Now it gets interesting, Zane Robertson's ex-girlfriend Betty Desalegn (Jama Aden athlete) is busted for Biological Passport

These medal winners often include slower runners, and the selection process, limiting athletes by country, often excludes faster runners from deep nations. This would make any speculation about impacts on best performances even less clear. I don't doubt that female sprinters taking steroids, like Marion Jones benefited from doping. I don't doubt that slower runners, might achieve even higher magnitudes of change, according to some diminishing returns as you get faster. Part of the discussion is how EPO and blood doping might offer less and less improvement, as you get faster.

OK then. It looks like Spain is the best example of what is possible when you take EPO. They took EPO, they got it right, and they won loads of medals for 10 years. Nobody did it better. And yet, how many of them ran sub-3:29 (1500m), sub-8:00 (steeple), sub-13:00 (5000m), sub-27:00 (10000m), sub-60:00 (half marathon), and sub 2:07 (marathon)? Cacho ran sub-3:29, and Alemayehu Bezabeh Desta (Ethiopian Spaniard) ran 12:57. Anyone else?

That's fine for "honest" countries. What about dishonest countries? What excuse do you have for countries like Russia, Ukraine, Turkey, Greece, Bulgaria, Belarus -- countries with a high prevalence of athletes with "suspicious" blood values, in the leaked database. We know the story of the Russian women taking cocktails with steroids. But what about the men?

Subway Surfers Addiction wrote:

➡roids, testosterone, stimulants and just for Bad Wigins, amphetamines. As "high octane doping" posted above those taking EPO were often on a muscle sandwich as well, so half the fun was potentially taken away. In the honest countries that brought in testing early, their athletes may have been fearful that EPO might soon be traceable and sanctions would be back dated. EPO wasn't detectable until 1999 in the TDF so that is correct but for many westerners runners the pay was so crap why would they risk killing themselves on epo for $30k p.a. That same amount was a bonanza in 3rd world countries. Nonetheless athletes in countries doing basic testing were at a disadvantage to athletes doing absolutely no testing.

now here is a thought for you reeknessrunner

how popular is distance running in kenya?

i know for a fact in the US and europe it is bottom of the barrel in popularity. back in the 70s a lot of the top talent in europe was in track and field, now they are only getting b rated scrubs. your arguments show just how ignorant or completely f*cking stupid you are.

EPO did work for the guys in europe who were using it, but your dumba$$ thinks that they didnt do it as good as kenya or some other worthless argument. so to help out your 3rd grade education level i will dumb this down for you the best i can, are you ready?

kenya has a larger % of their top athletes running distance

europe has b rated scrubs as their top athletes in distance running.....your still following? good cause i dont want to lose you i know this will be super hard for your feeble mind to handle

EPO gives the running apprx 3-4% , some guys get 2% others get 6%....get over it life isnt fair.

so if we do the average of 4% gain you will see that doing it right or wrong is the dumb attitude to have. doing simple math isnt that hard, the problem is you and others have this belief that this runner and that runners prs are clean. but if you think ok this guy improved by this amount (3-4%) and you go and look at other runners and think "well if they are on the sauce, all i have to do is subtract 3-4% and find out what they would be running clean"

its not that hard, kiprop runs 3:26 on sauce, if you subtract 4% improvement he is a 3:34 mid....and his best time for this year? 3:33.17...yeah yeah yeah i know he was going through a lot of things, i had nothing to do with him getting off the sauce cause of rosa, aden etc.

so we have ramzi 3:29.14, now lets see if a reduction of 4% gives us his times of 3:37 post bust and 3:39 pre explosion...well lets do the math you little tip touchers

hmmm i came up with 3:37.5 as a 4% reduction from his 3:29.14...ok so lets take a look at cahco, his pr was 3:28.95, so before i go look on his iaaf profile page im going to do the 4% reduction. i get a 3:37.31.

so what you refuse to accept is the kenyans who are 3:33-34 guys naturally run 3:26-7 on the sauce, and the best b rated euros are 3:38-9 guys and can maybe get down to 3:30 on the sauce. what was mo before his 3:28 speed? my guess 3:37 range. retardo can lie through his teeth all he wants, you take a 3-4% reduction on the 3k on up to the marathon and it matches very closesly to what the PRs were in the late 80s before EPO hit the running scene.

jim ryun 3:33.1 was his best, now you give him a 4% increase and what does he run? 3:26's

pre ran 13:21.87 give him a 4% increase and he is a 12:48, but i suspect he was prob blood doping and steroids so maybe he would only get a 2% improvement, or maybe he was a 12:48 guy on EPO, he was def more talented than pharmaceutical boy rupp when he was in HS and rupp on sauce could only manage sub 13.

lets take kb's 5k, 12:37.35, and give him a 4% reduction, my guess is it will be right around 12:55ish

i came up with a 13:07.2...hmmm ronos WR was 13:06.20......

whatever im tired now, EPO doesnt work, if it did work the euros would have run just as fast as the east africans, but since they didnt it proves east africans are clean, epo doesnt work....doesnt work on euros or africans...so lets drop it from the banned list

Mr. Obvious wrote:

He has claimed that he has hundreds of data points of blood tests on elite athletes which would support his contention that EPO would not work. He promised that he would post all of them. That was back in May (I have been asking him to provide them for several years, but he actually promised that he would post them in May). He will occasionally post a couple of numbers from specific athletes but this has extremely limited value in looking for systematic effects.

He either does not have this information or that information does not say what he alleges it says.

Claiming that he has evidence and then failing to provide any evidence undermines everything he says.

+1

rekrunner wrote:

We know the story of the Russian women taking cocktails with steroids.

But what about the men?

C'mon rekrunner...you're getting a little slack on your research. ? The Russian men are all into race walking. They feel they can be more competitive than trying to run against the East African juggernaut. Nonetheless, they, like their female running compatriots, have a huge appetite for EPO. ??

If you really wanted to see the effects of EPO, you would compare EPO-Spain with pre-EPO-Spain and maybe ABP-Spain.

If you want to learn about culture and talent and history, compare Spain with Kenia.

Check out Cacho's last lap in Barcelona, the fasted last lap we have on record (certainly for anything big) even faster than Centro's in Rio, off a quicker pace.

?

? Russia has not be strong in men's track running over the last 40 years at any distance. But check out their walkers.

rekrunner wrote:

Alemayehu Bezabeh Desta (Ethiopian Spaniard) ran 12:57. Anyone else?

Unfortunate that you mention Bezabeh - he was caught by the Spanish police infusing his own blood in the Galgo operation during the same year that he ran 12:57 :

"He confessed to his involvement in the alleged doping ring after having been surprised by the Guardia Civil in the company of the top Spanish coach Manuel Pascua Piqueras and the retired competitive mountain-biker Alberto León, when he was caught red-handed carrying a bag of his own blood which he was intending to use for an illegal autotransfusion to improve his athletic performance."

For other Spanish distance atheltes who will doubtless not be good engough for you, here are a few:

Isaac Viciosa - first European to run under 7:30 for 3K

Alberto Garcia - 13:02 5000m

Reyes Estevez 3-30.5 1500m (in a major champ final after heats and semis -how many have run faster in these circumstances - 2?)

Andres Diaz 3-31 1500m (3-31.8 in a major champ final)

Anyway we pretty much know that these guys were all blood doping/using EPO. You do not know whether the guys running faster than them were using EPO so using their world rankings in terms of time as an argument is sort of pointless. As has bean repeatedly pointed out you have to look at how the individual ahtlete improved when they started taking EPO ...

Subway Surfers Addiction wrote:

Check out Cacho's last lap in Barcelona, the fasted last lap we have on record (certainly for anything big) even faster than Centro's in Rio, off a quicker pace.

?

Spaniards at the top wrote:

Subway Surfers Addiction wrote:

Check out Cacho's last lap in Barcelona, the fasted last lap we have on record (certainly for anything big) even faster than Centro's in Rio, off a quicker pace.

?

https://youtu.be/AiqPRpKVY5E

I've got him going through 1100m in 2:49.7 (so c. 50.4, what a rubbish split).

Does the last 100m in 12.4s while celebrating for last 10m and decelerating. According to Venti's analysis, 12.4s, carry the 1, minus 0.2s gives Cacho:

Based on 50.4

44.0

1:38.8

3:23.99

7:18.7

12:38.8

26:37.7

As you can see Spain did have good runners during this period.

I feel honored that you abuse me like you would Renato, giving me cute nicknames in line with your mentality, but I don't deserve such high praise. When you say "I know", usually what follows is not "knowledge", in the primary sense of the word. Your analysis looks great when you can chose the "clean" numbers you want. Europeans ran less than 1% faster than their pre-EPO predecessors. That should be a pretty reliable indicator of the impact of the addition of EPO on the sport. I wouldn't expect that number to be higher for East Africans, as a result of EPO or blood doping. So your 3-4% boils down to less than 1% EPO, and 2-3% real talent. (See what you can do when you are free to make up numbers and causes?) WADA should still ban it because of other WADA sports like cycling and race-walking. But distance running athletes should self-ban from EPO and blood-doping because it is failing them.

mindweak wrote:

now here is a thought for you reeknessrunner

how popular is distance running in kenya?

i know for a fact ...

whatever im tired now, EPO doesnt work, if it did work the euros would have run just as fast as the east africans, but since they didnt it proves east africans are clean, epo doesnt work....doesnt work on euros or africans...so lets drop it from the banned list

Just the same, why look at medal winners when I can look at best times to get better quality data. Selectors do chose to leave their best at home (see links below), and it is their fault. But why should their poor selection cause me to make the same poor selection?

Subway Surfers Addiction wrote:

↔➡this is hardly a good excuse, countries can take three athletes, if they choose to leave one at home who would have medaled that is their own fault. And actually it is the world champs that allows the defending champion a free entry that gives say the Kenyan 1500m men the ability to use team tactics, a massive advantage that you do not see at the Olympics.

rekrunner wrote:"Part of the discussion is how EPO and blood doping might offer less and less improvement, as you get faster."

↔➡actually this is a reasonable discussion point.

As always, I'm talking about distance running. Why look to cycling and walking to explain running? I can only guess because there are not enough good running examples, we need to borrow from other sports to get real world evidence. It looks like even the Russian Ministry of Sports knows what this forum doesn't -- that doping the men runners would not work. Unless they also tried it, and it just failed to work. I think the recent history of Russia gives a good indication of where doping works -- or at least where they believed it would work.

Everyone's looking for an edge wrote:

C'mon rekrunner...you're getting a little slack on your research. ? The Russian men are all into race walking. They feel they can be more competitive than trying to run against the East African juggernaut. Nonetheless, they, like their female running compatriots, have a huge appetite for EPO. ??

Why unfortunate? I find it fortunate. I've already conceded that Spain is the best example of EPO success. Blood doping Ethiopian-Spaniard Bezabeh ran a 5K faster than all of the best EPO-blood doping Spaniards. Wow! We've agreed that Spain of 1992-2003 is the best example of the success of EPO, among non-Africans nations. Maybe we can include Julio Rey's marathon of 2006 (faster than his doping disqualified time from 1999). Then, comparing times of the 80s to this Spanish golden era of 1992-2003, or 2006, should give us some kind of reasonable upper bound of the impact of EPO had on the sport. The main problem with looking at individual improvements is, you cannot look at what you cannot measure. We cannot reliably measure both a best "clean" performance potential, versus a best "EPO" performance potential for a single individual. Methods from great analysts like "mindweak" suffer from selection bias. Furthermore, it's not what EPO studies do: EPO studies don't compare "best clean" times to "best EPO" times. They typically look at short term changes after one cycle for populations where their current and final state of training is uncontrolled and unknown. EPO studies with control groups (this excludes the Kenyan and Glasgow studies that produce numbers like 3-6%) compare the average of a population of EPO subjects to the average of a population of the control group. In the real world, we should compare EPO populations with populations using legal techniques like high-low altitude training, also proven effective in similar short term studies. Now, if we chose a different measure, the evolution of race times for different generations, we can work with data that is completely known. It's a different conversation, but the data is undeniable, because it is recorded history for the global population for the history of time. We can make a long list of environmental reasons why differences are not bigger, e.g. doping in the 80s, popularity, video games, fast food, etc. But it is not negotiable that universally non-African male populations progressed less than 1% in virtually all distance events (except half-marathon), since EPO was added as a variable to the sport, over two decades until the ABP. Then we can look at claims that EPO can cause individual improvements of 2%, 3%, 4%, or 6% improvement, for elite athletes producing best times, and ask ourselves, what did we see in the real world? Then we can ask ourselves, why did we only see large improvements in tiny regions in East Africa, and a handful of North Africans, when EPO was available everywhere, and untestable for a decade? What did the rest of the world do wrong? Spain was doping with EPO and succeeding. Yet, why did Spain -- the best example we can find, still fall so far behind the best of the East?

Team Sky's rounder wheels wrote:

rekrunner wrote:

Alemayehu Bezabeh Desta (Ethiopian Spaniard) ran 12:57. Anyone else?

Unfortunate that you mention Bezabeh - he was caught by the Spanish police infusing his own blood in the Galgo operation during the same year that he ran 12:57 :

...

Anyway we pretty much know that these guys were all blood doping/using EPO. You do not know whether the guys running faster than them were using EPO so using their world rankings in terms of time as an argument is sort of pointless. As has bean repeatedly pointed out you have to look at how the individual ahtlete improved when they started taking EPO ...

Times can be distorted by a few tracks in certain geographic locations. Going by times, Mo is only competitive over 2 miles and 1500m, because there was a period known as the "the epo era" don't forget! ?

Can we stop this dopey conversation and go back to the topic of the thread?

My question is, is it really getting interesting that Zane Robertson's ex-girlfriend Betty Desalegn (Jama Aden athlete) is busted for Biological Passport?

Because no one seems all that interested.

Now that the Catalonian government is dismantled, and Spain has is back in control, will Aden go free?