Sir Lance-alot wrote:
My questions: do you stand by those assertions now, or do you retract them?
And if you don't retract them, why do you give Paula a different treatment, for she is actually more of an outlier than the africans you were looking at, because they had lots of company with those amazing times from their countrymen.
Paula's 2:15 was faster than ANY MAN IN GREAT BRITAIN ran that year. I am not saying she is a doper, but THAT is as big a red flag as as taking a big chunk out of a WR, like the east africans did.
Please comment.
You have a good memory.
I'm glad you wrote as I meant to put on my original post - PS. Admittedly a good person can use stats to support whatever argument you want to support. I'll be the first to admit it. I used similar stats back in 2000 to say EPO usage was widesperad.
The article you are talking about can be read here.
http://www.letsrun.com/rojospeaksmay23.htmlFor those that are new to Letsrun, way back in 2000, I wrote an article entitled "Face the Facts: EPO Usage Likely Widespread" where I used bigger statistical improvements in recent years to indicate that I thought EPO usage was widespread.
No, I don't take back what I wrote then or what I do now. We now pretty mcuh know that EPO usage was widespread so the whole point of that article was 100% correct even if the stats/individual examples may or may not be accurate.
Here, I just was making my best argument as to why I thought Paula was clean which I do believe to be the case.
Back in 2000, I was just making my best attempt to try to shock people into thinking drug usage was indeed widespread as everyone was in denial.
The WRs are always hard to talk about as they are a single performance and it kills me to think Haile G or one of my idols might have been on drugs. Back then, I never really thought individually about a single record. A better way to do it would be to think about the depth of performances as the person who cited Bob Beamon points out.
It's certainly not racism. I do think certain countries have a real bad track record for distance running and it's not the US of late. But my gosh, since day one, we've been crucified for allowing the AWest drug talk to continually show up on LRC.
Each case is different. Maybe I'm biased because I've spent some time with her. I don't know. I just think she's clean.
A good statistician would laugh at my use of stats here for the records as if you pick a year or two before or after, the %s change drastically in either way. You could totally manipulate it i bet.