Wejo (and others): Tell me why Paula wasn't a doper.

I stand corrected on that photo I do know szabo complained bitterly about the Russian being in the 5k that day; again only to retire from the sport shortly after when calf serum was found in her auto crossing borders. I was wrong about that photo.

I think this is a good thread. Let me make a few points.

1) People who compare Lance and Paula on the anti-doping front are simply uninformed.

Yes, Lance has always said he's clean but he's always gotten angry when people accused him of being a cheat (much like a lot of cheats like say Regina Jacobs). Also he's never been a leader of the anti-doping movement like Radcliffe.

Ten years ago when EPO cheating was rampant, she was one of the few athletes in the world who wasn't happy to just turn a blind eye. The only people who seemingly wanted to publicly put the pressure on the obvious cheats like Szabo or Jacobs were Radcliffe and LetsRun.com.

I mean she went as far to ask for her samples to be frozen. One can't be more transparent than that.

2) 2:15:25 is definitely an outlier as compared to other women's marathon times but should it be such an outlier?

I went back 25+ years and took a look at the marathon world record in 1985 as the new men's and women's records that were set that year really didn't budge much at all for 10 plus years.

In 1985, Carlos Lopes ran 2:07:12 and the world record barely budged (didn't go below 2:06:50) until 1998. Since that 2:07:12, the world record has come down by 3:13 or 2.529%. If you count the 2:03:02, it's 3.276%.

In 1985, Ingrid Kristiansen ran 2:21:06. Like the men's record, nothing much (actually nothing at all) changed until 1998. If one takes 2.529% off of 2:21:06, then they get 2:17:32 which is basically the 2nd time ever recorded. If you took off 3.276%, then you'd be looking at 2:16:29.

As it stands, the women's world record is faster than both those figures. It's 2:15:25 or 4.028% faster than the 1985 record. 4.0% is more than 2.5% or 3.2%, but logically shouldn't the women's record have come down more than the men's?

Think about world-wide how many fewer women competed relative to the men back in 1985. Women's sport participation is up a lot since then so shouldn't their records fall faster?

Regardless, this unscientific math project reveals that the record probably should be in the 2:17 range at a minimum. The fact that more women don't do it mainly comes from the fact that world-wide women's competition is nowhere near as deep as the men's.

Once in history, Radcliffe ran faster than 2:17. Here is someone who has a full-time phsyio devoted to her. Someone who does altitude training. Someone who was/is 100% committed to being the best. Could that result in 1 minute in the marathon? I believe it could.

3) Weldon talks about how hard Radcliffe worked in practice but that's not what I focus on in believing her 2:15:25 came from being clean. For me, I like to think of her as just being 100% committed. When we were at Gerard Hartmann's, I was just struck about how she was TOTALLY all in.

She didn't sleep in the bedroom with her husband as it was on the street. She moved her bed into the living room for better sleep.

She would take a nap every single day. She would ice bath. Hartmann, a man who was used to working on elites, raved about her pain tolerance in a way that he didn't for other athletes.

She also did high/low training.

Ultimately she ended up hiring Hartmann full-time to help her try to stay healthy. I remember thinking at the time, well that in some ways is her legal drug. Doing everything humanly possible to recover allows one to achieve more in training and therefore run faster.

If she was on drugs, why would she need a physio full-time if she could just take steroids? Skeptics will say it's all a clever cover I guess but I think I've made my point.

I don't want to rip current elites but I think a lot talk about being 100% committed and yet many of them have never even gone to altitude. In terms of Mo Farah and this year, I think he deserves a lot of credit for moving his entire family half-way around the globe to be the best. A lot of Americans want to live in a certain state or near mom and dad, etc. Radcliffe simply wants to be the best.

Additioanlly, in terms of her training, it was clear to me she naturally could run long distances at a very fast pace.

Conclusion

2:15:25 seems suspicious mainly because it's such an outlier as no other woman has run under 2:18:47. In my opinion, lots of women should be running in the 2:17 range and will start doing so soon again if someone with say the talent of Dibaba ever moves up.

A woman should be able to run that fast. Let me pick on one/praise of the runner's I coached at Cornell. Sage Canaday. The kid constantly about how he had no talent and his 5k pr of 14:34 is slower than Radcliffe's. Yet he's run 2:16:52 in the marathon. So seeing Paula run a bit faster isn't shocking to me at all as I was certainly more impressed by her daily training than his.

Sage is very into running and as a result, he has a 2:16 to his credit. Radcliffe is more talented, is even more committed and has way more resources at her disposal.

Sorry Sage, for picking on you. Everyone should buy his book here:

http://www.amazon.com/Running-Hansons-Insiders-Brooks-Sponsored-Marathon/dp/0983294119/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&qid=1311884518&sr=8-1

One last thing. If Radcliffe was doped, wouldn't her husband also be doped. Gary Lough was a world championship finalist back in 1995 and yet stopped competing soon thereafter. If there was an easy way to bet the best, wouldn't he have taken it like his wife?

Radcliffe is special. Her desire to keep going after her dream of Olympic gold proves it to me. She's not afraid to lose (even Haile G seemingly is). She's simply special.

ummmm wrote:

Empiricism wrote:

Wejo, I'm assuming you know her pretty well. I'm not accusing her of doping. But with any world record holder, the suspicion is there. The fact she's never run well in the Olympics doesn't help her case. What can you say to convince those with the "guilty until proven innocent" that Paula was/is clean.

This is really a silly question because what can ANYONE say to PROVE they are innocent here. There is no answer that works.

I didn't ask Wejo or anyone to PROVE anything. I asked what he and others would say to CONVINCE others.

I personally think that people on Letsrun in particular are too quick to say somebody is a doping cheat. It seems that anyone who does well (including at least one instance of a mediocre D3 XC team) is accused of doping. That is just part of the sport. I'd rather give an athlete the benefit of the doubt and be wrong than to assume everyone is a cheat.

It is refreshing to see people defend an athlete but more athletes deserve to be defended, like Lasse Viren. This thread has demonstrated that there is no argument that will prove somebody innocent and in the end people are falling back on a gut reaction.

Empiricism wrote:

ummmm wrote:

This is really a silly question because what can ANYONE say to PROVE they are innocent here. There is no answer that works.

I didn't ask Wejo or anyone to PROVE anything. I asked what he and others would say to CONVINCE others.

Interesting thread. The thing is, the more that gets said to convince people that she didn't dope, the more it looks like it could be possible. "She would do anything..." "She could run hard every day..." "She wasn't consistent in races..."

rojo wrote:

Ten years ago when EPO cheating was rampant, she was one of the few athletes in the world who wasn't happy to just turn a blind eye. The only people who seemingly wanted to publicly put the pressure on the obvious cheats like Szabo or Jacobs were Radcliffe and LetsRun.com.

So when Mary Slaney got caught did Radcliffe speak up? Has she ever?

Paula Radcliffe's silence on Slaney is deafening. Why?

Khalid Khannouchi and Paula Radcliffe are synonymous... both WR holders with no Olympic Gold.

Many here state Khannouchi was dirty. I am convinced Radcliffe was crossing the line.

Two Major reasons.

Style and running efficiency would seem to preclude the possibility of that WR time. If she could run that fast with that form, imagine how fast she could go if the arms and legs were going in the right direction at the right time?

did Bob Beamon dope?

Excellent timing. I am glad you showed up when you did. Because......

I have often asked on threads (and NEVER received a comment from you) about the "article" you wrote on letsun many moons ago. It wasn't original, but something many others have stated. It was about how the men's distance records had come down a huge % during the 90's and early 00's, and since this also coincided with epo being developed, you strongly concluded that these amazing times were likely drug-aided. Am I correct that that was what you strongly implied?

Now who compiled all of these amazing times? It was 99% by the east africans. Daniel Komen, Geb, Bekele, Tergat, and many others like them. The bottom line was: you were accusing of them of being on drugs. Period.

My questions: do you stand by those assertions now, or do you retract them?

And if you don't retract them, why do you give Paula a different treatment, for she is actually more of an outlier than the africans you were looking at, because they had lots of company with those amazing times from their countrymen.

Paula's 2:15 was faster than ANY MAN IN GREAT BRITAIN ran that year. I am not saying she is a doper, but THAT is as big a red flag as as taking a big chunk out of a WR, like the east africans did.

Please comment.

Hypothyroidism can be caused by overtraining. There is NO difference between taking other types of hormones to overcome a genetic response to work load.

Of course these drugs give an athlete an unfair advantage.

Same thing with boosting your test to optimal yet legal levels...if you could not sustain it through a hard training load without "supplementation."

Are the low dose SARMS they are taking are out in the open too?

Lots of people overtrain and can't recover without steroids...that's the primary reason to take them in distance events.

Isn't advocating that everything "legal" is ethical the same as saying, to paraphrase Jim Rome, "If you aren't cheating, you aren't trying."

Especially in a sport where training volume and recovery mean everything.

If you idiots would take a look at a bell curve once in a while, you'd realize that the best in the world often well exceed the rest.

Take a high school or college race -- go ahead and pick any. Put the times in excel and graph them. You'll see that almost every time, the best runner is the best by a lot.

World typing champion - Sean Wrona - destroys everyone by craploads.

Go ahead, pick any subject or skill, and you will find that the best is the best by a LOT. You can't dope intelligence (although you can kill intelligence by doping...)

Here is rojo's article:

http://www.letsrun.com/rojospeaksmay23.html

THe conclusion was: based on big drop in WR's, one should assume that the best distance runners were doping. Now he avoids naming names, but the runners doing all of the smashing of the old records were Geb, Tergat, Komen, (and later) Bekele, and other east africans.

Now it's funny that rojo, I am sure, kisses these guys butts when he meets them, and of course promotes them on his site to make $ off their names, but in the past (and I haven't seen a retraction), he flat-out called them dopers. That's kind of two-faced, wouldn't you say?

So put up or shut up rojo: do you stand by your past accusations, or now that time has passed, do you have a different opinion? If the latter, apologies might be in order.

Shoe Goo wrote:

Outspoken, whatever. Who was the MLB player rep for anti-doping who was found to be lying in court? Rafael Palmeiro?

Who was the little Romainan runner who won medals, 5k?, in the pic with Paula, holding the anti-doping sign "dopers out"; who later retired very shortly after calf blood serum was found in her car? Gabriela Szabo?

Outspoken; bullshit!

i agree. this is an adaptation of "keep your friends close, but enemies even closer". many posts here echo that very fact by saying, "No way. She's so outspoken about PEDS!" it's called the wolf in sheep's clothing ploy and it works very effectively in almost any situation.

people lack logic. that 2:15 is obscene. like 13:44 5000m obscene.

the issue i have with Paula's marathon record is that it is a better performance than the other short women's distance records. 2:15 is on par according to Daniels with a 4:04 mile and 29:14 for 10000. Has anyone including men run 2:15 and not broke 30???

rojo wrote:If she was on drugs, why would she need a physio full-time if she could just take steroids? Skeptics will say it's all a clever cover...

Similarly, skeptics may claim that the entire practice of altitude training (and oxygen tents) is just a cover, that the modern athlete does (or just claims to do) altitude training to provide another plausible explanation for the boost in hematocrit they receive from blood doping (or epo like drugs). Especially in cycling where blood parameters are constantly monitored and compared and any changes are going to need an explanation.

A woman should be able to run that fast. Let me pick on one/praise of the runner's I coached at Cornell. Sage Canaday. The kid constantly about how he had no talent and his 5k pr of 14:34 is slower than Radcliffe's. Yet he's run 2:16:52 in the marathon. So seeing Paula run a bit faster isn't shocking to me at all as I was certainly more impressed by her daily training than his.

Maybe we should be picking on you ROJO! You couldn't get a kid

that Hansons got to run 2:16 to break 14:34? Might want to keep that one quiet while recruiting

captainwildcat wrote:

Empiricism wrote:

The fact she's never run well in the Olympics doesn't help her case.

This actually helps her case that she is clean. An athlete who never has a down race or a bad day is much more suspicious than one who is always 'on'. Given how badly she wanted to win those games (especially in 2004 when she had basically been unbeatable for a few years prior) Assuming she knew she wouldn't be caught if she was going to dope to win that would've been the time.

Are there differences between the doping system in the road races compared to the Olympics? I think it would be way more difficult for someone to test positive in a road race than in the Olympics. I believe the drug test for the road races are a joke compared to the olympics. If you test positive in the Olympics your career would be over. You would have to return your medals and leave on shame for the rest of your life.

So a 2:15:25 is worth what..14:07(better than current wr)? How about 29:21(again better than wr, which is held by a china doper)?

So we bitch up and down all day and night that those chinese times were doped, but it seems sacrilegious to a huge amount of Paula fans that she is also gassed up on the same type of stuff.

Come on folks don't know if you got the memo but there is no Santa Claus.