If Sanchez had been a Kenyan, who managed to have a false birth certificate stating he was 23 and a story that he'd not trained properly before this winter and was now working with some European based group and training like never before, half the posters on here would eulogize about what a great find he was. The other half would still suspect him of drugs. Lol
My point is, whether he's guilty or not, and I've yet to be convinced one way or t'other, if he'd been of a different race with a different age (and we know that some athletes in the past have been older than they'd claimed!) and had the "poor kid born at altitude" story as a backdrop, many who currently suspect him of drug use, wouldn't.
If we're going to be suspicious of Sanchez for showing little if any indication of greatness in his teens or early 20's, then why don't we treat all others in that group with the same way?
I remember Aouita came 34th in the World X-Country champs in '78 at 18; won by an English kid called Mick Morton, who went on to do nothing in the sport.
By his (Aouita's) 23rd birthday, his pb's were the following:
800m - 1:47.4
1500m - 3:37.4
5000m - 14:05.
No great shakes I think we'll all agree.
Within 8 months he was the World Championship bronze medallist at 1500 and had run a 3:32. In less than 2 seasons, his 5000m pb had improved by more than a minute.
Sanchez had run a modest 3:39.8 1500 (worth what? 5:02 for 2000m?) and an indoors 8:07.8 3000m at 21. He improves in the next 3 years to get his 5k pb down to 13:32 at 24. Substantially faster than Aouita's best time at that age. It takes another 3 years to improve enough to run 7:32 for 3000m.
So, it takes him 5 years to improve by about 10 seconds over 2000m (based on his 1500 pb at 21)
It takes arguably the greatest 5000m runner of all time about 21 months to improve by a minute at that distance.
Now I could have taken Aouita's name out of this and just called him athlete X, but I didn't want to insult anyone's intelligence. The fact is, given the above context, one athlete looks more likely to have used something than the other for his improvements.