Whatever Happened to Junxia Wang?

Amos Oh wrote:

Besides, if you think I shouldn't be posting anything about a thread this old, then I suppose nobody should have cared about records from 1993 in 2006.

Nope. It's that this thread is old and most of these people are not looking at this/not on here.

old tymer wrote:

wtf wrote:

THe men ran on the same track and they did not have any outlier performances. The men's 10,000 was won in a little over 29" and the 1500 went in well over 3;40. The short track argument is weak.

Ths short track argument IS weak, no question, but you certainly don't prove it false. In large part, your argument simply is that Chinese men were lousy in '93. Well, the real question is: How lousy were they? And, if they were so lousy, why were the '93 women such worldbeaters?

I believe:

a) the '93 times are preposterous

b) "drugs" alone doesn't really explain it

What's left? A case for castrated men?

The Chinese men didn't train with Ma Junren from the time they were eight years old. Nearly all those record breakers did.

J. R. wrote:

As far as I am concerned, Wang Junxia's times are legitimate.

Mmm. Yes.

And the simple fact there is an enormous hole in the WADA code that allows athletes to dope and never test positive in-country and multiple confirmed instances of this kind of fraud have nothing to do with her performances.

Right?

How do you think she was able to train that hard? We're both certain it was rice and vegetables alone.

Londoner wrote:

Given the rush of performances of this standard in the mid 90s, which has since completely dried up, it is clear than something was up. I have no idea what but the short track theory doesn't appear to hold water to me.

If you had done your homework, then you'd have learned some basic facts. These record-breakers were in a structured program from the time they were eight years old and to my knowledge, the type of training they did was unprecedented in history.

Let me know if you ever find any 16-year-olds capable of running 150-170 miles per week at altitudes as high as 9000 feet above sea level, having progressively built up such capacity from the age of eight.

If you can't find them, then you have your most likely explanation for these performances.

dwightarm wrote:

Amos Oh wrote:

Besides, if you think I shouldn't be posting anything about a thread this old, then I suppose nobody should have cared about records from 1993 in 2006.

Nope. It's that this thread is old and most of these people are not looking at this/not on here.

Well, this is as good a time as any to discuss this topic, especially in light of the recent revelations about NOP, Salazar and Rupp.

old tymer wrote:

"Anti-Asian sentiments"? Bullshit. I'm anti-fantasy, that's all. I'd say the same thing if Afghanis, Bolivians, Cubans, Danes, or any other group had done the same thing. . . . But the '93 races were truly off the charts--and not rationally explainable. Thirteen years after the fact, please tell me how many women today are running 8:06 for the 3000....or even 8:10.....or even 8:15.....or even 8:20...? How many today are running the equivalent of 8:06 at any other distance? I await your thoughtful response.

I don't think you're taking into account the fact that since Asians are generally concerned in "saving face," many would not even compete unless they had attained near optimal fitness. It seems that this Ma Junren character was rather narcissistic, so he would probably have been even more concerned with making impressions. In this respect, it is likely that he held his girls back from competitions until they were ready to make an assault on the records. It is easier to build up one's fitness when there are fewer competitions. Reducing the number of mesocycles can produce higher peaks. It is a rather basic concept of sport physiology. But of course Ma seems to have taken this concept to an extreme.

As for the question of why such performances weren't replicated to a great extent, if you had followed this story, you would be aware that some of the star runners left Ma Junren, because he was too strict. In fact, it was practically a revolution followed by a large exodus. Understandable when you read that he had forbade the girls to date or grow their hair long, along with many other draconian rules.

Now if you consider that these girls had attained celebrity status in China and around the world, they would probably have become less tolerant of such rules.

As for Wang, it was reported that her nervous system was damaged so seriously from overtraining that she had to stop for a long time. I think this was the key reason for her retirement.

old tymer wrote:

You are twisted. OK: I'm stating it: I HAVE NOTHING AGAINST THE CHINESE. THEY ARE WONDERFUL AND TALENTED PEOPLE.

And, further, I DO NOT BELIEVE FOR A MINUTE their 1993 performances.

Does that make you happy? Once again, race has nothing to do with this. If it was a group of Romanian women, or Ethiopian women, or Canadian women, etc., I'd be saying exactly the SAME THING!!!!!!!!!!! Can you grasp that?

How can you say that 8:06 is not that far off from "other times"? I repeat my simple question above. Thirteen years after the fact, how many women today are running 8:06, or 8:10, or 8:15, or 8:20?

But you cannot compare the Chinese runners of that generation under Ma with any other experience that we know of. Their training and lifestyle was unprecedented.

I believe that if the Chinese government had continued to support Ma, he would have been able to find new stars, but they stopped their support of him, and their disqualification of six of his runners for "suspicious" lab results is probably not an action sanctioned by world governing bodies.

Besides, in the case of the EPO test, it doesn't measure the presence of EPO at all. Rather, it has been arbitrarily determined that having a hematocrit level above a certain level is "evidence" of cheating. But of course, one would have to clearly understand the limits of natural performance to determine whether this threshold is based on facts. If nobody else ever pushed themselves to the limits of human performance in the manner these women apparently did, then of course the only way to properly determine the threshold would be to measure the EPO levels out of competition very often under extremely close supervision. The unfortunate thing is that the IAAF and the drug testing authorities never took on such a project, and this I believe is sheer negligence and incompetence.

These Chinese runners, if clean, would have been able to set the benchmark for the hematocrit levels, and perhaps the tests, not just EPO, would have been modified accordingly. They should have been studied in the lab by exercise physiologists around the world rather than just written off.

It's funny how a revolution within Ma's Army and a mass exodus of the most talented runners could have such an effect. Combine that with the fact that the Chinese sports authorities were now getting embarrassed at the wrong type of attention, though there was never even one failed drug test -- so much so that they disqualified their own runners on arbitrary grounds.

After the media learned about what a tyrant Ma was, he became persona non grata. But there was never even a shred of proof that he ever broke any rules pertaining to banned substances.

Haven't read through this whole thread yet, but of course there is always speculation on here about any of these Chinese gals (speculation for good reason).

I'd kill for a chance to talk with Wang. Even if her record ain't legit, and I'm not gonna delve into that, the woman still won an Olympic gold, which is impressive.

she retired,after the 1996 olympics,and has married,and has a child.She won the 5000 metres gold medal in atlanta,and i wouldnt be suprised if she was clean,when she did it.Sure,its highly likely she doped in 1993,but she was nowhere near as fast,in 1996,and still won gold,in the 5000,and silver in the 10'000.Drugs or no drugs,she was still a very talented athlete.She ran times of around 15 flat,in the 5'000,and 31 minutes,in the 10k,way outside her best,but still good enough to win.

toro wrote:

No doubt Wang was good regardless. She did win Gold in 1996 in front of the whole world.

Yes, and she did that while extremely sick with an infection. If it wasn't for her sickness, she had a good chance to break even her own records.

jeff tallon wrote:

Sure,its highly likely she doped in 1993,but she was nowhere near as fast,in 1996,and still won gold,in the 5000,and silver in the 10'000.Drugs or no drugs,she was still a very talented athlete.

This whole thread is rather meaningless for the following reasons:

1) nobody has offered a proper definition of a "drug" or "dope"

2) nobody has even bothered arguing that all performance-enhancing substances, "drugs," "dope," or other, have ever been on the banned substances list.

3) there is no possible way that in 1993, any of those designing the drug tests could have been knowledgeable enough about the properties used in Chinese traditional medicine and other folklore medicine to properly design a test for them. There are good reasons for this now, and these reasons were even stronger in 1993. Two decades ago, the overwhelming majority of Americans and the West were very ignorant about Chinese herbal medicine; and this was partly due to the fact that the American Medical Association and the medical journals practically pretended this type of medicine didn't exist and didn't see it as relevant. It seems that many of these same attitudes still persist even today.

Until we address these points, it is meaningless to talk about whether the Chinese "doped" or used "drugs" -- especially when there is no evidence at all that they used a banned substance. If they didn't use a banned substance, then whatever they took was legitimate. It is arguably far more legitimate than to abuse the IUE exemptions in order to use what is on the list of banned substances, as Salazar has been widely accused of doing!

Well, I'll play along w/ Amos, if for no other reason than boredom.

I have no idea if the Chinese women doped. It appears some of them did use banned substances later on, so I certainly have some suspicion of them, but there are not any elite athletes I would say definitely did not dope, so ...

Anyway, the lack of ability of these athletes to replicate those performances on other tracks and at other times leads me to believe something happened that was not very kosher. Maybe they started from a different line (and this does not have to be cheating, this happened just days ago in France). Maybe the timing had a glitch, or the wind meter didn't work, etc. I am not sure.

However, all of the defenses that Amos has proposed here (training method, young age of beginning training, ruthlessness of Ma, use of traditional medicines which might enhance performance but not outlawed) were not specific to this one meet (or two including Shanghai). There were obviously some talented, driven runners coached by a very driven coach in China during that time. None of them were able to replicate their performances and the idea that so many of them ran so many outliers (not just PBs, but large PBs) just makes no real sense.

Thanks for the response, Mr. Obvious.

I think the thing that nobody here has considered is that 1993 was the culmination of nearly a decade of extremely gruelling training, combined with extreme discipline, along with the nutritional support needed to sustain it. All these elements beginning from the age of eight has no precedence in history. So, all this talk about what is statistically possible is nonsense, because the presumption that statistical anomalies are suspicious would only make sense if you have a situation where no such extreme deviations from the accepted norm exist. In the case of Ma's Army, it is obvious that he wasn't content to follow the textbook while the training in the rest of the world were largely based on Lydiard, Zatopek, Karvonen and other figures decades old. You cannot properly results if you don't even have knowledge or understanding of the protocols!

Again, the only way to come anywhere close to proving that Ma's Army's results are impossible is to replicate his experiment as precisely as possible, and this would require a decade long experiment with extremely committed eight-year-olds with extremely high tolerance for not only pain but a highly disciplined lifestyle. This would be considered inhumane in almost every country, and it seems that even in China, it would be difficult to repeat this experiment today.

Mr. Obvious wrote:

Anyway, the lack of ability of these athletes to replicate those performances on other tracks and at other times leads me to believe something happened that was not very kosher.

1) the IAAF and WADA have no rules pertaining to "not being kosher"

2) the only rules there are pertain to "banned substances"

3) there is no reason to believe that the Chinese had to resort to using any banned substances, especially since they have a form of medicine that developed through trial and error -- the most proven method -- over thousands of years; and in 1993, nobody who designed the tests were interested or were competent in these areas. They only cared about pharmaceutically packaged products. Obviously if the tests themselves are biased and ignorant, there is a massive amount of negligence which allows innovative and opportunistic coaches and athletes to exploit this bias and ignorance.

4) conclusion: the Chinese cannot be accused of "cheating" whether or not they used a performance-enhancing substance if such substances were either unknown, untested, or ignored due to cultural bias.

If I were the head of IAAF or WADA, I would have retired in shame for such a great oversight -- and I would expect any honorable person to do the same.

If anyone claims that anyone knows every performance-enhancing substance there is in this world while for instance over 95 percent of Amazonian plants are not even classified, then they exemplify the same type of arrogant ignorance. The irony is that while the pharmaceutical industry and their cronies in the AMA, FDA and Public Health organizations have long publically dismissed the efficacy of plant substances, they have been the ones that have been patenting these very same plants, making derivatives of them, putting them in chemotherapeutic drugs, and capitalizing in so many other ways from them.

There are always confounding factors, so there would be no way to confirm or disprove based on a case study.

However, the grueling training, extreme discipline, and nutritional support starting from the age of eight would have affected these athletes throughout their careers. So that still leaves this one meet as a huge statistical outlier, with multiple athletes running times that they were not able to approach at any other time during their career. Some of those athletes running such huge outlier times multiple times (heats and finals) and some in multiple events as well. That does not automatically disprove that they happened or were legitimate times. Indeed, outliers exist by definition and many instances can be pointed out of athletes whose personal bests were quite a bit better than their second best time. If it were one athlete only there would be a lot less suspicion. At least some of these athletes should have times that are close to their best at other meets.

I guess your defense is that the training methodology was so unique that it allowed all of these athletes a stupendous peak simultaneously at this one meet and at this one meet only. I guess that is theoretically possible, but I don't think it is very compelling.

Amos Oh wrote:

Londoner wrote:

Given the rush of performances of this standard in the mid 90s, which has since completely dried up, it is clear than something was up. I have no idea what but the short track theory doesn't appear to hold water to me.

If you had done your homework, then you'd have learned some basic facts. These record-breakers were in a structured program from the time they were eight years old and to my knowledge, the type of training they did was unprecedented in history.

Let me know if you ever find any 16-year-olds capable of running 150-170 miles per week at altitudes as high as 9000 feet above sea level, having progressively built up such capacity from the age of eight.

If you can't find them, then you have your most likely explanation for these performances.

Something seems awfully wrong about that 1993 meet, BUT ... we do have another independent data point about what we might expect to get if we take a talented young runner and have them run 200 miles per week. The last time that was tried we got Gerry Lindgren.

I don't know if we can trust his assertion that he ran 20 to 40 miles per day, but if true, then his astonishing performances add weight to the possibility that the Chinese times were legit. Maybe not enough weight to remove all suspicion... but still it puts it in the realm of possibility.

You have edited my response in a way that is quite misleading, as my response really had very little to due with performance enhancing drugs or herbs and I really suspect that is not the reason for such outlier performances.

If your defense here is that the Chinese had discovered some extreme performance enhancing substance, turtle blood, caterpillar fungus, or the like, and that it was not illegal according to WADA and IAAF (through ignorance, bias, or some other reason, honestly the reason is not important), and as such it doesn't matter what they did; well I am sympathetic to that line of thinking.

However, why would they have only used or received enhancing at this one meet and never been able to replicate similar times anywhere else?

It is not only theoretically possible, but it also very likely if you consider:

1) that these same runners after 1993 World Championships had become international celebrities, and thus didn't have to rely on overachieving for their livelihoods.

2) that these same runners who took nearly a full decade to achieve what they did had now matured into women. Don't you think that becoming interested in men would tend to work against maintaining the same level of training load, intensity, etc, especially when your coach dictates such matters for you?

3) that it was widely reported that Qu, the second biggest star on the squad left Ma due to such conflicts about having boyfriends, growing her hair, etc.

4) later it was revealed that most of Ma's Army had disbanded as a result of their great level of dissatisfaction.

Obviously, any criticism that these athletes "failed" to produce similar results must take such factors into consideration. Under the circumstances, it would have been nearly impossible even for drug cheats to replicate these feats.

I think I am repeating myself to no avail, but I need to emphasize again that too many people have an unwarranted presumption that forces them to accuse the Chinese of being drugged. Of course I would never deny that they certainly used substances that enhanced their performance and endurance capacity, and probably their recovery rate. But this in no way suggests that they used a BANNED SUBSTANCE!

So, all this talk of cheating is absolute nonsense, unless you can prove that ALL substances capable of enhancing performance are on the list of BANNED SUBSTANCES. And this is of course impossible everywhere, and even more so in China, where they have an entirely different medical discipline than the allopathic one.

It is undeniable that certain plant substances often have greater or comparable efficacy when compared with drugs. For instance, there are studies that show that turmeric is as effective in reducing pain as cortisone, and of course without any side-effects. This is one of hundreds of examples.