
11
FRA
Driss Maazouzi
00:03:45.460
12
MAR
Youssef Baba
00:03:56.080
GBR
Anthony Whiteman

I would add to what I said above that even Canova's speculative reasoning on the science of blood vector doping is specious.

It amounts the claim that hematocrit levels have hard limits (no doubt true, for a number of reasons, and helps explain how some athletes died from faulty dosing in the early years of its use), and that therefore athletes with already very high levels-- due to genetics, having been born and having lived their whole lives at altitude, and having trained very effectively-- cannot benefit from EPO or other forms of blood vector doping.

But we know that hard endurance training puts downward pressure on hematocrit levels (through, e.g., mineral loss in sweat and foot strike hemolysis) for ALL runners, regardless of their natural levels. It takes no great feat of reasoning to conclude, therefore, that any technique that helps maintain or boost hematocrit levels is going to confer and advantage in endurance sport. The only question is the degree of the advantage (but even that would tend to increase with training intensity for ALL runners).

This is the same principle by which supplementation with synthetic thyroid hormones can be understood to benefit athletes with TSH and T3 and T4 levels in the normal range. Very hard endurance training and very low levels of body fat can lead to thyroid suppression, meaning that artificial supplementation theoretically could boost performance in healthy athletes, simply by warding off the negative effects of training-induced hypothyroidism.

That this long-time, top level professional coach appears not to be able to understand these basic facts should, again, be cause to question his integrity. Just like when Jerry Schumacher pretends not to know what nandrolone is or does, this does not pass the smell test. When people whom we know to be of at least normal intelligence appear this stupid, something is always up ethics-wise. They're simply hoping that they are furnishing reasons for people who ardently WANT to believe in their integrity as coaches to continuing doing so. As for the rest of us, we're just noise, and can go suck on their success.

It's amazing that with Canova we don't even have to get into the long and sordid story of Italian coaches, sport docs, and their improbably detailed knowledge of hematology (remember Dr. Rosa and his famous lab?) in order to raise ethical questions. And I mean, why no successors to all those world-beating Italian distance runners of the 80, 90s, and early 2000s? Demographics, maybe (it has a very low birth rate). Or could it be the loss of all that top level sport medicine when people like Canova de-camped for Kenya and elsewhere?

The Johnson brother's elevation of someone like Canova to the status he has enjoyed on this board is an unfortunate instance of naïve sycophancy for which they should feel a little ashamed. One of the things that keeps me coming back to this site is their genuine, youthful (in spite of their encroaching middle age) enthusiasm for all facets of the sport. But, for the sake of whatever journalistic integrity they pretend to, they really need to keep people like Renato Canova and Jerry Schumaker at arms length.

You’ve lost all respect on this thread/

El G goat BTW if he was doling he is still goat bc everyone after him doomed and he’s still untouchable.

That’s categorically false. Not everyone was doing it. Many athletes still had integrity (then and now) and chose not too. This is the dumbest argument that is continually brought up.

You obviously don’t know what you are writing about. You don’t even know what El G did in 2004. Clueless. 20 years later.

People like OED have been repeating lies over and over again for years on Letsrun. He should be banned.

People like me are the only ones who truly understand the sport. If I were a Nike shill/Kenyan apologist like you, I would try and get people banned too instead of trying to make valid arguments. You certainly don’t have truth on your side.

You can't understand the sport if you don't even know the sport. You've been saying there were zero EPO tests... well, turns out you were WRONG and your entire existence shattered.

The worst thing a troll can do is to bore the other poster.