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

"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."

Are you serious?

Drug users (especially steroid users) have a hugely elevated risj of many injuries, and proven drug users throughout the world have full time physio..

Google the names "Waldemar" and "Charlie Francis" together and you will find endless endorsement of the therapies of their personal travelling physio from the poster child for steriods...

are people really this clueless??

As for altitude, the evidence is entirely equivocal and certainly not explaining 2:15, and Radcliffe was notorius for using a lot of pseudoscience, lest we forget the titanium necklaces etc....

All I have to say about this thread is it shows how few of you have used PEDS. So come forward...

I've use a couple of cycles. No EPO. But I might in the future and I'm a Master. Why? Why not? Health risks? Get real. I'm not taking prize money. I'm not Nationally ranked, so who cares.

Junk Master wrote:

All I have to say about this thread is it shows how few of you have used PEDS. So come forward...

I've use a couple of cycles. No EPO. But I might in the future and I'm a Master. Why? Why not? Health risks? Get real. I'm not taking prize money. I'm not Nationally ranked, so who cares.

I hope you are not our local hero with a big jaw and clocking 15:45 for the 5K. This person improved so much in two years. He just came from nowhere in his early fifties and is breaking all records. I just wonder what caused that hip injury.

Basically all the brojo arguments amount to

1. She train real hard and commited bro

2. She got a real good physio all tha time

Two characteristics that a huge number of dopers reflect (as LMAO noted steroids bring many injury risks).

One of the reasons people have a hard time thinking Paula's 2:15 marathon is clean is because we still think guys with 2:15 or 2:16 PRs should be subsidized pro runners. Maybe they shouldn't be.

I think there are a lot of Hansons guys who have prs similar to her from the 5k on up, so I don;t think her 2:15 is so out of wack when compared to top men.

BOOM! wrote:

Do you even understand how PEDs work? You don't just take them, continue doing your old workouts, then show up to race day and kill it.

That's EXACTLY what EPO does.

You know your argument's right if no one replies to it. :)

Sir Lance-alot wrote:

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.

You have a good memory.

I'm glad you wrote as I meant to put on my original post - PS. Admittedly a good person can use stats to support whatever argument you want to support. I'll be the first to admit it. I used similar stats back in 2000 to say EPO usage was widesperad.

The article you are talking about can be read here.

For those that are new to Letsrun, way back in 2000, I wrote an article entitled "Face the Facts: EPO Usage Likely Widespread" where I used bigger statistical improvements in recent years to indicate that I thought EPO usage was widespread.

No, I don't take back what I wrote then or what I do now. We now pretty mcuh know that EPO usage was widespread so the whole point of that article was 100% correct even if the stats/individual examples may or may not be accurate.

Here, I just was making my best argument as to why I thought Paula was clean which I do believe to be the case.

Back in 2000, I was just making my best attempt to try to shock people into thinking drug usage was indeed widespread as everyone was in denial.

The WRs are always hard to talk about as they are a single performance and it kills me to think Haile G or one of my idols might have been on drugs. Back then, I never really thought individually about a single record. A better way to do it would be to think about the depth of performances as the person who cited Bob Beamon points out.

It's certainly not racism. I do think certain countries have a real bad track record for distance running and it's not the US of late. But my gosh, since day one, we've been crucified for allowing the AWest drug talk to continually show up on LRC.

Each case is different. Maybe I'm biased because I've spent some time with her. I don't know. I just think she's clean.

A good statistician would laugh at my use of stats here for the records as if you pick a year or two before or after, the %s change drastically in either way. You could totally manipulate it i bet.

really rojo? wrote:

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

When I was reading about Sage on RW today:

I thought just the opposite, "Man, why don't I hype Sage up all the time in recruiting? He's one of the many truly great rags to riches success stories we've had."

Clearly your post is yet again a time when someone on letsrun mouths off about something they have done zero research on.

1) Sage made NCAAs in xc as an 8:45 3k guy in HS and placed in the 80s I think. We looked up the stats and there wasn't a single American born athlete ahead of him at NCAAs in xc that year who was slower than he was in HS. That's a stat you pretty much can't argue with. He totally was maximimizing his talent. 9:20 + 3200 guys don't place top 100 much anymore at all.

2) The Hanson's have done a great job with him but he wouldn't be with the Hanson's at all probably if I hadn't let him run two marathons while on our team in college. So my allowing him to run has in turn helped him run 2:16. How many kids are allowed to do that in college?

3) He did run 29:45 here. He just is way better suited for the longer stuff.

'It's certainly not racism. I do think certain countries have a real bad track record for distance running'

Which countries are they?

The best country on long distance on the track also has the best record in terms of not failing dope tests

Where does Paula want to run besides berlin? She runs so little and she expects to win Berlin!

Foer me this is a big red flag for Paula, she goes away to train, no build up or lead in races and just pops a huge performance, ten she disapears again. Show me one other elite level athlete who can do this? All of them race before popping world leading half and marathon races not to mention 10k's.

Junk Master your junk is so big.

Frozen blood samples do not mean anything, there is so many ways to dope that is completely not detectable. Other medicines that have half lives of a few hours, the samples will be clear of every trace and no thinkable future apparatus can detect what does not exists.

Radcliffe is very dedicated and trains harder than everybody else, smiles pretty and is from england. This has nothing to do with whether or not anyone use doping.

What i say is not about Radcliffe specifically, and i do not mean to imply she doped, i do not know anything about her case. But i see too many times on letsrun discussion of specific athletes and who is doped or not.

What we know is that doping is widespread in professional sport and more money, more doctors, more science, more fame imply more doping.

The best athletes in the big sport where doping is widespread, either they are supermen or they are dopers with slightly more talent than other dopers. Everyone can believe what they want, but do not bring other irrelevant arguments into the discussion, like dedication to training, how nice this person is, what people tell in interviews how many times they are tested and so on.

What is more interesting is how we can reduce doping in general which is not an easy task. Or should we accept it as a part of the game.

Sir Lance-alot wrote:

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.

You're an idiot if you think it is this simple.

These guys run a running website. Acting like a dick and yelling at the high level pros about doping when you're in a 1-on-1 interview setting would serve zero purpose, except to piss them off and lessen your ability to do the rest of your job.

The Brojos are not in charge of an anti-doping agency, and doping is not their primary nor their sole job; in fact, it is a secondary thing that they support (I believe rightfully) in addition to their primary job of running news.

I am sure you have a boss or coworker you think is lazy. Every time you see that boss, do you tell him "hey, I think you're lazy and you're dragging our company down."? No, because even if it's true, it's not sensible to do that, because you have skin in the game.

Get off your high horse.

Alf Shrubb wrote:

The problem is that all you write is total conjecture.

Yes, in theory, a female runner might pay a couple of male Kenyan runners to pace her all the way.

But it has never happened since - and is unlikely to happen in the future.

You obviously didn't see Noguchi's Berlin Marathon when she was paced all the way to a sub 2:20 time. She was surrounded by men to the extent that you could barely see whether she was was running with them or being carried.

Similar situation when Mikitenko ran her 2:19 at Berlin, male pacemakers there pretty much all the way, although perhaps not quite surrounded in the way you describe with Noguchi.

Sir Lance-alot wrote:

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.

One can't draw ANYTHING from the quick numbers he put up. To the stats 101 crowd: correlation does not equal causation. There are a lot of other facts that came into play in the 90s. Drugs was just one.