standards wrote:
Rhetorical question? You forgot to mention that Kenya had no ooc blood tests during 2000-12, whereas other countries did. Thus a comparison of suspicious blood values of all countries is questionable, to say the least. More tests, more flags when all else is equal. That in itself is not a "premature speculation"; it would be a premature speculation to estimate corrected numbers which is why I won't do that.
But full stop. Interesting is rather your short list of only 12 countries worse than Kenya. Are you saying that even when ignoring the ooc bias, Kenya is no. 13 out of God knows how many countries? At worlds 2011 for example, 204 countries participated. Even when excepting your metrics, they'd be among the worst 6% of all those countries. Not exactly better than average.
Even though Kenyans were blood tested substantially less than say Americans and Brits (the countries mentioned above in this thread), they still got flagged more than twice as often in your selected period of 2000-12:
Russia 30%
...
Kenya 11%
...
Ethiopia 8%
...
USA 5%
UK 4%
You forgot to mention that too.
Where did you get 5% for USA? The source I saw was that the abnormal blood tests came from 94 countries. In a table of percentage of abnormal tests by country, they only listed 53 countries, which excluded the USA.
This speculation that OOC testing would produce a significant bias is something you made up without supporting data.
But for sure the whole analysis undertaken by the Australian scientists is unofficial, and many questions can be raised about their method (e.g. combining "yellow" "suspicious" values, with "red" "likely to be doping" values into one metric) and conclusions.
Even if it is unofficial, it is a large amount of data that fails to suggest EPO or blood doping use was significant for the East Africans, and for that matter, that blood doping use was apparently not so important for the performance of the 12 countries I mentioned.
The original question that seems to have gotten set aside is the evidence for trollism's insinuation of East Africans doping when "EPO became available", while apparently all other nations doped less, or not at all, and in then again "for the last 20-25 years." Where does any evidence exist that Kenya and Ethiopia doped before 2012? or before 2000? It's one thing to say you have questions about the unofficial data that was published in the Sunday Times, but no one seems to have any other supporting data.
In an earlier Task Force report from 2014, Kenya only had 11 positive tests in the years 1997-2011. In 2012-2013, this spiked to 18 for those two years. These are for all doping substances that can be found in urine, both in and out of competition, so the lack of local blood doping facilities in Kenya is not a factor.
It also reports back in 2014, that a number of athletes test positive "out of ignorance" during medical treatments, and noted "a lack of education and awareness on anti-doping regulations".
This is a bias that raises Kenyan "doping" and can easily be addressed with education, which apparently still exists today, as it did in 2014.
