Viren cheating?

Blood doping (or whatever you want to call it) wasn't illegal in the 1970s.

Interestingly, however, I remember the Swedish discus thrower Ricky Bruch (?) pointing the finger at Viren and other Finnish distance runners for use of steroids. At that time it was not widely recognised that steroids could help distance guys, they were thought of as making you bigger and stronger so not really relevant to endurance events, so his words were more or less ignored. But later evidence from various Finns suggest he may have had a point ...?

Loraine Moller (Lydiard) deserved a silver. Yergorova was suspicious.

Look how bad things were for women in 1976. I think every single event is doped to the max. Steroids were "banned" in 1974 by the IOC and the first in-competition anabolic steroid tests started in 1976 with primitive methods of detection compared to today.

Scroll down to the women's results.

Wow.

I forgot the link:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Athletics_at_the_1976_Summer_Olympics

OK.

Viren most likely blood doped and probably used steroids also. Proof is difficult to provide. There a lots of people who know the truth but remain silent. Some probably think that these things happened so long ago that it doesn't matter anymore. Others still remember the glory and the national pride and are afraid that telling about it would tarnish the Finnish athletics. IOC didn't ban steroids until 1975.

A Historical Timeline of Doping in the Olympics:

http://www.kawasaki-m.ac.jp/soc/mw/journal/en/2006-e12-1/01_kremenik.pdf

http://www.kawasaki-m.ac.jp/soc/mw/journal/en/2007-e12-2/01_kremenik.pdf

All the finns at that time were blood doping like hell! My former coach had affiliations to the finnish national team back in the days, and they were doping like hell

Nice link:

I'd say all the women's results could be suspect but especially:

400m, 800m, pentathlon, discus, shot put, relays, (anything East German, Polish etc. ha!), Stasi files reveal all so I'd presume the 100m & 200m but W. Germans did alright so who knows, the 1500m could've been suspect but one would have to watch the race as there could of been a slow first 400m etc and a supernatural sprint finish or in Viren's case "a supernatural sprint Finnish."

Caster Semen.....ya wrote:

This is a lame copout, studies have shown that different racial explanations for freak occurrences are complete nonsense, the variation between humans especially top runners from all over the world is quite minimal. That is why racism is so primitive.

I wasn't meaning race or genetics, I was thinking of the conditioning - kids growing up on farms and in small towns walking long distances to school, athletes growing up in areas with serious hills so they develop greater strength etc. I don't think it's a coincidence, for example, that two of the three NZ 1500m runners going to Rio are from Wellington, a city with serious hills. Compare that with a young Kiwi runner I was talking to who'd had a scholarship to a US College, who said that the only hill training she could get while in the US was running up and down the steps of the stadium.

While Quax and Dixon were training with Walker, were they training in the same way? Surely their speedwork would have been different from when they were racing 1500m?

I think you have a point about the demise of NZ athletics being related to doping in the 80s & 90s. The NZ all time men's 1500m list has 4 of the top 10 set in the last 2 years, 2 set in the 70s, 2 in the 80s, 1 in the 90s and 1 in the 00s. So there's a big recent improvement, but it wasn't as bad as I thought in the 80s, 90s & 00s.

What I've observed in any of these discussions about whether a particular athlete doped, blood doped, etc., is that the discussion is really about who likes that athlete and who dislikes him/her. If you didn't like Viren you'll probably think he blood doped and if you like him you'll think not.

In the forty plus years that this discussion has gone on, I have not seen anything that even resembles proof that Viren blood doped or doped. There has been no East German or BALCO type list with his name on it. There's been no death bed confession from a doctor who says he did the actual deed. He has no identifiable accusers that equate to what Magness, Fleischman, the Gouchers are to NOP or what various people whose names I've forgotten were to Armstrong.

What we have are comments like yours, about "lots" of people knowing the truth but remaining silent and people who note that Viren came out of nowhere, ran spectacularly, pretty much went back to nowhere, then came out of it again to run spectacularly. We're all pretty sure that loads of athletes who dope and/or blood dope are never detected and maybe that's just the case with Viren but it's also possible that there's no evidence of him doing any of those things because he never did them.

We know that other Finnish athletes did blood dope and also use illegal PEDS and one thing that I learned during my stay in Finland in 1975 is that there was definitely stuff going on there that wasn't supposed to be going on. I had a chance to do some of it. But Viren wasn't there at the time and just because some athletes in a country are doing a particular thing doesn't mean they all are or even that most of them are.

Please apply your arguments to Wang Junxia and the other Chinese women in 1993.

Wang Junxia never tested positive.

Do you think Wang Junxia was clean?

Do you think Genzebe Dibaba is clean?

notrump wrote:

I re-watched the race. I'd forgotten how close Pre was at the end (ran out of gas and finished a very close 4th). He ran often in lane 2 or worse and did a lot of surging to the lead that probably cost him a medal. Very much in character for Pre.

Even at the time there was a lot of discussion of Viren and blood doping. It was legal (no one had thought to make it illegal), but widely regarded as unethical, unsportsmanlike, etc. The Finn's kept their secrets.

The Finn's what kept their secret?

Caster Semen.....ya wrote:

Nice link:

I'd say all the women's results could be suspect but especially:

400m, 800m, pentathlon, discus, shot put, relays, (anything East German, Polish etc. ha!), Stasi files reveal all so I'd presume the 100m & 200m but W. Germans did alright so who knows, the 1500m could've been suspect but one would have to watch the race as there could of been a slow first 400m etc and a supernatural sprint finish or in Viren's case "a supernatural sprint Finnish."

The West Germans were also doping. Tatyana Kazankina, from the Soviet Union, never tested positive, but did receive a 2 year ban for refusing a test at an international meet. At the 1976 Olympics she won the 1500m gold, with 2 East Germans in 2nd and 3rd. She also won gold in the 800m in a world record 1:54.94, with 2nd place from Bulgaria, and 3rd place from East Germany.

Kazankina's world records in the 1500m and 3000m stood until the Chinese women destroyed them as a group all in 1 week.

The records for the 3000m and 10,000m still stand today. It is too bad they did not run a 5k also. Wang Junxia did run her last 5k of her 10k in 14:26, which was 11 seconds faster than the 14:37.33 WR at the time, and her last 3k was 8:17.47, which was more than 5 seconds faster than the 8:22.62 WR held by Tatyana Kazankina from 1984. Kazankina also held the 1500m WR of 3:52.47 from 1980, before Qu Yunxia ran 3:50.46 in 1993.

The 1500m record held by Qu Yunxia was finally broken last year by…Genzebe Dibaba (coached by Mr. Jama Aden).

Do you see a pattern?

It is just a coincidence.

test2 wrote:

To call blood doping legal at the time seems like a stretch. Correct me if I'm wrong, but I'm not aware of any rule at the time that permitted it. I don't think that something not being explicitly disallowed makes it fair game.

What? This is so warped. No rule says running a 100 mpw is permitted. No rule says speedwork is permitted?

WTF?!

Ok. I don't know about Junxia.I would say that the only evidence she wasn't clean is that she ran way faster than people thought was possible. But if she really was running 180 mile weeks, well, I don't think any woman has ever done that so I wouldn't rule that out as to why she was so much faster. I really don't know.

Dibaba has the coach who was busted for drug possession and a mustache. I'm not saying that Viren wasn't blood doping. I don't know. But all I've ever seen as "evidence" are people who generally had less contact with him than I did saying he did.

Good summary,

when I see 1:54.94 in a women's 800m it's a red alert for DOPING.

Interestingly, nobody noticed that Quax dropped hints that he would of medalled in the 10,000m had he not been sick earlier in the week. That is a definite hint that Brendon Foster was lucky to get a bronze. But he was sick as well. Some nasty bugs must have been circulating in Montreal at this time.

Were you with Viren in the last 1 to 2 weeks leading up to the Olympics? You could be with him for years and it would not mean anything.

Autologous blood transfusions have effects that last 2 to 4 weeks. They are usually only done a few times per year for big events…like the Olympics, or the 2003 World Half-Marathon Championships, or the London marathon, or the TDF.

EPO can be used all the time. HIF-stabilizers like FG-4592 are oral pills that work like EPO and are even more convenient, since there is no injection that some people find inconvenient. They can also be used any old time a doper feels like.

I was "with" Viren for a few minutes on the track on a handful of occasions. I don't claim any special knowledge from those occasions and that's not the point. The point is that people who only know of him from seeing him on TV, videos, articles, etc., look at his results and say, "He blood doped" based on nothing more than the fact that he ran great and that doing so was a possibility, as was the case for every distance runner who wanted to pursue the possibility. Then they start threads implying that he cheated by blood doping when they don't know at all whether or not he did and overlook the fact that even if he did he wasn't cheating.

Did Vataanien blood dope? Bedford? Foster? Piuttemans? Simmons, Stewart, Prefontaine? There's no more or less evidence that Viren did than that anyone else did.

I'm not sure why you have the bit about EPO etc. in your post. Viren's career was over by the time things like that were available.

The number of people in Finland that were known to be doing transfusions in the 1970s was much higher than in the other countries, which I believe should be considered as additional suspicion, compared to the athletes from the other countries you mentioned.

It sounds like you could believe the story that Wang Junxia was just naturally great and ran 180 miles per week at altitude with no doping.

I do not believe that story. I know there is no proof of doping by the Chinese women.

New Zealand and Australia are two of the cleanest countries when it comes to doping. Both countries have fantastic records and should be proud.

rjm33 wrote:

The number of people in Finland that were known to be doing transfusions in the 1970s was much higher than in the other countries, which I believe should be considered as additional suspicion, compared to the athletes from the other countries you mentioned.

It sounds like you could believe the story that Wang Junxia was just naturally great and ran 180 miles per week at altitude with no doping.

I do not believe that story. I know there is no proof of doping by the Chinese women.

New Zealand and Australia are two of the cleanest countries when it comes to doping. Both countries have fantastic records and should be proud.

That is due to the fact we are so isolated geographically and protectionists had such strict controls on goods coming in that it was very difficult to get drugs, needles, doping bags etcetera (in the past anyhow). That is why I know Walker, Dixon, Quax or Elliott, Snell, Halberg, Doubell, Clark were all clean, they simply didn't have the access to the means to cheat. Also, Lydiard, Cerutty and Jelley were the best coaches in the world at that time. Also, prior to the 1970s Australasia was by far the best place in the world to grow up in, daylight was a close second.

They had an advantage in the late 1950s to early 1960s because the rest of the world had not caught up with (copied) their training methods yet. Bill Bowerman brought the methods back to the US, and wrote a Jogging book, which coincided with the book Aerobics by Ken Cooper. Both of these books were major factors in starting the running/jogging for fitness boom in the United States.

The 2 books are what started me running in 1973. I still have Lydiard's tiny Running Training Schedules booklet, published in 1970. It is still relevant today. I still take a look at it every once in a while...over 80,000 miles later.

Arthur Lydiard had an influence that changed the world.

There is another person that you did not mention in your list.

I am thinking of another luminous diamond New Zealand Superheroâ„¢:

http://www.runnersworld.com/elite-runners/jack-foster