Narve Nordås 3:36 to 3:29 in 1 year

Dragged?😂 He was the only one with sub 1.50 for the last 800...

Maybe we all are just pussies not living out our potential,,, but a handful of men found a way….

Well, not so in IQ-tests.

I mean 3:30. I don't care who is the clean world record holder. No performance can be proven clean.

It isn't about "logic"; it is about the fact that doping is right through elite and professional sport, that track has been identified by WADA as one of the worst offenders and that very few dopers are caught. In that context the argument that an athlete goes from the middle of the pack at 3:36 to one of the fastest in the world at 3.29 in only a year and is somehow clean - when so many others at that level won't be - is an absurdity.

You have elevated yourself to new heights. And that tells a lot.

His "potential"? Well, if he carved 6 seconds off in the last year he could chop off another 3 seconds at least this year. Why not? He's Norwegian, after all. And clean. So, 3.26.

So you confirm what I just said.

Your last sentence is of course right…

You see? He has not answered your question. He never does if an answer just would put him in an even worse position.

It's just a normal question: if someone claims any top performance is the product of doping, where can we find the first non doped performances.

Since I know that I was capable of around 4:00 and I never doped, it must be somewhere between 3:26 and 4:00.

Well, I think it’s about logic. I must cling to that approach anyways, because of my lack of that sort of experience you told convinced you about the widespread doping in track and field. But of course feel free to correct me if my logic clearly is in mismatch with reality….

1.Prevalence: With you I think this is the key point. -What is the percentage of doping among elite athletes f.ex sub 3.35 (1500m) and sub 3.30, and how do we know…. Well, the last question first: I see four ways of information gathering. -One can test the athletes -One can investigate (as in Lance Armstrong and M. Jones) -One can study the blood passes -One can make an anonymous survey…

Testing: One can increase overall testing, but there will always be suspicions about a significant number never caught..The same with investigation. Maybe there is more to be seen in the blood passes -suspicious traits not enough to conviction, but to make an presumption (but this is a dangerous path legally and scientifically). Last: Anonymous survey -one has to ask directly: Have you / or do you do doping? But we know the answers can’t be trusted… Conclusion: There’s no way of knowing how prevalent doping is among the elite! You don’t have a clue, and I don’t have a clue! Therefore you loose all your base for your doping claims -you cannot draw a line on 3.30 or say anything of prevalence or the limit for human clean performance at all! And I, well I don’t loose a thing, because I have never pretended to have other things than assumptions, logic and some subjective reasoning / careful analysis of pros and cons / probability… Without saying “I know”!

I guess you have done some kind of interpolation from experience among sub elite, (where doping may be prevalent and not all that hidden) and over to elite athletes, but you cannot do a thing like that, because there is no necessary correspondence..! Or you are basing a lot on rumours or sayings or feelings around your thoughts of progression, limits of human capacity and the effect of drugs. But fact is that you know nothing, nor do I, or anybody else.

2. Point 1 is the factual part: What we know. (That we know that we don’t know anything about prevalence). Here in point 2 is how we can guess something about probability for doping / not doping based on subjective reasoning and falsification -but we need to know that this is highly speculative and not facts. We must be somewhat humble… -I have a lot here, but have to save it for a later post (too many words already…)

Narve Nordas did not take 7 seconds off his PR in one jump from 3.36 to 3.29 at all. Yes his PR from 2022 was 3.36 but he started this season off with a PR of 3.35.91, ran 3.34.70 in his next race and 3.32.39 in his 3rd.

Just to be clear here as comparisons with Katir are being made - there isn't really one. Katir, who had plateaued as a 3.36/37 runner having run at least 2 seasons where he ran multiple races at that exact level, then skipped down to 3.28.76 from one race to the next. Forget one season to the next - he toed the line on the 9th of July 2021 in Monaco with a 3.36.59 PR so unless my math has escaped me, that performance was a seismic 7.83 seconds improvement to a level of performance only 9 other humans have ever beaten. And yeah, it is a big deal running under 3.29 vs under 3.30 - it is another plateau.

Nordas toed the line at Bislett the other night with a 3.32.39 PR and ran 3.29.47 which is a 2.92 second improvement. This is not an outlier jump with respect to sub 3.30 runners in history at all.

Furthermore circumstantially, Covett here made absolutely relevant points.

I'm not saying Norway as a nation has never had dopers in sports - but they certainly didn't have a institutional program of doping specifically in middle distance running like Spain had (I'll refrain from using "has" as in presently).

I don't think people quite understand/remember/know this but Spain was a laughing stock in terms of performance enhancing drugs in the 90's and 2000's - all beginning with showing up for Barcelona. What the hell do you guys think Operation Puerto was? Eufemiano Fuentes? Cacho? Estevez? Redolat? Diaz? Sergio Sanchez?

The only similarity is an "end of season PR vs a PR achieved in the next" but actually that shouldn't be the benchmark at all. What we should be looking at is an athletes 10 best times over a distance and seeing if a rate of improvement is consistent within themselves and their contemporaries at a similar level of performance. If we did that here we could stop wasting our time comparing these two guys.

Sadly in the sport now all athletes who reach these levels of performance should be subject to some scrutiny -it comes with the territory. But Mohammed Katir is not even close to a comparable measuring stick in the case of Narve Nordas. Sorry.

Your sad that a white Westerner is subject to accusation but not sad that Katir is. You could at least be honest about that. The rest of your lengthy paragraph is just mental gymnastics nonsense to try to convince youself that it's not just plain ol' tribalism.

"Listen people, Nordås got dragged to a super quick time."(quote)

Dragged? Is that a typo?

You aren't the brightest here, are you? Since doping is known in the sport and is estimated to be widespread including at the top of the sport it will follow that the best performances are likely to be doped. If it were not used by elites and professionals doping would hardly be an issue - and it is elites and professionals who are being caught.

However we also know that many more dope than are caught; it is a clandestine practice. Hence we can never be sure which athletes are clean - especially when we know doping has been a growing feature in the sport for over half a century. That means no line can be drawn for certain between a likely doped and possibly clean performance. We can only estimate it based on our knowledge of the sport and what we think possible for a talented well-trained athlete who isn't using drugs. That is why we have threads such as these that never fully resolve these questions. It is also why asking who is the "last clean champion" is pointless; it can now only be conjecture.

"As far as I know this nice guy and his ethics I would be not only surprised but right devastated if he ever was thinking about doping."(quote)

That is the core of your argument - you would be "devastated" if he even thought about doping. The rest of your arguments are window-dressing.

Another poster on here believes no man can run under 3.33 without doping,and the cut off for women is about 4.03.Of course he also admitted that some people are way more talented than others,and he believes literally everyone at top or near top leval dopes in track and field.I tend to agree with him.Sport is a chemical fest.It gets a bit suspicious when im watching the olympics and everyone i see lined up looks like theyve walked straight out of a laboratory.

Like your Norwegian friend and rekrunner, none of you know how to make a point succinctly.

Your question boils down to this - how do I know the top athletes are doping? To answer that in detail would take pages, so I won't respond in detail.

I'll try to summarize. The numbers of dopers caught are a fraction of those known to be doping although the exact size of that particular "iceberg" cannot be known because it is a clandestine practice. Confidential athlete surveys suggest it is at least 1 in 3 championship athletes and could well be higher. Expert estimates range to nearly a 100 percent at the pro level in some sports. What sports night they be? Try bodybuilding and weightlifting, and pro cycling. Where does athletics fall? Right alongside those sports in the estimation of WADA.

At the top level in sports the incentive is to dope; the rewards for success make it so, and the risk of being caught is low except for those who don't really know what they're doing. The other reality top athletes have to deal with is known as the Prisoner's Dilemma - if they don't dope the other guy probably will. So they, too, will have to dope because talent will not beat talent + doping.

I have watched the kinds of improvements being made in athletics in over sixty years, and in a sport that has little technique, whose tools (shoes and tracks) have changed little in that time, and training methods are virtually the same, the "superhuman" performances we see are most easily explained - as per Occam's Razor - by the simplest explanation, which is doping.

I could go on with what I know that I have learned from professional athletes, doctors and doping officials but my point is made and it would be beyond anyone here to be interested in that or persuaded by it.