US Miler wrote:
you mean to tell me that 5 percent of clean people will test positive for drugs on their "A" sample? No way! It doesn't work that way--if it did, we would have WAY more total positive "A" samples. It would mean that if you test 1000 clean people, 50 are guaranteed to test positive on their "A" sample because of error.
If I recall correctly, there was an announcement that 10 percent of the athlete's tested for EPO at the last winter Olympics had been in the group you would call testing positive.
the test, I would think, is more likely to call a dirty person clean than a clean person dirty.
The testing for the protocol was something like this. Which is is not to scale since I don't have the information right now, so it's just what I remember of it.
So hypothetically speaking -
Let's say you have a test sample of 400 "subjects" (not athletes), and the A (clean) group has a range of 20 to 78 units of XYZ with a mean value of 40. The B group (with the artificial XYZ) has a range of 45 to 99 units of XYZ, with a mean value of 65.
Remember these subjects are non athletes. So from this you make a protocol. Where do you make it? If you make it at 65 then you will miss 1/2 the ones who took the artificial XYZ. But if you make it lower than that then more and more "clean" athlete's will indicate "positive" for taking the artificial XYZ.
So let's say they make it at 55. That's 15 units higher than the average for clean (non athletic) subjects.
Okay -- do you see the problems with this!
There are going to be a high number of false positives.
And probably more false positives than real positives that "got away with it".
Really I don't care if someone got away with it because I think it doesn't make any difference in the first place. It's just a means to eliminate certain competitors and define who can compete and who can't. But you might think artificial XYZ works so let's go to the next step which is -
The high number of false positives.
Surely you know this must happen, and often!
Oh some of these athletes say over and over they didn't take any EPO. Well geez just maybe they didn't. I haven't been over to Kenya recently but I can just imagine all those doctors jumping out of the trees over there.
What I find incredulous is that people would jump on such bogus information and literally set out to destroy honest athletes who have dedicated their lives to athletics.