Renato Canova wrote:
For answering your question, we need absolutely to know many things about the athlete. I knew too many situations with athletes of very big talent that trained like amateurs till, maybe, 30 years of age, and when had the opportunity and the motivation for becoming professional had very strong changes in their performances.
The evolution of their performances in their career can't give any indication , if we don't know all what there is around them : motivation, family problems, to have a coach or not, to stay in a place where it's possible to have good training or not, if there are facilities or not, and, about Africans, if they are able to eat two times per day or no.
It seems you think athletes are not persons with all the normal problems everybody has in his life. For you, the only explanation of big improvements is doping, but athletes are normal persons, and can have a lot of problems not connected with their activity. I saw how Moses Mosop reacted to the divorce from Florende Kiplagat and the impossibility to see his daughter till her major age : the athlete running 2:03 his first marathon and able to destroy the WR on track of 30 km 40 days after that marathon, suiddenly disappeared : no more training, confusion in his mind, loss of motivation.
If I see the performance of an athlete lasting at the same medium international level for several years (for example, 3'39" or 1'47" for 4 following years), and suddenly an improvement till 3'32" and 1'44", of sure my first thought is not about doping, but about training. And, because this situation happened several times to myself, with big improvements when athletes of some age finally could come to the training camp, I absolutely am not suspicious about their improvement.
This doesn't means I deny the possibility of doping : I know somebody dramatically improving after doping (90% of his improvement for mental reasons, in any case). But the problem is that you systematically deny the possibility of improvement for training, and is very clear you don't have any practical experience driving you to your conclusions, but only fake belief in something read on newspapers, that is only the part of sport producing scoops for people ignoring what there is behind every performance.
Of course each individual athlete will be different, and in part that will depend on their life experience and circumstances - as you have said. It is therefore very difficult to establish a rule of thumb of just how much might we expect any given athlete to be able to improve with the right training (for them) and in the right circumstances.
However, a knowledge and experience of sports over decades provides a perspective - but not necessarily a rule - for assessing whether any given performance may be genuine, or something else.
The human body remains the human body. What we are capable of is not unlimited - and that includes our capacity for making athletic improvements. If you think 5-6 secs improvement for an elite 800m runner within a year or so can be attributed to training, would you accept 6-7secs, 7-8 secs, and so on? For you, is there no limit to improvement?
I would be inclined to agree with some of your core arguments if we lived in a different world. But the world we do live in is one in which sports doping is endemic and sophisticated- and mostly beyond antidoping enforcement. It has been so for decades. It is especially a problem in Kenya (among other countries). It is impossible to evaluate the credibility of any performance without considering it in that context.
I know this not from reading newspaper clippings but because I have known world antidoping officials, and professional athletes and coaches, like you. That is what has informed my perspective.