Three more Kenyan runners busted

I defended what? At that time, you said "potentially lethal" contradicting your own source. Don't conflate me pointing out your mischaracterizations with a defense of a coach breaking German law. Here is how I explained the it last time you lied about me:

"I attacked your characterization, "in the interest of factual correctness", while remaining silent about Beyer, Straub and "the coach". You described it as "feeding potentially lethal peds to one of his 14 year old girl athletes", inconsistent with your sources. I counted 4 inconsistencies in that single phrase alone. I did not say anything about Beyer and Straub, and I did not condone the coach breaking German law. It's not surprising that your "reflex" is to concoct more lies."

Most people fluent in English understand what is meant by "rife" and "rampant". I see you aren't one of them.

To say Kenyan doping (I notice you confine yourself to blood-doping only, as you attempt to shift the goal-posts) is about "average" (amongst whom - Russia and Turkey or New Zealand or Iceland?) is to firstly minimize Kenya's established doping problem and secondly to concede that it is nonetheless a problem because doping worldwide is a problem.

Way to raise the scientific bar.

Your five-point argument proving EPO doesn't work for Russians makes me think you are a Russian doping apologist.

How many gold you beat if they enforce Test controls in Ethiopia?

We would see them at the top in World Indoor medals like in 2022?

Is it normal in a 115 millions country, they have only 10 cases?

1. I doubt that either of the physiologists I know, or maybe any physiologists, have actually enhanced the performance of a real athlete by doping that athlete. If they did they wouldn't really be able to tell anyone about it anyway. and even if they could acknowledge what they did it still would not be conclusive because they'd have no way of knowing what that athlete would have done had they not been doped. But lots of people know what EPO does, whether it enhances athletic performance or not and the physiologists I asked about this said the idea that there can be a very small and select group of people for whom it doesn't work the same as it does on everyone else is nonsense. And again, if Renato really wants this idea taken as gospel it would help if he cited some knowledgeable people to confirm this idea. Maybe there are some and I've missed them but this is a subject where he has a serious vested interest in promoting the idea that the athletes he's working with, the ones getting the maximum results, are doing it because of their abilities and his coaching and not from PEDS.

2. There are people who have looked at the doping issue and believe that drugs really don't improve performance of competitive athletes. Jon Orange used to come here frequently, sometimes under different names, and make that argument.That's a separate discussion. It is probably impossible to prove conclusively that doping does or does not aid individual performances because you cannot do experiments with control groups. You just have to look at what a drug does and assume it can help an athlete taking it improve performances, e.g., steroids make muscles bigger, bigger muscles can lift heavier weights, so it's logical to conclude that weight lifters would be able to lift heavier weights is they use steroids.

3. Renato has not used the word "know" as far as I can see. But his comments about EPO not helping the performances of top athletes who are at altitude and training properly are, from how he writes, presented as fact. He doesn't say "I believe..." or "In my opinion...". etc.

My superior fluency in English is why I can say these terms are highly subjective.

Similarly, saying "Kenya has a doping problem" conveniently avoids specifying the scale of the problem, also leaving it subject to wide interpretation.

If you haven't yet nailed down the size of the problem, you cannot say I am minimizing it.

To be completely transparent, I've only seen prevalence data by country for blood doping. This should be sufficient to address the goalpost of "EPO works for Kenyans".

Feel free to assume the goalpost of "steroids works for Kenyans" is as yet undisputed.

Average is "global average" amongst all athletes from all IAAF countries.

Can you please quantify your superior fluency in English? Against which metric are you measuring your fluency?

Or is it superior to others in a passive aggressive way? I'd argue that thems fightin' words, son.

I too have a superior fluency in English, but if I am not mindful of editing or taking the time to think about what I am saying (perhaps in a heated debate), I am capable of not displaying superior fluency in English and therefore, regardless of how I profess my superiority, there is evidence that I am not. And hence doubt enters.

So, are you always superior in English with your fluency? Do you have an education in English? Like a PhD?

Not to take away from the debate about whether or not Kenya has a doping problem, but that is a balls-out statement. Also, it can be taken as having racial bias, or classism, or good old arrogance.

Command of the English language (probably any language) has regional idiosyncrasies. So much so, that In England, you can walk a few blocks and hear different accents. Growing up in the same house as two siblings, I can tell you that I sound different than by brother and sister and you wouldn't think that we are related....how is that? Not jus tone and timber, but more command and ability to make a point. Saying that, I will say as little as possibly with the expectation that implied commentary is sorted out by the listener; absorbed and understood. That's mildly arrogant and can be construed to mean I do not have superior fluency.

My next door neighbour, raised in the same town, similar age, same economic situation sounds different than I do. His phrases and colloquialisms are blue collar, mine are white collar. Who's is superior?

At the end of the day, Kenya appears to have a doping problem. And one reason that they are being testing so much is not just their superior depth of talent, but because they are rated as a category-A country in the testing realm and to be category-A doesn't necessarily indicate depth of talent, but at risk of cheating.

...and I just made about 10 errors in my post about superior English (mostly because to me, chatting on here is casual convo, brah)....

Wet Coast, you just don't have any nuance to your characterization of Kenya.

Kenya does have a doping problem. You'd have your head in the sand if you suggested otherwise. However, it doesn't mean what you say it is.

To whit:

A) Kenya doesn't have a state-sponsored and organized doping regimen like Russia and others (this has been investigated)

B) Kenya's increased scrutiny as a category A country with expanded OOC testing/anti-doping efforts has not resulted in any significant drop in performances

C) This is at complete odds with countries like Russia, Morocco, Algeria and Turkey which have seen their elite ranks completely decimated in the last 5 years

D) Most of the Kenyan doping positives appear to be random and sporadic, these are often Tier B/C athletes who aren't part of a group, or once Tier A athletes who have completely lost form

E) Whereabouts is a greater problem in other countries, but it seems to be more of a cultural phenomenon than doping phenomenon in some cases as athletes who aren't competing/are retired get sanctioned

F) At the top of the heap in Kenya, some 60 1500 and up athletes part of the AIU RTP and faces extra OOC tests due to Kenya's status and extra anti-doping efforts. And yet, there has not been a star drug bust since Asbel Kiprop and Jemima Sumgong.

G) If you want to say this is because Kenyans have become so sophisticated at doping at the highest level, sure say it but just note there's no reason to think athletes of all countries wouldn't be able to do the exact same thing and we'd have no idea.

Thanks HRE for the thoughtful responses and bearing with me this far.

1) There was another "without doping" half to that question. Keep in mind that post Sondre Moen, Renato broadened his opinion expanding it beyond this previously "small and select group of people" to include non-Africans like Moen. I think the way to make sense of EPO and RBC is as an optimization problem and anything beyond an optimal point starts making you slower. If your HcT is 90% would you expect to run your fastest? We know from decades of high altitude training studies and experience that the "sweet spot" of training is +/- 8000 ft (2400m). The alitude of Iten is 2400m. Which scientist/physiologist has looked at athletes already highly trained at altitude at the start of the study, and the subsequent gain from supplementing that with more EPO? Another question -- if altitude studies show 3-5% short term gains and EPO studies show 3-5% short term gains, and an athlete improves in the short term by 3-5% -- did he dope?

2) Jon tries to look at it from a physiological point of view, with very limited success. Seeing that physiological models can quickly become quite complicated, I thought it would be simpler to look at it from an all time historical performances point of view looking for general trends (albeit also with very limited success). Starting from an assumption that "EPO works for everyone", on the order of 3-5%, we should be able to identify the effect in all populations taking EPO, and not just a few tribes in the Rift Valley. We just saw this universal impact immediately with the 4% shoes. Otherwise, the discussion is like concluding falling trees make noise, but no one is ever within earshot.

3) In this thread, "Wet Coast" just pointed us to a 2012 interview (scroll back to page 6) where Renato says "I continue to think ..." and "I don’t have any proof about this". However strongly worded it is stated elsewhere, without such qualifiers, there is no new proof since 2012, and the only change to what he thinks, was to include athletes like Sondre Moen.

The ironic thing is Ngeny was coached and managed by Kim McDonald, training pretty much exclusively in London. So, if you want to say one of the greatest training groups of all time literally presided over by British athletics royalty was a doping fraud go for it. Just know you've implicated many of your heroes by association.

To this point, consider the following.

Managed by Kim McDonald: Steve Ovett, John Walker, Liz McColgan, Greta Waitz, Marcus O'Sullivan, John Treacy and many more

Managed and Coached by Kim McDonald: Sonia O'Sullivan, Peter Elliott, Bob Kennedy, and of course all the athletes athletes you would separately single out for insane doping.

Fair point -- I can't post edit, but I'll withdraw the fighting word "superior" and replace it with "mother tongue" and let my posts speak for any superiorness of my fluency.

What do you think of the passive aggressiveness and arrogance of Armstronglivs' "Most people fluent in English understand what is meant by "rife" and "rampant". I see you aren't one of them."?

My response should be seen against the metric of being excluded from "most people".

As a native English speaker, would you agree that terms like "rife" and "rampant" are not terms that meaningfully quantify the size of the problem in a uniformly understandable away? How much is "too much"? When does a doping problem become small enough not to be rife or rampant?

I think the "Category-A" label is also largely misunderstood, because it is often briefly described as a "most at risk of doping". When you look at the AIU criteria for the different categories, and the "Rule 15" which describes the obligations of the different categories, this is not just a simple raw assessment of national doping and "risk of cheating", but a combined assessment of the number and nature of doping positives and whether the National Federation is doing enough to combat these with respect to the anti-doping objectives of whereabouts, testing, and education.

1. I doubt that either of the physiologists I know, or maybe any physiologists, have actually enhanced the performance of a real athlete by doping that athlete. If they did they wouldn't really be able to tell anyone about it anyway. and even if they could acknowledge what they did it still would not be conclusive because they'd have no way of knowing what that athlete would have done had they not been doped. But lots of people know what EPO does, whether it enhances athletic performance or not and the physiologists I asked about this said the idea that there can be a very small and select group of people for whom it doesn't work the same as it does on everyone else is nonsense. And again, if Renato really wants this idea taken as gospel it would help if he cited some knowledgeable people to confirm this idea. Maybe there are some and I've missed them but this is a subject where he has a serious vested interest in promoting the idea that the athletes he's working with, the ones getting the maximum results, are doing it because of their abilities and his coaching and not from PEDS

You doubt any physiologist actually enhanced the performance of a real athlete by doping that athlete. I'm with you, nobody tried.

But I have NO DOUBTS that they NEVER studied the effect of advanced and proper training (the training of the best athletes, volume, intensity, modulation, rest, recovery, etc...) of REAL TOP ATHLETES, and for that reason cannot have any clue about the effect of blood doping
WITH ATHLETES FOLLOWING FOR LONG PERIODS MODERN ADVANCED TRAINING IN ALTITUDE.

This is the reason because what physiologists say about blood manipulation for top athletes can't have credibility : they continue to study the effect of doping on the performances WITHOUT including in their studies the variable TRAINING, that absolutely don't know (otherwise never can exist stupid researches like the one of Pitsiladis with 15 kenyan boys and 15 scottish boys for demonstrating something everybody knows at that level (EPO can improve the performance of NOT TRAINED athletes), or consider Elite athletes 40 min far from the WR in Marathon, or consider "well trained" athletes who run 5 days per week one hour easy...).

The subject of their studies is not the same of their final reference when they want to apply to the best athletes the same parameters. It's like to study how to better a Fiat 500, and after to apply the same parameter to a Formula One.

For that reason, I don't care about physiologists who have nothing to do with training, and my convinctions are based on what I know many top athletes did in training (not only athletes whom I coach or coached, but athletes coached by other coach, too).

This doesn't mean some top athlete can use doping, but this only one time (the case of Abraham Kiptum) helped one athlete to reach the top of the World (and in 3 years only we could see how much improvement there was, in a event clearly still far from the possibilities of the best current specialists).

What are you saying? That you don't believe the low number of violations in Ethiopia and they should be catching more cheats? Based on what? Is it normal that there are virtually no cases in Western Europe and North America?

Some additional thoughts:

- the primary language of anti-doping is English and French. To what extent are nationals of most countries prejudiced by relying on the level of support from their national federation? How many Americans would end up committing procedural errors if all the official correspondence was in Sasak?

- to add to F), athletes that win more "in competition" are tested more "IC".

Just to expand on the Pitsiladis study -- these Kenyans had already run performances which suggests an 8-minute potential capability for 3000m.

Yet in the study, the Kenyans "tempo'd" the first time trial around 9:20 (predicted marathon pace), then sped up with EPO to around 9:00 (predicted half-marathon pace).

Hypothesis -- Pitsiladis' coaching is so bad that he needs to use EPO to get 64 minute semi-marathon and 2:12 marathon athletes to run 3000m at their half-marathon pace.

I think rife and rampant are words used to describe volume in an expressive way so that one gets the picture. So, if doping is rife or rampant in any country, then it's a "lot." How much? Well, I am not sure I care about that so much as the fact that we have a problem. Each doper should be banned (and therefore treated equally and fairly according to the rules). So, I suppose that suggests one doper is one doper too many. No to doping.

I have nothing personally against Kenya. Every Kenyan that I have met, I have walked away either liking that person or the experience was positive. I also, can't blame Kenyans or any third world athletes from trying so hard to win, when it means everything, not just as an emotional thing, but a life circumstances change. The very old notion of "no professionalism" in athletics (and other sports) was about the wealthy not having to work so hard to beat a man who has nothing to lose. This is a distorted, perhaps perverted manifestation of that. It's also arrogant. But how can a middle-class North American be as desperate as someone who can't afford shoes in a country where the government can't even help them. Here, you can take a year off of work and get paid 55% of your gross annual income.....you know to "find yourself," if needed.

If 2:06:44 was the world record in the marathon right now, we would think that it is outrageous and only the most talented, well-coached and hungry athlete could run that fast. And that would be good enough, for now. We wouldn't know 2:01:39.

But there is the part of me that looks at athletics and wonders if we have even tapped the world's talent. Out of 7.5 billion humans, a tiny amount of them run consistently. A very small percentage of those people train seriously. A very small percentage of those who train seriously, train as methodically, seriously and are that well-coached. Fewer still are at the top-rung of the talent food chain. So, on the one hand, perhaps times will drop much more....over time....WHAT if one billion people training like Kipchoge and Kosgei in some sort of crazy global training experiment? We can only wildly imagine the talent that would emerge.

But to be fair to life as we know it. As the rules are at this time. It is wrong to take performance enhancing drugs to earn money, awards, records and scholarships because those who choose not to take performance enhancing drugs will likely lose. Kenya has had +/- 80-ish athletes in and out of suspension for one reason or another over the past couple of years. Perhaps the exact same level of testing should take place in Ethiopia and we will see that just like in Russia, it is rife and it is rampant.