A very simple question

Armstronglivs wrote:

henrik wrote:

Great summary of Renato’s post, thank you.

But it may not be a factually correct view of what EPO (or any other form of doping) can achieve. It essentially says that EPO cannot increase an athlete's endurance beyond what would be naturally achievable through training. This view has been formed without conducting research that would include doping the best-trained athletes with EPO and comparing their performances when clean. So it is ultimately a speculative position, without empirical foundation. Against that we have numerous cases over many years of doped athletes (including EPO) who have measurably improved. Some have become champions and world record holders. If using EPO when combined with training merely helped them to attain the limit to their natural abilities there could hardly be any objection to it - it would merely "short-cut" their improvements. Like altitude-training.

Really both Renato and Rekrunner have unwittingly admitted that it is 90% epo and 10% training. What about the poor guys and girls relying solely on training? They're getting smacked.

I will repeat this again. A gentleman that ran the 1500m at the 1996 Olympics went to Ifrane to train with the Moroccans in the mid-1990s, he said that they would sit in the evening doping on something that was then untraceable (he claims that he didn't take part). This gentlemen roomed with my brother. Years later I was taking to a good friend (he is married to a lovely lady I have known for over thirty years), who ran the 1500m at the 2000 Olympics. He told me the identical story that the 1996 Olympian had told him.

casual obsever wrote:

Facts: The survey was conducted earlier, the paper was published later. There was a lot of time to "correct" the findings after the 58% paper, had the authors deemed that necessary.

I don't know if they had so much time, nor the will, nor the data to make corrections. The main flaw with the UQM approach, despite the rich set of math models provided, is it's inability to detect and measure the degree of non-compliance, in order to provide the necessary input parameter to the math models in order to make any corrections.

They did make one correction, attempting to eliminate an obvious bias in the fastest responses, to arrive at a conservative lower bound.

There is still a possibility though to arrive at a different estimate. They also collected SSC responses as part of the survey questionnaire, and promised a follow up paper. I'm unaware of that being published yet. But plugging the data into an SSC calculator similarly confirms a measruable high degree of non-compliance to the survey instructions, and arrives at a significantly smaller estimate than UQM.

Subway Surfers wrote:

Really both Renato and Rekrunner have unwittingly admitted that it is 90% epo and 10% training. What about the poor guys and girls relying solely on training? They're getting smacked.

That's not really very honest, is it.

If you want to boost your EPO and your red blood cell count, my advice is to do it naturally, and train at high altitude.

rekrunner wrote:

They did make one correction, attempting to eliminate an obvious bias in the fastest responses, to arrive at a conservative lower bound.

They made several tentative corrections, some of them resulting in a lower number, more in a higher number.

Your and the IAAF's problem is that scientists* don't fall as easily for propaganda as journalists: both papers in scientific journals that discussed that study used the 44% as a result, not the PR 31%. And literally no one aside from your PR here pretends the real number being less than 31%.

As discussed in the article, and as is common sense, the normal, intended non-compliance would be to deny doping, not to pretend doping, meaning the real numbers are most likely higher - see e.g. the 60% in your favorite appendix (but a different table than your favorite).

But, keep bringing this up. More and more people need to realize how dirty the sport is for it to finally change, and rebuild the corrupt IAAF/WA.

* Political scientists spreading propaganda are a different story.

rekrunner wrote:

Subway Surfers wrote:

Really both Renato and Rekrunner have unwittingly admitted that it is 90% epo and 10% training. What about the poor guys and girls relying solely on training? They're getting smacked.

That's not really very honest, is it.

If you want to boost your EPO and your red blood cell count, my advice is to do it naturally, and train at high altitude.

Or just have a normal healthy blood count and realise that ATP utilisation cannot be magically enhanced.

We’re still living in the dark ages where Exercise Physiologists don't understand the basics. Just thought l’d remind you.

But it’s ok for people like you to endorse doping covertly, thinking you are some kind of dogooder?

rekrunner wrote:

Subway Surfers wrote:

Really both Renato and Rekrunner have unwittingly admitted that it is 90% epo and 10% training. What about the poor guys and girls relying solely on training? They're getting smacked.

That's not really very honest, is it.

If you want to boost your EPO and your red blood cell count, my advice is to do it naturally, and train at high altitude.

But what if it's faster and easier to do it with EPO? Who's going to take your advice then?

Armstronglivs wrote:

rekrunner wrote:

That's not really very honest, is it.

If you want to boost your EPO and your red blood cell count, my advice is to do it naturally, and train at high altitude.

But what if it's faster and easier to do it with EPO? Who's going to take your advice then?

Why should young athletes believe in you or any anti doping zealots who are endorsing the very drugs they are supposedly trying to ban?

rekrunner wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:Your figures while plausible are nonetheless speculative. No estimates of doping prevalence are definitive - they are estimates - but some are markedly higher than 20%. But what isn't speculative is that we see from those who have incurred doping violations that they are amongst the very top of the elites - championship winners and medallists like Ramzi, Kiprop, Jeptoo, Jebet, and so on - the list goes on. While you might wish to argue that performances that have not been achieved by a known doper are clean, this cannot be taken as fact. It is equally possible they are not.

You still need to go beyond mere existence.

Otherwise you only prove the existence of fast people that also believed in doping.

That is spectacular denial, to suggest that there is no link between doping and performance. All the world are fools - except you? Proof of what exists in the real world doesn't always require academic research to confirm what we experience; as anyone who has leaped off a tall building might attest, gravity existed long before we found a formula to describe it. Doping has been around long enough for us (and many sports people) to see that it produces results, even if the scientists are still figuring out exactly how it does it.

extend the philosophy wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:

But what if it's faster and easier to do it with EPO? Who's going to take your advice then?

Why should young athletes believe in you or any anti doping zealots who are endorsing the very drugs they are supposedly trying to ban?

You missed the logic. I am not endorsing anything. Rekrunner is implicitly acknowledging that EPO can produce results but is arguing that athletes should take the more difficult path of achieving those results through training. What path are most people inclined to take - the easier or more difficult path? That is why we have a doping problem.

Doping in sport is a fact.

And here comes Renato Canova and tries to show that it is possible to run fast without doping because he has witnessed that over and over. I believe all Renato wants is to inspire and to push runners to greater levels. He's been doing that for over 15 years, here on these boards. Not once he called dopers idiots, but that's not the point. It's a shame that many would read his posts and all they conclude is the doping.

Here, you can read Renato's posts to get to know him and his point better:

https://www.letsrun.com/forum/flat_read.php?thread=222028#222028

It's amazing how generous he has been, over and over answering questions, sharing training plans (as he always says, it's not the plan, it's the connection and relationship between an athlete and the coach), and being honest.

"Remember always the 3 most important points of a good training : CONTINUITY, GRADUALNESS and MODULATION."

And something he says about himself:

"I loved athletics from when I was 12 years old. At that time, I decided that, grown up, I wanted to become Italian National Coach.

But I never was interested in top results for myself. My motivations are basically two : to investigate what is possible to do with the human body, where for human body I want to mean physiology and psychology, finding the personal key for the best way of improvement (that is different one from another), and to help the athletes in improving their personality and their life.

I believe very much in the role of athletics (and of every type of sport, generally) like education for the life.

My principles are the principles of a teacher, before than a coach. I think that I'm at first an educator, secondly a coach.

This is the reason because I cannot accept in my mind not only any type of doping, but also any type of help from external sides. I think that the greater strength is in the mind, and I work for increasing the self confidence in my athletes."

Renato Canova wrote:

I agree that EPO can give one minute of advantage in 10000m for athletes running one minute slower than their potential due to mistakes in training.

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Renato, please, that’s nonsense. Where is that extra energy supposed to come from? ATP production produces heat which has to be mostly dissipated. No drug can magically bypass this process. You lose a huge amount of credibility with this dark ages belief in doping, which you are trying to argue against. You are as confused as the other doping efficacy believers.

rekrunner wrote:

You brought Schumacher into this discussion. I don't doubt his medical credentials.

What discovery did he make about elite performance in his extensive research that would be relevant to this thread?

Apparently enough that he's able to provide an expert opinion on the performance improvement of EPO/Blood Transfusions at AIU/CAS hearings involving ABP cases with elites.

I'll switch gears and bring up a coach you hold in high esteem and a statement he made on PEDs & elites:

"I believe that it is currently difficult to be among the top 5 in the world in any of the distance events without using EPO or Human Growth Hormone. While some of the top athletes may be clean, so many athletes are running so fast that their performances are suspect. This is compounded for me by the fact that the times these athletes are running just happen to coincide exactly with what top exercise physiologists have calculated taking EPO would produce."

There you go; a world renowned coach that you have the upmost respect for stating that it's difficult to run top 5 in any distance event without using EPO or HGH. And not surprisingly, EPO and HGH happen to be a popular stack used by many dopers over the decades.

So, I would think you would concede that EPO has some performance enhancing effect on elites based solely on Salazar's statement.

rekrunner wrote:

Subway Surfers wrote:

Really both Renato and Rekrunner have unwittingly admitted that it is 90% epo and 10% training. What about the poor guys and girls relying solely on training? They're getting smacked.

That's not really very honest, is it.

If you want to boost your EPO and your red blood cell count, my advice is to do it naturally, and train at high altitude.

I think that was the intent of Aden at Sabadell, except for the natural part. Lol.

You are all confused in similar ways, Renato and rekrunner included.

.

Salazar doesn’t know either. His many experiments show that he is still searching for magic bullets.

How dirty the sport is today? Or how dirty it was in one event in 2011? A great deal has happened since then.

The "tentative corrections" are not really corrections at all, when the non-compliance for each case is unknown.

Without this input, there would be no reason to prefer 63.4% in Table 8, over 8.9% in Table 12.

Not knowing the magnitude and nature of non-compliance is what makes UQM so problematic, and why conclusions of "likely more than xx%" must be taken with a grain of salt, since there is no real basis to determine likelihood.

"Propaganda" is an interesting choice of words, as both estimates come directly from the study.

What you call "common sense" is hardly a scientific basis for drawing conclusions.

And it may be an incorrect assumption. Given the guarantee and goal of anonymity, we should expect the motivation for dopers to lie to be greatly reduced, or else UQM doesn't make much sense.

I wouldn't say "no one" thinks UQM arrives at high estimates after we just discussed a peer reviewed paper that demonstrates with real data from a real survey that UQM arrives at an estimate which is nearly 3x larger than other techniques.

extend the philosophy wrote:

Or just have a normal healthy blood count and realise that ATP utilisation cannot be magically enhanced.

We’re still living in the dark ages where Exercise Physiologists don't understand the basics. Just thought l’d remind you.

I don't have an Exercise Physiology explanation, but I am encouraged by the example of Sondre Moens, who ran sub-2:06 after an extended training session at altitude.