Why is it so often the ones with zero experience are the ones who style themselves as the true experts?
You wrote that, “Clarke trained essentially the same was as they do now.” On what basis can you make such a claim? Ron Clarke did essentially the same workouts year round, never used a stopwatch and never kept a training diary. Does that sounds modern to you? And despite all that, and all the time working as a qualified accountant as well as not having trained seriously from ages 19 to 23, he still managed to run 27:39 on cinders, largely in lane two. But there’s no room for improvement on any of that in your closed mind.
How common is cheating at the top level of athletics? As I have written before, it’s around 20 pct. That is after having thrown out all the Russians and the like, for whom there is no sport without chemical assistance.
If doping is always ahead of antidoping efforts, why is it that the women’s power events are so far behind the marks that were put up during the Cold War? How can it possibly be that athletes today are just as freely capable of taking performance enhancing drugs as was possible before the employment of out of competition testing, before the long term archival and retesting of samples, before the employment of the isotope test, and before the development of the athlete blood passport? Working closely with athletes at the top level is my career and my position on the matter is that it’s not possible to get away with it as it was before, but clearly you know more about this than I, so please offer some insight. If, at minimum, you counter that they’ve been forced to cut back to doping at reduced levels, then that would not, in fact, be staying ahead of antidoping measures but would instead be a reduction of doping in response to tighter controls.
That is not zero, of course. Ostapchuk stole quite a bit of money for many years before they finally got her. But those new measures meant that she was throwing in the mid 20s and only north of 21m once, instead of throwing 21s regularly and into the 22 metre range, as she might have had she been able to take androgens at the level that she could have had she been active 30 years earlier. The antidoping measures kept her beatable by clean athletes, such as Adams, and eventually led to her banishment from the sport.
It would take me some time to count all the clean athletes I know who have been cheated out of medals by frauds. This is as much personal as it is professional for me. My great pet hate is seeing dopers get away with fraud. And yet, I’m heartened by the many legitimate athletes I have seen succeed and win medals at the major championships. I wouldn’t be involved if I didn’t have reason to know that.