Sunday Mail Has More Details on Paula's Blood Values and Off Scores + News She'll Put up £1m for an MRI lie detector

Was there any doubt that the IAAF was corrupt? Was money not changing hands to cover up drug positives.

How do you not know that these " experts " were not part of the corruption?

The Guardian:

"A spokesperson for the Sunday Times said their reporting of doping in athletics had been “responsible and accurate”.

“The information we relied on was not stolen and we were assisted in interpreting the data by two of the world’s leading blood doping experts. We reject any suggestion that we have pressurised any athlete to publish blood data,” the newspaper said in a statement."

The real experts interpreted the data.

Plan B and the Saugybottom Boys.

Which department do guys work for?

Here\'s your IAAF expert... http://www.cyclingnews.com/news/swiss-lab-director-confirms-meeting-bruyneel-and-armstrong-over-suspect-samples/

You ask if there is any doubt that the iaaf was corrupt. Abso-bloody-lutely! Iaaf had / has some governance / structural weaknesses. But Wada has determined that the corruption was linked to diack and his cronies, not to anyone else.

larkimm wrote:

But Wada has determined that the corruption was linked to diack and his cronies, not to anyone else.

How a corrupted organization like WADA can determine that the corruption was only linked to DIACK and a few of his close affiliates? Seriously?

The IAAF is in a worst position now that the UCI was some 15 years ago! And Coe has no will to clean up the shop!

larkimm wrote:

I've been back and just re-read the IAAF's rebuttal where, to be honest, they put themselves in the firing line by specifically defending Paula (in fact, specifically declaring her innocent which is a bold statement to make).

Having re-read it, I do think they go too far in asserting her innocence, and perhaps that's what riles some here. They should have instead asserted that, irrespective of whether this was Paula R or AN Nobody, the outcome of each of their investigations would have given an athlete what the IAAF has to consider to be plausible explanations for the unusual blood results, and with the IAAF having rEPO tested the urine too, no further conclusions can be drawn.

Absolutely. It all smacks of 'looking after one of our own'.

I don't see the IAAF going out of their way to support other athletes in this way.

Ok. In Oversimplified. I can go find the three groups but Rekrunner- tell me again what you mean when you say you agree we need more context but then come back and say three independent groups reviewed, cleared, and moved on. Also, I am not saying Paula is legally required to release anything because of her past actions. She is completely in the clear.I am saying it's hard to take her seriously as a leader in the sport given her past actions. I would take her more seriously if she worked with people like Ashenden and Tucker to review the record and educate the public. I don't need to see the scores . We don't really need you or rjm33 to analyze them. I would like the context from people like Tucker and Ashenden. She could be clean but this course of action is odd given her past statements.

larkimm wrote:

You ask if there is any doubt that the iaaf was corrupt. Abso-bloody-lutely! Iaaf had / has some governance / structural weaknesses. But Wada has determined that the corruption was linked to diack and his cronies, not to anyone else.

I don't think WADA can know with absolute certainty who was involved and who was not.

Nobody, for instance, knows whether Coe:

1) was actively part of the corruption

2) knew of it and turned a blind eye

3) or simply had no idea about what was going on.

I personally believe it's #2, but that's pure speculation on my part, based on his behaviour and comments to date (his Nike contract, the award of major games to NOP, "declaration of war", FIFA ethics committee, etc.).

When Infantino got elected to replace Blatter, I'm sure many thought that he was a ray of light, a break from the corrupt past. But it's not looking great for him now.

If Coe upholds the Russia ban for the Olympics, he will go up in my estimation and I will get back some feeling of hope that PED usage can be attenuated.

Ross Tucker wrote:

What Radcliffe needed to do was to provide the context to those tests, all the answers and then we could have taken the discussion forward. She didn't, and Ashenden for his part wouldn't comment any further on the specifics, so it reached a stalemate.

Why should we rely on Paula's testimony? That seems like the least objective way to proceed. Isn't she just going to trot out all the possible reasons why her blood readings might be subject to such fluctuation?

That's stalemate also, as nobody is going to declare her innocent based on her explanations.

We also know that in the weeks running up to Vilamoura, Paula did in fact race in the UK, and was at a race in the UK on 7th September. The IAAF report states she "came down three weeks before the race". Either she went back to altitude after that for a further week (possible) or the three weeks fact is incorrect. Again, we don't know where this fact was established from, and I don't know if a journo has pursued the IAAF on this.

I would be extraordinarily surprised if the IAAF had deliberately put in the public domain facts which are verifiably wrong by keyboard warriors such as myself. But I'm not so naive as to imagine that it isn't a possibility, I just consider that it is not the most likely possibility (mistake, other facts we don't know, etc etc are higher possibilities I believe).

It's already been noted, a long, long way ago on this thread, that she was basically not at altitude for a minimum of 5 weeks before the race (she was at the Great North Run 2 weeks before and then raced each of the weekends before that). So basically her own original statement

and the IAAF report were totally incorrect.

Paula's explanation fails many basic fact checks? I wonder why someone's whose reputation was on the line could not be bothered to, you know, check facts about their own life.

Huh.

The IAAF document is a very weird document.

I can't understand why a supposedly neutral organisation should be coming to an almost foaming-at-the-mouth defence of an individual athlete. I get the fact that people within the organisation wanted to defend the testing that they had been doing, and to demonstrate that not everyone lower down the organisation was corrupt. But the one-sided, biased and at times plain wrong summary about Paula is just bad. (Plus the content of this was being leaked to Paula so she & Octagon could plan their own media interviews to coincide with this document)

Point 5.5.3 in the report states that she was at altitude (incorrect) but then also says "In relation to the relatively low RET% value of 0.47, two points need to be made. First, research has shown that endurance athletes display significantly lower RET% than normal during the competitive season". Can someone comment on this? Surely for a marathon runner who is running big volumes all year round this is rubbish

Finally some sanity on the thread in contrast to the trolling of rekrunner and the increasing insanity of rjm (please can we have the old, informative one back?). If it is Ross Tucker, I think people on here would be grateful if someone influential in the real world (i.e. you) would try and remind the public that the WADA report did NOT clear Paula Radcliffe of all allegations (see a headline and sub-heading here:

)

but rather cleared the IAAF of standing by and not following up suspicious blood tests - i.e. they did carry out urine tests for EPO based on intelligence from suspicious blood values. This is two very different things!

Paula DID have suspicious blood values (that's why she was being tested repeatedly around this period), the value in 2012 DID get referred to a panel for consideration (still don't know why there were 12 experts looking at this value - and why 1 of those experts concluded that it DID show that she was taking drugs).

Can somebody also ask her about her use of Actovegin and whether she things that, although strictly speaking it was legal, was it morally correct to be taking a drug, banned in the US and Canada, and reputed to have performance enhancing effects, but she had NO medical need for?

My view is still that Paula will not be brought down by anything related to the drug test scores (with the possible exception if someone, somehow, gets hold of the drug test forms that were filled in at the time and the facts on this contradict something that she has said). Rather she will be flawed by inconsistencies in her stories that have been forced on her due to having to make up stories to fit the fluctuations in her blood values. Two spring to mind - firstly that she was sick between the Great North Run and the World Half Marathon Champs in 2003 (13 days later) - so sick that she required antibiotics, but bounced back in time for the race. Really? I think this was a cover story (now dropped) for the ridiculously low (impossibly low) HGB value pre-race in 2003 (not thinking she would be tested) which resulted in the huge increased in HGB and off-score post-race. So I'm waiting for someone to remember running with a fully-fit Paula in that period.

Similarly, when she got tested in 2012, I think she was clearly not expecting this, therefore the very very high values. Again, she needs to include all possible reasons for the high value. Altitude, altitude tent (really? she'd been at altitude for a month in Kenya, a month before Christmas in Kenya and was about to leave again for altitude in the US, when she had a few days at home with her family, she was sleeping in an altitude tent?) and then, finally, 'injured at altitude'. As I've posted here before, all contemporaneous accounts of her out in Kenya have her logging 120miles/week and where this 'I was injured so I was not running and not crushing red blood cells so much' comes from, I do not know - but there were many athletes out there with her in Kenya during this time so maybe one of them can refresh their memory and correct me if this is incorrect and she was injured and not running.

Good article here about how the little lies are the ones that catch you out....

Good stuff, DHT

I think this is the overarching point that we come back to; the many inconsistencies in the story, the missteps, lack of transparency, the dubious affiliations, and the circumstantial evidence of a culture that was less interested in truth than making money. These are the things that unerringly have created suspicion, where previously there may not have been any.

Plenty of people have doubted the 2:15 forever.

Plenty of other people have believed they witnessed pure sport.

I venture that the majority of people from either camp who have followed the story, picked up the vibe and made a value judgement based on what has been presented will now be firmly in the suspicious camp.

Focusing on technical evidence and minutiae draws us away from the broad picture, one that remains ugly and far too familiar.

janshr khan wrote:

I venture that the majority of people from either camp who have followed the story, picked up the vibe and made a value judgement based on what has been presented will now be firmly in the suspicious camp.

The fact that not a single EPO fiend has ever got within three minutes - yes, THREE minutes - of Paula's WR time is cause enough for suspicion, without the borderline blood scores and ever-changing cover stories.

Still the GOAT though, as she was playing the Russians at their own game and levelling the playing field.

cleans wrote:

The fact that not a single EPO fiend has ever got within three minutes - yes, THREE minutes - of Paula's WR time is cause enough for suspicion, without the borderline blood scores and ever-changing cover stories.

Still the GOAT though, as she was playing the Russians at their own game and levelling the playing field.

^This - all of it.

DHT123 wrote:

Paula DID have suspicious blood values (that's why she was being tested repeatedly around this period), the value in 2012 DID get referred to a panel for consideration (still don't know why there were 12 experts looking at this value - and why 1 of those experts concluded that it DID show that she was taking drugs).

Where did you find this information? The IAAF report only said

"When Ms Radcliffe's (anonymised) profile was referred for independent expert review, the experts noted that this altitude exposure was a plausible explanation for the values reported for her 7 February 2012 sample, and so concluded that there was no basis to pursue the case as a potential adverse passport finding."

Those should have been three experts, if I understand the rules correctly. Unless they met, and then all agreed that this needed to be investigated further.

rekrunner wrote:

With respect to Paula, the three most relevant organizations, with the expertise and access to the full context available, have moved on.

Earlier you wrote: "The full context has already been reviewed by experts in three independent organizations." Sorry, but that still sounds like a joke or sarcasm or trolling.

Which three? UKAD/IAAF/WADA? They are not "independent", and they all have a strong interest in confirming each other that they acted correctly and that Paula was clean.

See here, for example:

Further, I am unaware of experts of UKAD having looked at the full context, but maybe that's just me.