If we were guaranteed one WR was clean, which one would it be

So if you concede the Duplantis records maybe aren't clean then you are conceding I may also be correct. It's taken you a while - but well done.

A couple of questions for the "experts" here on "soft" records.

How many athletes does it require before the event or the sport isn't considered "soft"? What is the figure for that? Is there a critical mass that needs to be arrived at before you can say a record won't be soft? Measured, how?

If numbers participating are what determine whether an event is "soft" or not, all of the wr's are soft because running events have fewer participating at the pro level than just about every other major sport.

I don't "concede" that Duplantis might not be clean. Such obvious trueths doesn't need to be mentioned at all in a discussion with someone not completely retarded.

For any athlete there are two options: to be a doper or not to be a doper. Which one is the correect one for a specific athlete? Nobody apart from the athlete himself can know the answer (or when there is an unquestioned positive doping test).

Really?

An event with a much higher participating level than another (for example men's 100m compared to women's hammer) most likely has a stronger top mark.
It's extremely likely that the men's pole vault records would be higher than 6.21/6.22 if the event would have the same no. of participants than - say - the men's 100m.

Do you disagree with this? If so, please explain why.

And a point you still struggle deeply (despite you were informed about it several times before):
Komen's 7:20.67 was a strong record when set 27 years ago (the 5000m WR at the time was 12:44.39). Since then the 5000m mark has improved by 9 seconds - the 3000m mark remains the same. So, was Komen's mark so much better then Gebrselassie's legendary mark from 95 which improved the previous record by 11 seconds? Definitely not, they were relatively close to each other. Now, 27 years later, the 3000m mark is not anymore as strong and it will be broken in the next two years by several athletes. And not just by a couple of hundreds.

21st century only? Most of them are clean with few exceptions like Brahim Boulami, and Abraham Kiptum, and maybe Ruth Jebet.

No guarantees.

But then we have the fact that doping is throughout the sport and yet most are not caught. To suggest any record now is clean is to believe the most talented athletes who dope can't beat their clean competition. So doping doesn't work?

You didn't answer any of my questions. You can't.

Can you point me to the posts in which people are insisting that the men's pole vault record is clean?

I, and others, have answered the question posed in the thread, that IF there is a clean record, it COULD BE the pole vault, and then we explained, several times now, why that would be a fair candidate event.

I, and others, would also admit that record could be as dirty as the day is long. Nobody is wagering their life's savings on it.

You lose credibility when you misrepresent other people's positions in an attempt to make a point in response.

Further, if you don't know which athletes are clean or not you can't argue that any given world record will be clean. You have effectively admitted you don't know.

You are weaselling around this issue. You and others have argued repeatedly that the pole-vault record is likely clean because you say the event is "soft".

But you now fall back to saying it "could" be clean, which is effectively an admission it may also not be. That happens to be my position. The difference is I think it more probable than not. The arguments that it is a "soft" event and the only one which is not susceptible to doping are not persuasive. But as usual on Letsrun, I have been attacked for saying what you and others are also conceding may be true, that the record in the event may not be clean.

It's hurting to read all of your misinterpretations, misquotes, unfounded allegations, nonsensical reasoning and so on.

I don't have to ADMIT you imbecil that I don't know if a specific athlete is clean or not. That's obvious. Nobody can know apart from the athlete himself. Why should I argue some specific record is clean? I just can tell if I believe this athlete is clean, this one not. I won't do this, because it's so unimportant what I believe.

There is doping in sport, anybody knows this. How many dope? Nobody knows. Who? We don't know until some positive test. Before this we can speculate because of some indicators like personal inveronment, performance, change of physique of the athlete and so on.

You are never answering any concrete question. I don't know the participating level for any event. I'm just pretty sure that there are just a few pole vaulters COMPARED to sprinters. Do you disagree with this? And that this much higher participating level in sprinting than pole vaulting (10x?, 100x?) will most likely result in a higher overall level and records closer to some limit. Do you disagree? Please explain why.

Really?
Coleman? Montgomery? Powell? Gatlin? Bolt? Clement? Norman? Van Niekerk? Rudisha? Suleiman? Tefera? Kejelcha? Ingebrigtsen? Faraj? Bekele? Cheptegei? Wanjiru? Tadesse? Gebrselassie? Kiptum? Kamworer? Kandie? Kiplimo? Khannouchi? Tergat? Makau? Kipsang? Kimetto? Shaheen? Girma? Kipchoge? Robles? Xiang? Merritt? Warholm? Lavillenie? Duplantis? Crouser? Meyer?
Bol? G. Dibaba? Shobukhova? Adere? Abelegesse? Defar? T. Dibaba? Gidey? Kipyegon? Ayana? Hassan? Jepchirchir? Kiplagat? Yehualew? Jepchirchir? Jepkosgei? Takahashi? Ndereba? Radcliffe? Keitany? Kosgei? Galkina? Chepkoech? S. Kallur? Harrison? Amusan? Muhamad? McLaughlin? Bergquist? Rojas? Isinbayeva? Feofanova? Suhr? Dragila? And the ones I forgot?

(Almost) all are clean?

I find myself curious; do you use such off-putting, aggressive language in your interpersonal relations, in discussions that are nothing more than hypothetical conjecture and intended to entertain? Do you approach general conversations as if they are arguments, to be "won" or "lost"? And do you typically misquote people, or attribute to them things that they never said?

For example, nobody put forth a position that the pole vault is not susceptible to doping. You are making that up, attributing that position to others, so you can argue against it. But NOBODY thinks that is true.

As for the rest of your post, I've made a case in this thread that the men's pole vault record could be clean (with a number of well-founded reasons to support that as tenable). By definition, that also means it might not be. That is literally the definition of "could," when used in the context that something "could be true, but it is uncertain."

That is not a "fall back position." That is my position and has been throughout.

The other thing to think about is how easy it is for a given athlete to take a shot at the record. Compare a 1500m runner with a marathoner. One races a half dozen. Times/year and things like weather don't matter as much. In the marathon you get 2 chances/year and it easy for a day to be 10 degrees to hot. The more attempts you have, the better your chances of having everything line up. Same thing about infrequently run events.

And it helps if you don't need a ton of training. You get a lot of kids who are good distance runners (say a 4:20 miler) with sh-tty training (30mpw, take the summers off) who then give up after high school. Compare that to the 100m where you learn who you are in a hurry. Granted a lot of fast people pick sports that pay better. Most of the footballers (both types) that we think of as fast wouldn't be fast on the track. But a half dozen of them would be. But they aren't idiots and knows making 10m as some 2nd stringer is better than 100k if your the 20th best guy in the world...

Really. That's my answer to this speculative thread.

I said "most of them", although I wasn't really thinking about indoor records, or non-standard events like 60m. I would also except the Russian, Turkish, and Bahrain female athletes.

So that you are saying that you don't know if any given athlete is clean this logically leads to the inference that they may not be - which is my position, that you so insistently dispute. You aren't aware that you are in fact in dispute with yourself. But on the facts of whether Duplantis or any other top athlete is doping you are saying you simply don't know. In that case you have nothing to offer in this discussion because it is only your ignorance that you are admitting to.

My questions are relevant to the claim made here that a record will be "soft" based on the numbers participating in the event. To support that claim you (or whoever makes it) must be able to say what those numbers are and at which point an event no longer is "soft" because of the numbers participating. Without those numbers and arguments supporting them as a measure of the competitiveness of the event the claim about an event being "soft" is unsupported assertion only. It is why I haven't accepted it.

I used the "numbers" argument to say that all records are "soft" by that measure, because the sport has a fewer participants than a number of other major sports, like football - which, incidentally, offer much more in the way of financial inducements. The best athletes aren't necessarily heading to T and F.