Which studies? In this study, Kenyan runners living at 7,000 feet improved their 3000 meter times at altitude by 5% from using EPO. Granted, it's not placebo-controlled, but we all know how hard it is for experienced competitive runners to improve by 5%. That just doesn't happen unless you were previously training 20 miles a week and work up to 60 miles a week. I believe this was a training camp.
My opinion is that people would have to spend 16 hours a day at simulated 12,000 to 17,000 feet to see similar hematocrits. There's time, money, motor noise, hormonal changes that take months to stabilize, and the question of effects on mitochondria adaptations (although hypoxia may increase capillary adaptations).
Ah yes -- the Kenyan study. Besides the lack of a control group, the fatal flaw in that study was that the Kenyans were simply not racing the time trials. This can be confirmed by estimating their 3000m ability, and was confirmed by the researchers with RPE measurements. It is not that hard at all to improve your 3000m time trials by 5% when the baseline time trial is run at your marathon pace. This can be done easily without EPO.
What a wasted opportunity.
Levine and Stray-Gundersen performed several altitude studies, showing the best results with a "Living High, Training Low" protocol.
It's only a fatal flaw in your opinion. Time trials to check for changes (based on any intervention like interval training or doping) are common procedure. Might even be better than racing, because of less crashing/bonking. That's why the study had no problem making it past peer review.
Placebo exists, yes, but is almost always between 0.5-1%. So that leaves these Kenyans with a 4-4.5% improvement.
Not coincidentally, your Levine study also used a time trial, not a race, and didn't correct for the placebo effect either. There, the (best) high-low group increased Hb from 13.3 to 14.8 g/l, and the 5,000 m time by only (additional) 13 seconds. Of their 17 minutes, that amounts to only 1.3%! Why would you think that's comparable to the EPO results?
Detective P makes a good argument about the magnitude of elevation. In a nutshell, EPO additions mimic higher altitude, such as 4000 m instead of 2500 m, which cannot be sustained in training for several, practical reasons. This makes the gains somewhat natural, not superhuman at all.
Last, let's not forget the individuality here. For example, some athletes have a natural Hb of 13 g/l, others of 14, and can increase it at different "altitudes" (blood doping techs) to 14, 15, or even above 17 g/l like the banned WR holder Abraham Kiptum. Meaning blood doping will work better for some than for others.
It's only a fatal flaw in your opinion. Time trials to check for changes (based on any intervention like interval training or doping) are common procedure. Might even be better than racing, because of less crashing/bonking. That's why the study had no problem making it past peer review.
Placebo exists, yes, but is almost always between 0.5-1%. So that leaves these Kenyans with a 4-4.5% improvement.
Not coincidentally, your Levine study also used a time trial, not a race, and didn't correct for the placebo effect either. There, the (best) high-low group increased Hb from 13.3 to 14.8 g/l, and the 5,000 m time by only (additional) 13 seconds. Of their 17 minutes, that amounts to only 1.3%! Why would you think that's comparable to the EPO results?
Detective P makes a good argument about the magnitude of elevation. In a nutshell, EPO additions mimic higher altitude, such as 4000 m instead of 2500 m, which cannot be sustained in training for several, practical reasons. This makes the gains somewhat natural, not superhuman at all.
Last, let's not forget the individuality here. For example, some athletes have a natural Hb of 13 g/l, others of 14, and can increase it at different "altitudes" (blood doping techs) to 14, 15, or even above 17 g/l like the banned WR holder Abraham Kiptum. Meaning blood doping will work better for some than for others.
Can there be any other opinion about these half-hearted efforts?
While time trials are a good way to check for changes, it is only meaningful if the subjects give a maximal effort, i.e. that 3000m time trials are run at 3000m pace rather than tempo'd at marathon pace. In the Pitsiladis study, the half-hearted effort was confirmed by the reported RPEs from the Kenyans of ~15-16, while the Scottish cohorts in a similar Pitsiladis study tried harder, with RPEs of ~18-19. According to the best times reported by Pitsiladis, these near-elite Kenyan athletes should have been running the time trials about a minute faster, instead of averaging time comparable to the US high school girls' record in the 1970s.
The Pitsiladis study says placebo effect for 3000m time trials is 1.2%.
In Levine and Stray-Gundersen's hi-lo study, three weeks after the altitude training, the hi-lo subjects improved another 15 seconds, or a cumulative 2.7%.
Noting unusually poor performances from some of the women, they also showed the results considering just the men -- which would be a better comparison to the Pitsiladas study.
For the men, we get an improvement of ~24 seconds, or 2.5%, and three weeks later, an additional ~6 seconds, or a cumulative 3.1%.
Additionally, unlike Levine and Stray-Gundersen, the Pitsiladis study design failed to eliminate a well-known "training camp effect" with a 2-week lead-in phase, and failed to include an initial training control phase before the EPO intervention, which would improve the initial baseline performance before the EPO intervention. This suggest that the Pitsiladis figures could be inflated with training effects in addition to EPO effects.
If Levine and Stray-Gundersen had included these additional non-altitude performance effects, like Pitsiladis, the cumulative increase over the course of the study would have been reported as 5% for the hi-lo group, and 6.5% for the hi-lo men.
The Pitsiladis study could have provided valuable information, had the design included these lead-in and training control phases, and a control group for comparison, and ensured the Kenyans were incentivized to race all the time trials.
The studies are imperfect, so we make judgement calls based on what's available, including the EPO busts and history of doping.
Ideally I think it would be best to test for the 2nd lactate turnpoint at 10 minute increments of intensity to account for differences in MCT4 content. This is the method Dr. San Millan used with his cyclists. (Ignoring accusations about him, the theory makes sense.)
Thank you for that term "regulatory theater." A quick search shows it is used widely. I've heard "political theater" which is more broad.
As much as I think WADA and the AIU are a big step up from NCAA and American sports testing, I still think there's some regulatory theater going on. The primary biomarkers of the athlete biological passport can be manipulated with hydration. This could easily be resolved by using one of the secondary biomarkers. Also there are stronger biomarkers in the Holly Cox 2021 paper with double the detection time and allow non-refrigerated transport. Can't use that because it would catch too many dopers. The EPO testing update in 2022 was substantial but had a vague wording loophole. I think that was fixed in the 2024 update, but an EPO-like substance (pegmolesatide) that's been around since at least 2023 is finally being officially banned and tested for in 2026. And the minimum lab requirements for detecting molidustat allow microdosing every night if the athlete's 60-minute window is late in the day. And some HIF stabilizers are absent from WADA's document (but possibly may serve a different medical function).
This might be too much info for some, but these things are frustrating for me.
You are right to see the flaws, and I think we can take it one step further. On paper the purpose of testing is to create a fair playing field. In practice it also works as a tool of control for the people who run the sport: big sponsors like Nike, federation heads, World Athletics, the IOC.
I am not saying every positive test is fake or every ban is political. But look at how the system is set up. Vague wording, loopholes, delays in banning obvious substances, selective enforcement. That is not just incompetence. It creates leverage. If you are useful and play along, you somehow skate by. If you become a problem, suddenly the full weight of “clean sport” can land on your head.
Lance is the template. For years he was a global cash cow who made everyone money and gave the sport a heroic face. The red flags were there, insiders were suspicious, but nothing stuck. Then he turned from asset to liability. Almost overnight the tone changed, investigations sharpened, people who stayed quiet for years started talking, and he was tossed aside as the great villain. Did the science suddenly improve in one season, or did his value to the system crash?
Even LetsRun sits inside that ecosystem. How many clicks and page views come from endless “Is X athlete doping” threads and moral arguments that never really get resolved? The current half effective, half theatrical anti doping structure keeps everything murky enough that there is always another outrage cycle, but never enough clarity to actually clean house.
That is why I see the Enhanced Games as a kind of brutal honesty. I am not pretending they are a utopia or that they fix every inequality. But they strip away the regulatory theater and say out loud what everyone already knows: enhancement is part of elite sport. Make it explicit, make it transparent, and you remove one of the main tools of selective enforcement.
So when the powers that be line up to denounce it, is that really about fairness and athlete health, or about protecting a system where they control who gets protected, who gets sacrificed, and when the big, public bust gets staged to reassure everyone that “the system works”?
Yes, this is certainly seeing the forest and not just the trees. Erin Brown the influencer (sometimes trolling, sometimes insightful) has mentioned something along these lines where the powers can choose which athletes stay "clean" and which ones get busted.
There's the short-term commercial effects but also in the long-term they could be choosing future influencers and politicians, or just squashing the futures of honest people or those who question the system.
The studies are imperfect, so we make judgement calls based on what's available, including the EPO busts and history of doping.
Ideally I think it would be best to test for the 2nd lactate turnpoint at 10 minute increments of intensity to account for differences in MCT4 content. This is the method Dr. San Millan used with his cyclists. (Ignoring accusations about him, the theory makes sense.)
The point was that we have seen similar 3-6% gains, from both altitude and EPO studies, among well-trained amateur athletes.
If we are all making judgement calls based on what's available, we can also include decades of all-time historical performances around the world, and "unofficial" blood doping suspicion, in addition to studies and known EPO busts and the history of doping and look for patterns.
The studies are imperfect, so we make judgement calls based on what's available, including the EPO busts and history of doping.
Ideally I think it would be best to test for the 2nd lactate turnpoint at 10 minute increments of intensity to account for differences in MCT4 content. This is the method Dr. San Millan used with his cyclists. (Ignoring accusations about him, the theory makes sense.)
Further to the altitude studies, The study I linked previously is not the only one Levine and Stray-Gundersen performed. They repeated the time trials with another 39 subjects, looking at variability of time-trial response and physiological parameters, looking for patterns and potential causes. They split the results up into three groups, non-responders < 0 s (15), low-responders < 14.1 s (7), and high-responders > 14.1 s (17). Among the high responders, the average improvement was 36.6 s, or 3.55%. They also compared this with the results with another study of 22 "elite" (US national class) runners in 3000m time-trials. The average improvement after 4-weeks at altitude of the total group was 6 s, or 1.1%. They also similarly split among no-responders (5), low-responders (8), and high-responders (9), but I found no data for the high-responder average improvements beyond the cutoff of -5.8 s and that 3 athletes improved by as much as 23 s, or 4.2%.
It is clear that the altitude studies took great care to ensure that the initial baseline time trial and subsequent time-trials were highly competitive efforts. In the "elite" study, they even used pacemakers for the first 1600m, to ensure honest efforts, rather than tactical. In that one, they reported that 9 of the 22 participants achieved their own new personal bests, in an altitude study that was performed directly after the participants competed in national competitions (NCAA and USATF).
Although I much prefer time-trials in research over other biological, treadmill, and stationary cycling proxies, there is still a question of how well it represents the population of athletes in competitive racing. While average group improvements between a pre-intervention baseline and a post-intervention time-trial is a popular measurement among researchers to show the effect of the intervention, this relative change, in the short term, doesn't seem as representative or as relevant as attempting to determine the difference between the best results training with interventions, compared to without, or comparing EPO to altitude, or both, in the long term. After all the results of important competitions are not the result of 4 weeks or 13 weeks of training, but rather a cumulative result of years of training among the highest responders.
I once said that it was a not well kept secret that a few people on my midmajor D1 team were doping, and I was ripped for it and called a liar, and that I was a poor sport who simply didn’t want it enough for speculating a lot more of my competition was also doping.
Why do people not think collegiates are doping? It used to be a big deal when even a collegiate athlete broke four in the mile, and now every good program has at least one sub four guy and it just about takes sub four to make the best teams. I promise you it ain’t just the spikes.
No, the thread isn't just about EPO. Any kind of doping. Which is what Kenyans do. Altitude-trained athletes wouldn't dope if it didn't given them advantage - and Kenyans dope in their droves. Doping statistics are actually data but you will never find "data" that you will accept.
Doping statistics are one kind of data, but they are not "reliable performance data". I have accepted for discussion the totality of all the available data, and stripped them of baseless conclusions, common fallacies, and other speculative rationalizations.
The thread isn't about Kenyans either. You only show you didn't follow the main thread, or grasp the nuance of the thread within a thread. You are not materially responding to anything in this thread. "Detective P" and I were talking about EPO and altitude, before you butted in like a bull in a china shop.
That thread within this thread went like this: "Detective P" commented about "3 to 6% improvement (from) safe amounts of EPO". I responded that "We have seen similar improvements from altitude studies." You replied "Altitude benefits don't match doping gains", failing to understand that we were only talking about EPO. To get you back on track, I asked you specifically if you had "reliable performance data showing any cumulative benefits of EPO + altitude training". Your response shows you have no data, just speculative rationalizations based on busts.
So you set the rules about what can be discussed, what the subject is and who can discuss it. Of course you do - because it always has to suit the arguments of the board's resident doping denier. You say nothing that you haven't said in your posts for the last ten or so years. You are no more convincing now than you were then.
So you set the rules about what can be discussed, what the subject is and who can discuss it. Of course you do - because it always has to suit the arguments of the board's resident doping denier. You say nothing that you haven't said in your posts for the last ten or so years. You are no more convincing now than you were then.
What a curiously odd response. I guess there is no rule that says you can't give non-responsive responses, except for the one that says to stay on topic.
Before you accuse me of going off topic, we were actually talking about doping in college, and you strayed off topic, accusing me of the same debunked strawman arguments I never made.
Here I didn't so much as say something, as ask you a very specific question: "Do you have reliable performance data showing any cumulative benefits of EPO + altitude training?"
You responded with a non-sequitor which provides no relevant data: "Several hundred busted Kenyan dopers, most of whom also trained at altitude."
This was in response to you saying "Altitude benefits don't match doping gains" -- responding to a comment about altitude studies versus EPO studies -- but you seem to be unable to support your beliefs with real performance data.
Whether I am convincing or not, I am also not convinced because you are not convincing. I could be persuaded to promote your beliefs to something more substantial than baseless beliefs, if you had any reliable data, but at each opportunity, you fail to follow through and substantiate any of your beliefs.
So you set the rules about what can be discussed, what the subject is and who can discuss it. Of course you do - because it always has to suit the arguments of the board's resident doping denier. You say nothing that you haven't said in your posts for the last ten or so years. You are no more convincing now than you were then.
What a curiously odd response. I guess there is no rule that says you can't give non-responsive responses, except for the one that says to stay on topic.
Before you accuse me of going off topic, we were actually talking about doping in college, and you strayed off topic, accusing me of the same debunked strawman arguments I never made.
Here I didn't so much as say something, as ask you a very specific question: "Do you have reliable performance data showing any cumulative benefits of EPO + altitude training?"
You responded with a non-sequitor which provides no relevant data: "Several hundred busted Kenyan dopers, most of whom also trained at altitude."
This was in response to you saying "Altitude benefits don't match doping gains" -- responding to a comment about altitude studies versus EPO studies -- but you seem to be unable to support your beliefs with real performance data.
Whether I am convincing or not, I am also not convinced because you are not convincing. I could be persuaded to promote your beliefs to something more substantial than baseless beliefs, if you had any reliable data, but at each opportunity, you fail to follow through and substantiate any of your beliefs.
You sound like one who is in conversation with yourself. You generally are.