rekrunner wrote:
You still seem to misunderstand the subject of my posts. I didn't raise issues with the study, but your misrepresentations. I accepted the data from the surveys, and the discussion in the study about the impacts of non-compliance. I also accept the "general picture" that among IAAF athletes, doping prevalence is high, and that doping convictions are low. I accepted among Arab athletes, across 28 sports, prevalence is even higher.
My points were correcting wrong statements that came from you, which were not "findings of surveys and research", and which attributed findings, and events, to wrong parties.
These misstatements are easily fixed (initially you just had to modify two words out of twelve), while maintaining "the general picture" of doping prevalence and convictions. Don't blame me for demonstrating that your statements and depictions of real findings are wrong. By insisting on being wrong, you do yourself, your credibility, anti-doping, and the sport a disservice.
Armstronglivs wrote:
Rekrunner, you work very hard to dismiss the findings of surveys and research which depict serious levels of doping in the sport. Are you seeking to persuade yourself (or others?) that the problem doesn't exist?
The detailed objections you might make to the Tubingen/Harvard survey of IAAF events can only at best qualify our perceptions of its findings. The general picture remains the same. I say that, too, because the survey is not the only information we have about doping. There are many different sources that can tell us about doping, and for myself I include amongst them my contacts over the years with professional sportsmen, coaches, physios and anti-doping officials. Published research of an academic nature cannot tell us everything about a subject that is essentially clandestine. Dopers don't make it a practice to tell the world what they are up to. The interesting thing about the survey (which you somewhat pedantically insist is not an IAAF survey, even though it included IAAF athletes) is that the athletes themselves admitted what they were doing - but only so they couldn't be identified. Whether we can rely upon the 57% figure given, or whether it is in fact somewhat less or more, it is still information that can't be ignored, and more or less confirms what so many other disparate sources are saying: doping is endemic in elite sport in most countries. We can add, that it often occurs with the collusion of sports governance bodies (Renee Anne Shirley, the Jamaican whistleblower.) To deny that is to enable it to continue.
Humbug. My initial comment was one sentence referring to an "IAAF survey", because it was of IAAF athletes and had to be undertaken with IAAF approval; that it was not actually authored by the IAAF is not of critical importance; it is the findings of the survey and that are significant. Readers of this blog are unlikely to care that it was undertaken by Tubingen/Harvard.
My main point was that the survey revealed a 57% doping rate of elite or championship athletes (again, the distinction between those two terms is not critical in this context.) Your pedantic criticisms appear little more than an attempt to undermine the import of the survey. You could have simply added clarifying points. But you did not. Despite what you subsequently protest, that is not someone who acknowledges the sport has a serious doping problem. If you are now back-tracking and saying there are indeed issues of doping, put your money where your mouth is. If you don't think it is 1 in 2 elite athletes who are doping, as the survey indicated, then how many is it - 1 in 3?4? 20? But I don't think you will put a figure on it because you don't want to admit elite distance running is part of the doping problem today, like most other major professional sports.