There are barriers to doping in the western world that do not exist in Kenya. You need to be a troll or just dumb to not understand the difference.
Free access for everyone with absolutely no consequences in Kenya is why they are completely dominant. It's a free for all with free for all access that guarantees success .
You cannot compare that to a few people willing to take the risks in other countries where you become a social pariah if caught and you have to try and access it without leaving a trace. You can't just pop down the pharmacy like in Kenya.
I mean how dumb are people, the whole genetics B's was always nonsense .
"Hi my name is Rekrunner. Despite people overwhelmingly disagreeing with my takes, it doesn't matter because I'm the smartest person so simply know better. Thanks. RR"
"Hi my name is Rekrunner. Despite people overwhelmingly disagreeing with my takes, it doesn't matter because I'm the smartest person so simply know better. Thanks. RR"
These things aren't decided by popular vote.
And they are never decided by your deliberately disingenuous takes on things. Africans cheat, incessantly. Anything goes. True pressure can stop a lot of this, as we saw when this pressure was applied to the men at the WCs.
And they are never decided by your deliberately disingenuous takes on things. Africans cheat, incessantly. Anything goes. True pressure can stop a lot of this, as we saw when this pressure was applied to the men at the WCs.
How should we decide things? For centuries, since the Age of Enlightenment, if not since the time of the ancient Greek philosophers, decisions were made through objective observations and controlled measurements.
In these threads, I don't take anything, but ask for others to give things to support as yet baseless claims.
Whether Aficans cheat or not, my interest is how that influences performance, if at all. What tangible evidence exists that supports many of the wild claims that are widely believed?
Who says pressure was applied to the men at the WCs? On what basis? What form did this pressure take? This looks like a new page in a book of mythology, adding more myths to support existing myths. I thought pressure was applied to Kenyans, both men and women, since 2017, when a lab was created in Nairobi, and World Athletics placed Kenya in Category A. What changed in 2025, besides a lack of government funding for Kenyan anti-doping and ADAK being declared non-compliant by WADA?
Rekrunner is that person at the party who's telling everyone about how the earth is flat , the aliens are here you can see the lizard eyes sometimes and everyone dopes like the Kenyans that's not why they are dominant.
Rekrunner is that person at the party who's telling everyone about how the earth is flat , the aliens are here you can see the lizard eyes sometimes and everyone dopes like the Kenyans that's not why they are dominant.
There is an irony that you suggest that I'm the one who would fall for unsupported conspiracy theories.
In all of these cases, I would be similarly asking for tangible evidence and objective observations to support their stated beliefs, or ultimately call them baseless beliefs and speculation and hypothesis and mythology.
To the flat-earthers, I would ask them to conduct Al-Biruni's 1000-year old mountaintop measurements of the horizon, and then reconcile the results with their beliefs. Does the observation show an infinite radius (i.e. flat earth) or is there something wrong with trigonometry and mathematics.
Regarding aliens, in the spirit of keeping an open mind, I read with great interest William Bramley's "The Gods of Eden", who raises some doubts about how certain things, like the precision and magnitude of the constructions of pyramids around the world were beyond the technology of the people at the time, suggesting that man has long been guided by "custodians". He gives a new meaning to many things we see, for example, in the bible, like "fire in the sky", and "creating man in God's image" and "immaculate conception". It's an entertaining hypothesis (but also not quite centrally necessary to the rest of the book, so he substitues "custodians" for "extra-terrestials", taking it for granted as he navigates the history of how men are manipulated) and a reasonable and consistent argument with plenty of examples, but my general skepticism leads me to think this is still a work in progress.
Persistently holding party-goers to the highest intellectual challenges may piss off most of the people at the party, who would rather be "pissed" then "pissed off", chugging beer and getting into brawls, and who would fail to provide any of the strong evidence or observations to support their strongly held, but baseless beliefs. They would predictably start attacking me as a psychological defense mechanism to deal with and mask their own personal failures, including, predictably, projecting their own flaws and insecurities onto me.
When Canova posted that here, that EPO won't benefit such runners, I asked two exercise physiologists I knew, one being Peter Snell, the other no one would have heard of, what they thought of Canova's claim. Both told me the idea was nonsense. Canova did have a pretty vested interest in convincing people that the Kenyan performances were legitimate.
Canova is one of the biggest stitch-ups that ever frequented these boards.
He played it well though - he was active on the boards relatively early in it's inception and in a time when access to pro training schedules etc was quite limited online, so he garnered a lot of fans with stories of workouts and training.
Of course that built up a platform of legitimacy which he parlayed into that narrative of "They were born at altitude so EPO doesn't work for them anyway, hence why would they take it" - and you are 100% right, considering almost all of his clientele were Kenyan distance runners, he had a massive vested interest in this fantasy that his athletes were clean (which they weren't).
I saw Renato at many meets in my time and always with the same protagonists - The Rosas and Gianni Demadonna. Enough said.
He was making lots of crazy claims that steroids benefited cyclists more than epo
I finally got around to watching that video. The title should change from
"How Kenyans get EPO"
To
"Why Kenyans are busted for EPO and others arent"
That video betrays the fact that Kenyan runners appear to be still in the stone-age.
Whereas runners in the west have an army of medical experts to help them beat drug tests, Kenyan runners like the one described in this video doesn't seem to have a clue what masking agent is or what microdosing is or any of the myriad Salazar type methods being used in North America and Europe
He was making lots of crazy claims that steroids benefited cyclists more than epo
and that EPO slowed athletes down
A quality poster nonetheless
Canova made claims about steroids for cyclists?
Stichmo is incorrect to accuse Canova of saying "They were born at altitude so EPO doesn't work for them anyway". It is the long term training at altitude that led Canova to say that EPO would bring no additional benefit to these top athletes who are already highly trained. Canova said the same thing about the sea-level athlete Sondre Moen, not born at altitude, after eight months of altitude training led Moen to his 2:05:48 marathon. It is the long term training at altitude that makes additional EPO superfluous, if not counter-productive, for all athletes who are at their top.
Regarding EPO for cyclists, I've seen two meta studies which looked at the body of decades of scientific research on blood doping studies for cyclists, both concluding that the alleged benefits from blood doping were exaggerated and lack scientific support.
Can EPO slow athletes down? This may depend on the dosage. Arguably too much EPO can thicken the blood, leading to the opposite of the desired effect, with circulatory bottlenecks preventing red-blood cells from getting to the muscles. You could also argue indirectly that in some cases, turning to EPO to fix bad training, may actually lead you to perform less optimal training. It would be better to find another coach who can fix the bad training in a WADA legal way.
we see you get EPO and steroids in the pharmacy, just walk in. ever been on holiday? say in mexico, thailand, wherever??
and until recently, it was open season PEDs, absolutely no secret
and the crowd wonders if testosterone helps more than EPO, what is the point? both are game changers.
why letsrun did not fly to kenya and get the goods on PEDs a long while ago , well that is incompetent, as PEDs are the single most important thing in the sport, .....
Correct or not, the only way Canova can KNOW if EPO doesn't work for particular athletes is if they're using it.
He said he didn't know. He doesn't need to know, as the null hypothesis is on his side. It's up to those making the claim a relation exists who has the burden of supporting that claim.
The way modern science works, ever since the Age of Enlightenment, is with a starting assumption that no relation exists between two things (e.g. EPO and marathon performance). To overcome this initial assumption requires both tangible evidence and controlled observations suggesting a relation, and simultaneously disproving the relation could be spurious.
Outright ridiculous. You act as if there haven't been decades of studies and data and correlation and countless success stories. Your "null hypothesis" is long gone.
Your absurd theory, "based" on pointless comparisons of Kristiansen with Radcliffe and Lopez with Khannouchi, is not just baseless, it's long disproven.
Correct or not, the only way Canova can KNOW if EPO doesn't work for particular athletes is if they're using it.
He said he didn't know. He doesn't need to know, as the null hypothesis is on his side. It's up to those making the claim a relation exists who has the burden of supporting that claim.
The way modern science works, ever since the Age of Enlightenment, is with a starting assumption that no relation exists between two things (e.g. EPO and marathon performance). To overcome this initial assumption requires both tangible evidence and controlled observations suggesting a relation, and simultaneously disproving the relation could be spurious.
I'm not going to do the digging to find what he said ages ago but I recall that he said definitively EPO did not work on the fittest athletes who had lived their lives at high altitude. When I told him Snell and my other physiologist contact said the idea was nonsense he doubled down on the claim and said he knew better than either of them because he was in Kenya and they weren't.
Outright ridiculous. You act as if there haven't been decades of studies and data and correlation and countless success stories. Your "null hypothesis" is long gone.
Your absurd theory, "based" on pointless comparisons of Kristiansen with Radcliffe and Lopez with Khannouchi, is not just baseless, it's long disproven.
Disproving the null hypothesis requires disproving the effect under observation was not caused by any other factor than the one being tested. This was not done by any study, nor for any success story.
None of the decades of studies are representative of athletes training for racing, nor provide us data on racing performance with EPO versus without any blood doping. None of them conclude a benefit for athletes in races, and many of them say so explicitly, although some speculate one.
More importantly, since we were talking about the marathon, none of them studied the marathon, which is run at a lower sub-VO2max intensity for longer, and impacted by other performance factors like heat build-up and dissipation and energy management and significant muscle damage and general efficiency/economy factors.
Your alleged success stories are all confounded, often by other drugs, but also by training and placebo effect, as doping is usually unblinded. They are often cherry-picked examples looking to confirm the baseless assumptions, prematurely attributing the success to EPO or blood doping.
Your entire collection of studies and stories put together in its entirety provides no real data or tangible evidence or controlled observation that informs us about real training on real athletes in real races trained to run their personal best, with EPO (or blood doping) compared to without.
I understand it is not easy, or cheap, to come up with robust and reliable evidence and observations, but that does not make the existing observations any stronger or robust or conclusive or unconfounded.
My theory of comparison was based on a popular assumption (not mine) that "EPO works" on Kenyans like everyone else -- the contradiction of what Canova is widely believed to have said --- which raises the obvious question, how well did it work on everyone else? In other words, where is the performance data that forms the basis of the widespread belief that it ever worked for everyone else, that makes anyone doubt Canova's statement about top East African athletes? I read many speculative reasons explaining why the performance data can't be found where I was looking, but no alternative showing of performance data that can be found elsewhere.
With the introduction of supershoes, we saw progressions from distance athletes across the board, from high school to new world records, from 800m to the marathon, for both men and women.