rekrunner wrote:
The effects on red blood cell count is well known, but the subsequent impact on performance improvement in a real world class race context is not.
Please refer to Mohammed Mourhit's biological passport results at the time he was winning world championships medals in the early 2000s.
rekrunner wrote:
Rocket science is easy. This stuff is much harder.
The resulting faster paces and performance from EPO is still speculative for the already elite runner.
Why? It's just a sliding scale of ability. Everybody benefits.
wejo wrote:
We were talking today and I was saying I thought I had seen a thread saying EPO would help
I've been searching around trying to find some posts on this but am coming up short.
The idea that drugs help people to run faster is retarded.
Biological passport didn't exist in the early 2000's.You can't build a reliable performance model from one athlete.
preciously jaded wrote:
rekrunner wrote:The effects on red blood cell count is well known, but the subsequent impact on performance improvement in a real world class race context is not.
Please refer to Mohammed Mourhit's biological passport results at the time he was winning world championships medals in the early 2000s.
Because the impact on performance has never been observed, and never been measured, for the elite athletes in question, in a way that supports the D3_Nuts's reality.
Jeff on a Starship wrote:
rekrunner wrote:Rocket science is easy. This stuff is much harder.
The resulting faster paces and performance from EPO is still speculative for the already elite runner.
Why? It's just a sliding scale of ability. Everybody benefits.
Why didn't EPO help non-Africans participate in the world record decimations of the 90's?It seems unusual that only East and North Africans had access to and/or benefited from synthetic EPO.
bernie madoff wrote:
Distance running performances exploded in the 90s, the same time synthetic EPO came into widespread use. And there was no way to detect it. Seems pretty obvious that it was and is beneficial to distance runners.
People that disagree with this will say one of 2 things:
1) The best runners weren't using drugs.
The best cyclists and swimmers were. No reason to believe the best runners were an exception to this.
2) Even if they were using it, it doesn't help their performance.
It is quite a coincidence then that distance running records were decimated at this time.
9:20 is weak for teenagers? wrote:
You consider a 9:20 average two mile time weak for teenage boys?
Don't forget that those were 9:20 3k's. Still not the time that you get in the U.S. for untrained teenagers.
We've seen in the past year that the IAAF and national federations are as corrupt as all the conspiracy theorists were always saying (with the added ingredients in the news story of money/corruption and actual evidence of all of this), so we sure cannot trust any of the world elite results from the drug era, meaning since the 1960s, if not even sooner (amphetamines were in wide usage from the 1930s). So, there is no way we can know that this or that athlete was or is clean. But we do know that the ranks of the very best have been replete with drug users, because quite a few of them have been caught, including Rita Jeptoo on the Kenyan side, Rashid Ramzi, Mohammed Mourhit, and Ali Saidi-Sief on the north African origin side, and many, many Eastern Europeans, and they have run among the best times ever with EPO. So, athletes may be able to run such performances without drugs, but there is plenty of evidence that many of the athletes able to do it did so with drugs.
jjjjjjj wrote:
We've seen in the past year that the IAAF and national federations are as corrupt as all the conspiracy theorists were always saying (with the added ingredients in the news story of money/corruption and actual evidence of all of this), so we sure cannot trust any of the world elite results from the drug era, meaning since the 1960s, if not even sooner (amphetamines were in wide usage from the 1930s). So, there is no way we can know that this or that athlete was or is clean. But we do know that the ranks of the very best have been replete with drug users, because quite a few of them have been caught, including Rita Jeptoo on the Kenyan side, Rashid Ramzi, Mohammed Mourhit, and Ali Saidi-Sief on the north African origin side, and many, many Eastern Europeans, and they have run among the best times ever with EPO. So, athletes may be able to run such performances without drugs, but there is plenty of evidence that many of the athletes able to do it did so with drugs.
Ali Saïdi-Sief wasn´t caught with EPO but with nandrolone.
rekrunner wrote:
bernie madoff wrote:Distance running performances exploded in the 90s, the same time synthetic EPO came into widespread use. And there was no way to detect it. Seems pretty obvious that it was and is beneficial to distance runners.
People that disagree with this will say one of 2 things:
1) The best runners weren't using drugs.
The best cyclists and swimmers were. No reason to believe the best runners were an exception to this.
2) Even if they were using it, it doesn't help their performance.
It is quite a coincidence then that distance running records were decimated at this time.
Why didn't EPO help non-Africans participate in the world record decimations of the 90's?
It seems unusual that only East and North Africans had access to and/or benefited from synthetic EPO.
Your second sentence does not follow from your first.
António Cabral wrote:
Ali Saïdi-Sief wasn´t caught with EPO but with nandrolone.
Yes ,he was unfortunate enough to swallow nadrolone from a contaminated bottle of Peruvat
I wonder how his compensation case worked out.There were a myriad of unfortunate nandrolone incidents at this time?
On a serious note .It is now well established that all of the moroccan track athletes and all of the spanish marathon runners were likely using EPO
Many of these athletes were running 12-50 for 5000m and 2-06/2-07 for the marathon
EPO performance gain can be estimated at 5-10 seconds for 5000m and 2-3 minutes for marathon at the top level
The mystery with the Top Africans over the last 20 years is the Combination
of dominant performances,lack of doping positives and absence of OOC drug testing.And include shady european doctors and agents
What does that all add up to ?
rekrunner wrote:
Biological passport didn't exist in the early 2000's.
Yes it did exist at the time but it could not be used alone to prosecute athletes, only for targeted testing (which was not happening and this was one of the reasons for this Seppelt/Telegraph/Times scandal). Besides you were implying that the impact of "red cell count on performance improvement in a real world class race context" is unclear. All you need to look at is blood test results. In the breakdown of abnormal blood findings by nation, the ones from Belgium are from Mourhit:
features.thesundaytimes.co.uk/web/public/2015/the-doping-scandal/index.html
rekrunner wrote:
You can't build a reliable performance model from one athlete.
Mourhit is just a start. You could also look at Ramzi (2008 Olympic Champ at 1500m), Boulami (World rec holder at steeple), or Lombard (National record holder at 10000m). Of course you may say that the effects of EPO and raised red cell count in these athletes was largely a placebo effect or that they were/are not really world class etc ...
But it does not have to stop there. The names of all athletes on the Times/Telegraph leaked lists and their blood test findings (and the dates) cold be made public and you would be free to further inform yourself and scrutinze the relationships between increased red cell counts and performances. But I guess that you are against this sort of transparency.
The biological passport is simply a way for the WADA puppets to manipulate who gets free passes and who gets banned from competing.
Drug BS wrote:
wejo wrote:We were talking today and I was saying I thought I had seen a thread saying EPO would help
I've been searching around trying to find some posts on this but am coming up short.
The idea that drugs help people to run faster is retarded.
I know you are using retarded as "so easy to understand", as you should be.
[quote]rekrunner wrote:
Why didn't EPO help non-Africans participate in the world record decimations of the 90's?
It seems unusual that only East and North Africans had access to and/or benefited from synthetic EPO.
[quote]
Because they weren't genetically gifted enough, just as they aren't now.
They still ran faster though.
J.R. wrote:
The biological passport is simply a way for the WADA puppets to manipulate who gets free passes and who gets banned from competing.
J.R. actually telling it like it is
rekrunner wrote:
Because the impact on performance has never been observed, and never been measured, for the elite athletes in question, in a way that supports the D3_Nuts's reality.
Jeff on a Starship wrote:Why? It's just a sliding scale of ability. Everybody benefits.
As related to my question specifically, your argument is an argument from ignorance and a slippery slope too. Here is your argument towards me broken down. Since, I can't prove they doped, then I cannot claim doping helped their performance and if they did dope they likely would have achieved the same level of performance, because there is no proof that doping would have helped their performance.
The basic problem with your argument is you reject evidence about performances that are linked to doping as evidence while you start with the assumptions that Elite Athletes have a significant difference in how physiological mechanisms operate compared to other populations, there is no evidence to suggest elite athletes having different physiological mechanisms. You alsp reject that since every single healthy research population given EPO has increased o2 carrying ability that elite athletes aren't going to have the same benefit. You reject that increased o2 transport per unit of blood doesn't decrease a given cardiac output required to deliver the same metabolic output potential for elite athletes, Fick's law (or equation) is kind of hard to circumvent and applies to athletes at all levels. So when an elite athlete is busted, you fall back on your 2nd argument that they would have been capable of producing the same performances without doping. The 2nd argument may or may not be true, but requires a longer time course which is more random and with greater variance relating to training in producing performances. It no longer becomes about having the best training plan and conditioning, but who has the best pharmacologists, scientists, and doctors in producing artificial adaptations to manipulate training adaptations.
The rise of the East Africans has in large part been due to the coincidence of improved OOC testing in the West and complacency in East African OOC testing which is almost non-existent. The ADR report by Seppelt highlighted this problem and soon the walls came tumbling down. Robin Parisotto and Michael Ashenden, made the assertion from 2001-2012 that 146 medals from Endurance events belonged to athletes that had at the very least values which are suspicious of doping and that 1 in 7 athletes of the 5000 athletes tested were suspicious with only 12,000 samples taken. To put that into perspective, based on the limited number of samples per athlete taken we can start making assumptions that the 1 in 7 number would likely rise if there were more samples taken per athlete. There are 36 medals in distance events at the 2012 Olympic games, 10 of those were found to be suspicious. The medalist have a rate of suspicion higher than the competing population in fact it is twice as likely that best of the best is doping over someone who is not. Those are facts, and suggest a significant change in anti-doping policy is needed. One that targets the favorites and targets those showing the greatest improvement.
It's not a sliding scale of ability. The psuedo-adaptations provided by blood doping cannot be done through training and can only be done from changing the partial pressure of oxygen in the air to stimulate EPO production. That's a huge difference with many other complex variables that come into play for the downstream systems adaptations when at altitude as compared to the downstream adaptations when at sea-level. The best possible physiological combination is getting cardiorespiratory adaptations that altitude provides and the muscular adaptations that sea level training provides (the reason anabolic PEDs are also taken concurrently).
Clerk, your post has many questions, and I want to answer to any of them.
Your reasonings about physiology are well known, as part of the "official" physiology. I don't need to read again something I know very well : the fact is that I don't believe in the conclusions, because I have too many REAL data, coming from training of top Champions, contradicting them.
The data I have are REAL. The explanations I try to give are only conjectures, the fact is that, using the "official" conjectures, it's not possible to justify the performances of many athletes connected with their blood data. For this reason, it's clear there is something different from the "official" explanation of physiologist, when we go to examinate training, values and performances of top runners, I repeat, born, living and training in altitude.
I'm not sure my attempts to explain what happens in the body of these athletes with their training arrives to right conclusions : however, official science NEVER tried to investigate this fact, analyzing one clear fact : the effect of training on their physiology.
In ALL the researches of physiologists, including the experts of antidoping, NEVER there is a real interest for the effects of training.
What is TRAINING for these scientists, who are pharmacologists, biologist, biochemicals, but don't know anything about training ? Do you think somebody of them can know the real training of top athletes ? Which is their idea of training when they general speak about "well trained athletes" ?
For having a REAL SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH, that it's possible to approve in scientific way, we need to detail ANALYTICAL TYPE OF TRAINING, that means :
a) How many sessions per day and per week
b) How much continuity
c) How much total volume
d) How much maximal volume in a single session
e) The speed of every run
f) The intensity of intervals
g) The recovery times between every interval in the same session
h) The frequency of sessions of intensity
i) The general recovery among sessions, connected with the global load of every session
l) The periodization
m) The place of training (not only altitude, but surfaces, profile of the courses, type of tracks, etc...)
n) The organization of their life
o) The training modulation
p) The frequency of competitions
We can still find some other point regarding TRAINING, METHODOLOGY AND IMPROVEMENT OF PERFORMANCES. However, all these points are already enough for demonstrating that, for physiologists interested in doping, THERE IS NO INTEREST AND NO IDEA OF WHAT TRAINING IS AND ABOUT ITS EFFECTS.
After this premise, that is one of the reasons because I can't follow the general idea about the effects of EPO with this very selected kind of runners,
I go to answer your questions.
1) In the world of international athletics, many times there are rumors and smoke about some athletes using drugs, and the most part of times where there is smoke there is fire too. So, we have opinions about who is clean, and who uses some doping (not necesseraly EPO).
For example, during African Championships 2002 in Tunis, my athletes running steeple (Wilson Boit Kipketer and Stephen Cherono) before their warm-up came to me telling that in the dressing room there was a doctor coming from Belgium meeting Brahim Boulami, they went in the WC, and immediately after Wilson and Stephen found a syringe.
Boulami showed a top shape, winning the competition in front of Wilson and Stephen, and after few days bettered the WR in Zurich, with a fantastic "solo". But this record never was accepted, and Boulami was banned, because he had two tests, one with blood the day before the race, and the other with urine after the record, showing he used EPO.
After that race, IAAF changing the rule for the approval of official WR in all endurance events (from 800m to Marathon), asking as condition to take both the samples (blood and urine).
So, we have well clear idea about who is clean, and who isn't.
Always we had suspicions about athletes of the East, continuing to use the systems of the old Soviet Union and East Germany. We Always had doubts about many Moroccans, many Turkies, and also many Spanish for some period.
About managements, I frankly think the best manager don't want their athletes take something illegal, because the management has only to lose. For my knowledge, the best managements have, in their contracts with the top athletes, a rule where it's written that, in case of doping, guilty athletes are thrown out from the management, and have to refund the amount they won during the period between the test and the start of the sanction.
I can say, for example, that athletes as David Rudisha, Asbel Kiprop, Wilson Kipsang, Eliud Kipchoge, Brimin Kipruto, Ezekiel Kemboi, Viviane Cheruiyot, Faith Kipyegon, Mary Keitany, Edna Kiplagat (speaking about Kenyan) are totally clean, such as in Ethiopia Kenenisa Bekele, Haile (during his best period), and athletes that use my training plan from two years only, but I had the opportunity to know well, referred to a period before training with me, such as Tsegaye Kebede, Ayele Abshero, Yenew Alamirew, Tiki Gelana, Aselefech Mergia and other female Marathon runners (Tirfi, Aberu and Shure Demise).
So, I can't say I trust everybody. But of sure I trust the most part of Countries, managers and coaches, because there is still a common denominator in these categories, that is the PASSION for running, not only for having results. Also if the economical stimulus is fundamental, this is not the only motivation, and all the managers I well know (the Italian Federico Rosa and Gianni Demadonna, the Dutch Jos Hermens, Valentijn Throuw and Gerard, the late Zane Branson before, the English Ricky Simms) have a deep passion for athletics, not only connected with the money they can earn.
2) I don't think any top athlete was fully developed in his career, speaking about African runners. It's not a fact of my athletes, or athletes with some other coach. The fact is that in Africa is practically not possible to have all the supports we can have, for example, in Oregon from Nike, or in UK from the Federation and individual choices (the case of Paula Radcliffe).
African runners have something more under point of view of talent and motivation, for part of the seasons, but face situations disturbing a correct application of training : problem of life connected with their families, lack of facilities (especially for physiotherapy), risks of the surfaces, both on the roads and on tracks, medical problems, due to a lot of diseases they frequently have in Africa and not in Europe, specifically typhus and similar, and not optimal organization of free time.
So, in my opinion it's not a problem connected with doping : I say that the best talents, if in theory could be possible to assemble together the "killer instinct" they have also in training, with the professionalism of European or American best runners, the WR could have the opportunity to reach higher levels (f.i., Asbel Kiprop under 3'25", or Geoffrey Kamworor under 58' in HM, or Ayana under 14'10" and probably 29'30" in 5000 and 10000 for women).
Personally, for example, I never was fully satisfied about the WR of my athletes. I put the real limit of Shaheen under 7'50" in steeple, and the WR of 10000 of Bekele well under 26'10" (when he bettered twice the record, in the first occasion was a little sick, in the second was not in top shape).
In any case, I think the further development could not happen using EPO. These athletes were already at a level so high, that only tough training could further develop their aerobic house
How I wrote several times, if I have a car Fiat 500 (normal athlete) I can find the system to add 20 HP with a good manipulation of the engine with a good mechanic (doctor giving EPO), but if I have the Formula One winning WCh, I need 100 top engineers working for one year for improving of, maybe, 2HP (good coach and good training). In this case, there is no more margin to any improvement.
Knowing the effects of hard and proper training in altitude (and for athletes living their with continuity), I'm pretty sure nothing can be added to the results achieved in clean way (honestly, I think in these cases EPO has negative effects more than advantages).
Where blood doping can work, also with athletes belonging to the "class of subjects" we are speaking about, is to cut the time needed for reaching a good aerobic level (maybe 80% of max level), starting from very low level.
This is the case of athletes after a long stop for injury o for different reasons, who want to recover a high level of shape in short time, in order to compete for winning some money after a too long period of rest (frequent situation in Africa, where, also if today we can find more professionalism, normally athletes take a long period of rest after winning good money).
But this is not the case of the best, who are the best because understood the rules of professionalism, having continuity in their training and never resting too long time after top performances.
3) This, instead, is another good point. Yes, I'm sure the "perceived benefit" exists and is important factor in the development of the final performances.
This is nothing else than the "placebo effect" we named many times in several posts.
There is no doubt that athletes of good international level in Kenya (mainly women) used doping. There is also no doubt the most part of them improved their PB. This situation is exactly, in my opinion, a product of the "perceived benefit" : taking doping (90% of case steroids, not EPO) they SUPPOSE possible to train more, so finally they have a jump of quality in their training in both volume and intensity.
The real fact is that they didn't try these volumes and these intensities when clean, thinking it was not possible to recover. So, their improvement is induced by training, not by EPO or steroids, but the level of their training changes because EPO or steroids.
Could these athletes be able to use the same level of volume and intensity if able to approach training with another mentality ?
The results achieved by the top in the world say "YES", simply they were not mentally strong enough for trying.
In all this situation, I'm not surprised when I discovered Kisorio positive, because he showed very fragile mentality approaching the training needed for running full Marathon (while instead was clean when running 10000m and HM). I'm, instead, very surprised by Rita Jeptoo, who was already able in 2006 to run 2:21 in a paced race (winning her first Boston, she ran the last 12.2 km faster than all the first 10 men), because she is the athlete able to train more hard I saw in my life (nothing to do with Mary Keitany and Florence Kiplagat, for example). Her logic evolution was to run also under 2:18 in 2-3 years, if in 2007 she was not restrained in her evolution by a wrong technical choice, moving from the camp in Iten (when was every day with me) to her new house in Mosoriot, with her husband as coach and without Group around. After this, she had a baby in 2009, came back in 2011 with little training, and started again to improve in 2013, when, after many family problems, left the husband concentrating totally in training.
So, for me her improvement has nothing to do with EPO, but I don't understand because she was so stupid to listen to some cheater, losing the jackpot, the face and the possibility to run again Major marathons and Olympics, with concrete possibility to win.
Final thing : give the true importance to the fact that all the athletes of top level taken for EPO or different type of doping (Boulami, Mouhrit, Saidi Sief, Sanchez, Ramzi, the Russian, the fmous Chatal Lombard also if not elite, the first taken for EPO who is the Italian Roberto Barbi, Goumri and the Maroccan marathoners) were athletes born and normally living at sea level, going only occasionally in altitude, and NEVER in high altitude (Ifrane is 1600m, while Iten is 2400 and Addis - Solulta 2600).
My thought is that EPO can give, for the aerobic system, advantages till the altitude of about 1800m (connected with training), no advantage till about 2200m, and NEGATIVE EFFECTS compared with training in altitude between 2200m and 3000m (in higher altitude, I don't think the body can have advantages, but only prioblems since the demand is too high).
But all my hypothesis must be investigated, and till now no scientists had interest, knowledge and possibility to do this kind of research with the top runners in the world.
D3_Nuts wrote:
rekrunner wrote:Because the impact on performance has never been observed, and never been measured, for the elite athletes in question, in a way that supports the D3_Nuts's reality.
As related to my question specifically, your argument is an argument from ignorance and a slippery slope too. Here is your argument towards me broken down. Since, I can't prove they doped, then I cannot claim doping helped their performance and if they did dope they likely would have achieved the same level of performance, because there is no proof that doping would have helped their performance.
The basic problem with your argument is you reject evidence about performances that are linked to doping as evidence while you start with the assumptions that Elite Athletes have a significant difference in how physiological mechanisms operate compared to other populations, there is no evidence to suggest elite athletes having different physiological mechanisms. You alsp reject that since every single healthy research population given EPO has increased o2 carrying ability that elite athletes aren't going to have the same benefit. You reject that increased o2 transport per unit of blood doesn't decrease a given cardiac output required to deliver the same metabolic output potential for elite athletes, Fick's law (or equation) is kind of hard to circumvent and applies to athletes at all levels. So when an elite athlete is busted, you fall back on your 2nd argument that they would have been capable of producing the same performances without doping. The 2nd argument may or may not be true, but requires a longer time course which is more random and with greater variance relating to training in producing performances. It no longer becomes about having the best training plan and conditioning, but who has the best pharmacologists, scientists, and doctors in producing artificial adaptations to manipulate training adaptations.
The rise of the East Africans has in large part been due to the coincidence of improved OOC testing in the West and complacency in East African OOC testing which is almost non-existent. The ADR report by Seppelt highlighted this problem and soon the walls came tumbling down. Robin Parisotto and Michael Ashenden, made the assertion from 2001-2012 that 146 medals from Endurance events belonged to athletes that had at the very least values which are suspicious of doping and that 1 in 7 athletes of the 5000 athletes tested were suspicious with only 12,000 samples taken. To put that into perspective, based on the limited number of samples per athlete taken we can start making assumptions that the 1 in 7 number would likely rise if there were more samples taken per athlete. There are 36 medals in distance events at the 2012 Olympic games, 10 of those were found to be suspicious. The medalist have a rate of suspicion higher than the competing population in fact it is twice as likely that best of the best is doping over someone who is not. Those are facts, and suggest a significant change in anti-doping policy is needed. One that targets the favorites and targets those showing the greatest improvement.
It's not a sliding scale of ability. The psuedo-adaptations provided by blood doping cannot be done through training and can only be done from changing the partial pressure of oxygen in the air to stimulate EPO production. That's a huge difference with many other complex variables that come into play for the downstream systems adaptations when at altitude as compared to the downstream adaptations when at sea-level. The best possible physiological combination is getting cardiorespiratory adaptations that altitude provides and the muscular adaptations that sea level training provides (the reason anabolic PEDs are also taken concurrently).
Are you sure we don't agree?