The sudden performace drop-off of America's 2009 wonderboys: helps or hurts their case that they were dirty?

Injuries.

I thought it was well known that Teg is/was injured. As for Ritz, who knows. Its hard to make a judgment off a sample size of one (one race this season).

^this.

And you kind of misrepresented Ritz's season last year.

It's not like he sat for 6 months after London and popped a 12:56. He ran US nats at 10k, and though Rupp blew his doors off in the last 800, people were surprised at how well Ritz did and were impressed at it, especially coming off of a marathon recovery. He also PR'd at 10k before running that 12:56.

If I had my guess on Ritz, I'd say that last year was a perfect storm kind of situation where piling the right speedwork on top of his extensive base led to great results. I'm not saying he'll never run that fast again, just that they may need a new formula and can't expect to do the same thing he did last summer and get the same results. It takes years to build the runner Ritz was last summer, not one season.

As for Teg, yeah, I thought he was injured. But I think this whole thing seems kind of trollish.

So is everybody in agreement that Sanchez is clean?

gee