Whatever Happened to Junxia Wang?

What evidence are you bringing up...

The only evidence I see that you keep talking about is the fact that the National champs is incredible important to the Chinese and that if they didn't perform then Ma would beat them....

That’s not evidence at all...

If that were the case then the Chinese women would have beat the times again and again because presumable the same pressure would have been put on them at every National meet.

Also you bring up that they are a large population and therefore could have a large number of genetic freaks out there....well I agree with you there the Chinese should be dominating in just about every sport because their population is so large.....but it still brings up the point of why have they not been able to duplicate the performances at that ONE MEET....

and for god sake tell us why all these records all happened at one meet....

You my friend are not thinking logically....

I agree with you that the Chinese should be great runners but something is fishy about that one meet....but you are blinded by your love for the Chinese that you can’t see logic....

the short track still makes as much sense as anything...

It is possible to measure the track from a satellite photo taken before it was demolished.

OK, since this seems to be your central argument let's put it another way. Given this combination of genetic luck, hard training and regional pride, why haven't China produced anything close to the quality of that 3k either before or since? 8 in the top 10 of all time in one race, none in the rest of history. Why?

I'm not making any accusations, I simply don't understand it.

She won the 5000 in '96.

Her name is Wang Junxia but the Chinese list their sirname first. So I guess you can Westernize her name by calling her Junxia Wang.

cock ring wrote:

i think it's you who has to calm down. it's like spoonfeeding information to a baby here. the womens distances haven't been around half as long as the mens, so yes, bug improvements are going to more magnified than ones on the mens side. duh.

That fails to explain how Wang never again even APPROACHED the times she ran in one meet. Not within even 30 seconds in the 10k. And god knows she had plenty more chances. She even won an olympic medal later or but still never came close to that time. The other athletes who broke the record have similar tales.

Six runners, one single day, absurdly fast performances not internationally drug tested and never again coming close. Lets hear your explanation.

to all you meatheads who evidently can't read past the last post, go back a few pages and the rest of my mine because it answers your questions neatly. Basically, you get a national champs that is an extreme high priority COUPLED with a crazy coach that took extremely tough girls from the outer provinces who have high pain thresholds and run them into the ground. You wonder why most never resurfaced? They were too burnt out after that two year stint to do much else afterwards. And Ma was basically thrown out of any serious coaching positions. I am not blinded by my love of China, I just know how things work over there than you do.

It's funny, I don't see you making any claims about MJ's 19.32?

cock ring wrote:

to all you meatheads who evidently can't read past the last post, go back a few pages and the rest of my mine because it answers your questions neatly. Basically, you get a national champs that is an extreme high priority COUPLED with a crazy coach that took extremely tough girls from the outer provinces who have high pain thresholds and run them into the ground. You wonder why most never resurfaced? They were too burnt out after that two year stint to do much else afterwards. And Ma was basically thrown out of any serious coaching positions. I am not blinded by my love of China, I just know how things work over there than you do.

It's funny, I don't see you making any claims about MJ's 19.32?

Oh please. That doesn't even pass the laugh test. Yes, all one one day 6 people hit their absolute zenith and then never could come CLOSE again. The fact that they were not under internationally monitored drug testing is just coincidence. Spare me.

As for MJ's 19.32: He actually WAS drug tested by people outside of his own country immediately afterwards. He had already smashed the 200 meter world record before his 19.32. He went on to break more world records afterwards. He didn't just win medals afterwards. He broke world records. He wasn't a one-day wonder.

cock ring wrote:

to all you meatheads who evidently can't read past the last post, go back a few pages and the rest of my mine because it answers your questions neatly. Basically, you get a national champs that is an extreme high priority COUPLED with a crazy coach that took extremely tough girls from the outer provinces who have high pain thresholds and run them into the ground. You wonder why most never resurfaced? They were too burnt out after that two year stint to do much else afterwards. And Ma was basically thrown out of any serious coaching positions. I am not blinded by my love of China, I just know how things work over there than you do.

It's funny, I don't see you making any claims about MJ's 19.32?

This is a really frustrating thread. I think that the basic theory outlined about, that these athletes were trained into the ground in an unprecidented fashion to give a short but spectacular set of performances, is actually about as sound as any of the other theories we have. Short track? Sounds unlikely it would not have gone unchecked. Drugs? There have been plenty of drugged athletes, none have produced anything to match what was seen here.

Problem is that the cock ring and othere who are trying to defend the Chinese are doing such a bad job of it. Instead of trying to argue their position from what facts there are they either make stuff up, resort to personal attacks or attempt to draw parallels which are clearly miles off mark. Shame as it completely undermines any credibility that their arguments might have had.

Here: On page 85 of the Renato Canova thread, he offers his explanation for Junxia Wang:

Wang Junxia was one example of runner at the chromosomal border between the sexes (also looking at her morphology is possible to see a lot of male particulars), and really nobody wanted to analyse this aspect.

http://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=458338&page=84

"chromosomal border"? Yeah right!

loot wrote:

[quote]cock ring wrote:

That fails to explain how Wang never again even APPROACHED the times she ran in one meet. Not within even 30 seconds in the 10k. And god knows she had plenty more chances. She even won an olympic medal later or but still never came close to that time. The other athletes who broke the record have similar tales.

Six runners, one single day, absurdly fast performances not internationally drug tested and never again coming close. Lets hear your explanation.

It's easy, Drugs, drugs and more drugs. A short track would be too easy to catch after the race. Unlikely track was built short when new. But a slow clock would do the same thing and the clock could conveniently disappear for good after the meet. Perhaps it could also be set to be slow for only particular races. Still my bet is that all those fast times were run by runners drugged up to their eyeballs! That's what most of the media suspected at the time.

I heard her last 5k split of the 10k was roughly equal to the 5k WR at the time, anyone have information on this?

Seem to remember a last 3K split of 8min 22sec. WOuldn't swear to it though.

Have heard one respected coach say he thinks that one or two of Ma's army were blokes.

Bottom line is this: drugs alone don't explain it. Far more to it than that.

Subsequent events with Chinese athletes and swimmers show you can't say drugs weren't part of the equation.

The races were televised, so tv footagew probably exists somewhere.The track was not short. To make the lap shorter you need to lay extra tartan on the inside of the track then move the lines in. Also the performances in all other events (400, relays) would also have been out of line, which they were not.

Because of my chinese connections I was asked to comment on the performances at the time. Not wishing to upset the Chinese too much, I didnt provide the answer I would have wished !

I believe that the Chinese were using epo or blood doping, or even a combination of both. I believe that they were also using steroids, and may be they fed animals on steroids and then eat them - on the basis that the metabolites in the athletes urine would not be the same as they would by taking the steroids directly.

It is true that the Chinese Games are very important and a provincial team would resort to any measures to win and humiliate the opposition. So short track isnt the answer, and we may never know what combination of drugs was.

As for all of the athletes peaking to that level for a very short space of time - that is as likely as the whole squad needing the appendix removed at the same time - sorry that was the next year wasnt it ?

S&S: Thanks for your thoughts. Everything you say sounds perfectly reasonable. I've never actually worried about whether the Chinese were doing drugs. As we know, a good percentage of the standing WRs are dirty, and for that matter, most of us assume that at least a couple of the records demolished in '93 were as drug-aided as they could get. For that matter, I also believe that Beamon's big jump was almost certainly wind aided, and I personally witnessed Flo-Jo's 10.49 and don't believe that either!

What has always puzzled me is why that '93 breakthrough pretty much only happened once, at one meet, in one week. (The '97 results were great, but not really on a par with '93. And none of the other Chinese Games results are remotely comparable.) There can be no question those runners trained incredibly hard. But others can and do train hard. If they used all the drugs you suggest (and I have no reason to doubt it) other runners probably did exactly the same. It remains true after all these years that only 3 non-Chinese runners have beaten the pre-93 3000WR, and the best of these is only 1.2 seconds faster than Kazankina in 1984! At the 10,000, only 4 non-Chinese have run faster than Kristiansen's 30:13.74 of 1986, with the best of them 12.6 seconds faster. The argument that the '93 performances were simply "normal" WR outliers simply is not true. The earlier comparison to Komen's 7:20 is way off the mark. As I tried to state before, the real comparison would have been if, in one week, Komen had run 7:16 (heat) and 7:10 (final), and had also broken the WRs in the 10,000 by, say, 35 seconds, and in the 1500 by 1 second. Would any of us have believed this?

For me, the bottom line is quite simple: I have no real idea what happened, but it does not make historical sense, pure and simple.

It doesn't make statistical sense.

Here's the women's all time 3000 list at the end of 1993:

1 8:06.11 Wang Junxia CHN 09.01.73 1 Beijing 13.09.1993

2 8:12.18 Qu Yunxia CHN 25.12.72 2 Beijing 13.09.1993

3 8:12.19 Wang Junxia CHN 09.01.73 1h2 Beijing 12.09.1993

4 8:12.27 Qu Yunxia CHN 25.12.72 2h2 Beijing 12.09.1993

5 8:16.50 Zhang Linli CHN 06.03.73 3 Beijing 13.09.1993

6 8:19.78 Ma Liyan CHN 03.11.68 3h2 Beijing 12.09.1993

7 8:21.26 Ma Liyan CHN 03.11.68 4 Beijing 13.09.1993

8 8:21.84 Zhang Lirong CHN 03.03.73 5 Beijing 13.09.1993

9 8:22.06 Zhang Linli CHN 06.03.73 1h1 Beijing 12.09.1993

10 8:22.44 Zhang Lirong CHN 03.03.73 2h1 Beijing 12.09.1993

11 8:22.62 Tatyana Kazankina RUS 17.12.51 1 Leningrad 26.08.1984

12 8:25.83 Mary Slaney USA 04.08.58 1 Roma 07.09.1985

13 8:26.53 Tatyana Dorovskikh UKR 12.08.61 1 Seoul 25.09.1988

14 8:26.78 Svetlana Ulmasova UZB 04.02.53 1 Kiev 25.07.1982

15 8:27.12 Lyudmila Bragina RUS 24.07.43 1 College Park 07.08.1976

16 8:27.15 Paula Ivan ROM 20.07.63 2 Seoul 25.09.1988

17 8:27.68 Wang Junxia CHN 09.01.73 1 Jinan 06.06.1993

18 8:27.83 Maricica Puica ROM 29.07.50 2 Roma 07.09.1985

19 8:28.71 Qu Yunxia CHN 25.12.72 1 Stuttgart 16.08.1993

20 8:28.74 Sonia O'Sullivan IRL 28.11.69 1 Oslo 10.07.1993

21 8:28.83 Zola Pieterse GBR 26.05.66 3 Roma 07.09.1985

22 8:29.02 Yvonne Murray GBR 04.10.64 3 Seoul 25.09.1988

23 8:29.25 Zhang Linli CHN 06.03.73 2 Stuttgart 16.08.1993

24 8:29.30 Qu Yunxia CHN 25.12.72 2 Jinan 06.06.1993

25 8:29.36 Svetlana Guskova MDA 19.08.59 2 Kiev 25.07.1982

26 8:29.59 Svetlana Guskova MDA 19.08.59 1 Moskva 06.08.1984

27 8:29.69 Mary Slaney USA 04.08.58 1 Köln 25.08.1985

28 8:29.71 Mary Slaney USA 04.08.58 1 Oslo 07.07.1982

29 8:30.12 Sonia O'Sullivan IRL 28.11.69 1 Zürich 04.08.1993

30 8:30.28 Svetlana Ulmasova UZB 04.02.53 1 Athínai 09.09.1982

31 8:30.30 Yvonne Murray GBR 04.10.64 2 Oslo 10.07.1993

32 8:30.32 Maricica Puica ROM 29.07.50 2 Köln 25.08.1985

33 8:30.45 Yelena Romanova RUS 20.03.63 4 Seoul 25.09.1988

34 8:30.86 Sonia O'Sullivan IRL 28.11.69 1 Bruxelles 03.09.1993

35 8:31.67 Maricica Puica ROM 29.07.50 1 Bucuresti 14.08.1982

36 8:31.67 Natalya Artyomova RUS 05.01.63 5 Seoul 25.09.1988

37 8:31.75 Grete Waitz NOR 01.10.53 1 Oslo 17.07.1979

38 8:31.95 Zhang Lirong CHN 03.03.73 3 Stuttgart 16.08.1993

39 8:32.0 Tatyana Pozdnyakova UKR 04.03.56 1 Ryazan 11.08.1984

40 8:32.00 Elana Meyer RSA 10.10.66 1 Durban 29.04.1991

41 8:32.08 Tatyana Kazankina RUS 17.12.51 1 Leningrad 27.07.1983

42 8:32.1 Grete Waitz NOR 01.10.53 1 Oslo 27.06.1978

43 8:32.43 Yvonne Murray GBR 04.10.64 2 Bruxelles 03.09.1993

44 8:32.62 Yvonne Murray GBR 04.10.64 1 London 23.07.1993

45 8:32.81 Elana Meyer RSA 10.10.66 3 Oslo 10.07.1993

46 8:32.91 Mary Slaney USA 04.08.58 1 London 20.07.1985

47 8:33.01 Tatyana Kazankina RUS 17.12.51 1 Praha 16.08.1984

48 8:33.16 Svetlana Ulmasova UZB 04.02.53 1 Praha 29.08.1978

49 8:33.33 Maricica Puica ROM 29.07.50 2 Athínai 09.09.1982

50 8:33.38 Sonia O'Sullivan IRL 28.11.69 4 Stuttgart 16.08.1993

Right. And as I said, even in 2006, the all-time list hasn't really changed much. The relevant recent additions:

8:21.42 Szabo 2002

8:21.64 O'Sullivan 1994

8:22.20 Radcliffe 2002

This says very very clearly that Kazankina's 8:22.62 of 1984 was not remotely a "weak" record: not in 1984, not in 1993, and not even in 2006.

why is this even a debate? Anyone with a critical mind knows that those times from 1993 were bogus. I don't know if it was drugs, a short track or a slow clock, but that many people running that fast in one meet is a HUGE RED FLAG that something is amiss. It reminds me of an XC meet I ran where most of the competitors were about 60 seconds faster than their PRs... The course was measured again and, voila, it was short.

One other thing that bothers me is that, these distance miracles were never produced by Chinese men. Curious, eh? Do the Chinese simply value women's running more than men's? Are their women simply tougher than their men?

Clearly not. But it seems more than a coincidence that women stand to improve their strength and recovery the most in using testosterone derivatives because their bodies produce far less of it than males. Relatively speaking males won't see as great a benefit.

jaguar1 wrote:

I tried to find the book about Ma's Army, but it doesn't appear to be available in any library's in the US.

I have this book. If I ever get around to it, I'd like to translate it. Stay tuned...