High-Octane Dopers wrote:
5% might be realistic with the synergistic effects of the cocktails the hard-core dopers take (e.g., EPO, HGH, T, steroids, SARMs, etc.).
Remember Lance was on a special cocktail of PEDs organized by the legendary doping doctor Ferrari. Lance adamantly states he got a 10% performance boost from the program!
"Might be" can also mean "might not be". When you say 5% or 10%, you need to say 5% "of what", and you need two reliable measures to produce a reliable measure of change.
The problems with the examples of Ramzi and Lombard are:
- no reliable measure of their potential best non-doped performance
- they don't address confounders: e.g. both of them changed their training significantly
You can speculate they improved as a result of doping, but you cannot put a number on it without better measures, and if you attribute all of the observed gains to doping, it will surely be an over-estimate.
The problem with Lance's "10-percenter"claim is:
- "10% of what?"
- Lance has a reputation for embellishing the truth, and he has a vested interest in making the public (and himself) believe he had no choice
The problem with the above mentioned Kenyan study:
Putting aside the lack of best practices like lack of controls and control group, the main problem with the Kenyan study is that they were not trying to run fast. They took a group of Kenyans who:
- had a "predicted" ability (1:30/2:12 runners) of around 7:50 for a 3K time trial
- ran a pre-EPO time 3K trial around 9:23 average (about marathon pace)
- ran an EPO 3K time trial around 8:57 average (about half-marathon pace)
The fastest time of all Kenyans in the study was around 10K pace. The low efforts were confirmed by RPE measures in the study.