So wait….is Nick Willis the 2008 Olympic 1500m champion?

Wasn't it well known that the Finns were doping on steroids (as part of a cocktail) in the early 1980s at the latest, with whispers of it going on in the glory years of the early 1970s?

That raises the question -- whose opinion is relevant? I'm happy I made you realize at least one inconsistency in the rules.

Note that what you quoted contains no opinions, but rather three verifiable, or falsifiable, facts: Fact 1) Kiprop was punished; Fact 2) Kiprop has a positive test from 2017; and Fact 3) Kiprop has no positive test from 2008. These are not my personal opinions.

If I do give personal opinions, I usually make the extra effort of supporting them with things of relevance, like verifiable or falsifiable facts, or the opinions of others which are more relevant than mine. Sometimes you call that "wall of text". You can always feel free to disregard my opinions and conclusions, but you should at least try to be consistent with the facts, or factor in the opinions of others with more facts.

When you assume something, is that fact, or opinion? It's like an opinion, treated as if it were a fact, but without any evidence.

It would be a fact to call such assumptions "belief" without evidence. Many such beliefs when combined require a great deal of faith and are needed to form and support myths, and religions.

Furthermore, suggesting that such an assumption is fair -- is that fact, or opinion?

Because I consider your unsupported opinions to be irrelevant.

Some Finns were doping in the 80's and based on my brief time racing in Finland I' think they were doing it earlier. But I don't know for sure or what they were using. We know Vaino got caught. Does this mean Cierpinski's name is really on that list of athletes in the doping program? Of course not. Does it mean his name isn't? Same answer. All I'm saying here is that the idea about steroids among English speaking runners was that they would inhibit a distance runner's performance and not be worth using. It well could be that the East Germans, Russians, Finns, and who knows who else had figured out otherwise.

Have you had a chance to look at any of the links?

Before we can start seriously talking about lifetime bans, forwards and backwards, we need a better system that is transparent, (not for the public -- too much risk of tabloid fodder and confirmation bias), but at least for the accused and his defense, during his/her "trial", and reliable and robust process, such that errors introduced by the lab will be independently caught by design.

Someone said earlier that at least we "know Kiprop doped", but after reading the details of these other cases, and how some of this "evidence", which apparently shows that during the WADA testing in the WADA lab, EPO leaked from a reference sample bleeding into the athlete's sample in the next lane, was not made available to the athlete, as WADA forbids the labs to make this raw data available, but only the conclusions in a summary report, and the difficulty of getting "independent" lab reviews, as most experts work in the WADA labs, and the WADA labs are forbidden to be critical of other WADA labs.

Maybe one improvement is a strong athlete's union, who will act in the best interest of all athletes, and develop its own base of legal precedents and scientific references.