Armstronglivs wrote:
rekrunner has long argued that EPO doesn't really enhance performance, and that its use is mainly due to a mistaken "belief" that it does - especially amongst Kenyans, for whom it appears to be part of the national diet. So why would he bother to argue that it may be just as easy to get EPO in other countries, if there is no real reason to be concerned about its use because it isn't really performance performance enhancing? It's like saying, after a particular business is revealed to be on the take, that, "to be fair", everyone is, but no one is making any money from it. The mind of rekrunner is a weird and wonderful thing - particularly when he attempts to cloak his many and varied contradictions in "logic".
If you want to argue against me, it helps to understand what I have long argued.
My arguments about when EPO can work are much more nuanced, and it seems the only way for you to contradict them is to first build a simple to understand universal strawman that does not accurately reflect what I have long argued.
For example, I have long argued that high altitude works. I have often referred to a 1997 Stray-Gundersen study that shows how high altitude works, and recently, used the figures in the study to determine that one of the groups of men improved by as much as 6% over the course of the study, a gain that is similar to less controlled EPO studies.
I have never argued that EPO will not bring the gains to sea-level athletes that high altitude has been demonstrated to bring. And I highly recommend to altitude training as a legal method to any athletes who want to increase their red blood cell count.
I have questioned how much more EPO can help athletes who have already realized high altitude gains.
I have argued that we should expect proportionally smaller gains as talent levels get higher.
I have argued that prevelance is evidence of belief (high correlation), and not sufficient evidence of performance gains (no established correlation with the very best times).
Note the proven prevalence of Kenyans busted for EPO is rather small, as we have recently seen in a WADA study that they are mainly busted for nandralone and cortisone, with EPO a distant third.
But a strong belief that EPO is a good explanation for the top performance gains starting in the 1990s requires to fabricate new explanations as to why the rest of the world could not realize similar gains, for example, suggesting that EPO must be hard to get in other countries. This might be true for isolated countries like the UK, but then how can we explain countries like Russia? You also have to wonder how East Africans who emigrate to other countries are able to rise to the all time top of these countries, or why non-Africans going to Kenya or Ethiopia to "train" cannot close the performance gap.