casual obsever wrote:
Sigh. We are talking about Ethiopians and Kenyans at world championships here. I would argue that for example the top-3 Ethiopian marathon runners and the top-3 Kenyan marathon runners are top athletes, no matter which reasonable criteria one chooses.
If you insist on using your unique, originally undefined and still only vaguely defined definition of "top", to then conclude that it is unknown how many of them are blood dopers, fine. But, if your definition includes only world record holders, then Kiptum alone will bring the percentage up substantially.
As for the 70 - 87% non-blood dopers, non sequitur. Recall that we only got the numbers of the in-competition blood dopers. We would need to subtract the more careful dopers, who stopped 1 - 2 months prior to the competition, from that number. More unknowns, more fun for your spinning. Go ahead, knock yourself out.
Sigh.
You say this with full knowledge that I have explicitly questioned the Olympic Gold winner Sumgong's "top" status by virtue of never running anywhere near top times, and being only a top-30 runner in an immature event which was historically not very deep at the top.
They don't hand out participant medals at World Championships.
I've always considered you smarter than that, so you must be wilfully aware of your deception even when others are not.
If you lower the standards of what it means to be on the top, then obviously the "few" I refer to will become more than a "few". What "you would argue" then becomes a different argument which arrives at different conclusions. This is like "winning" by Kobayashi Maru.
I should remind you that you (and Thermo Dino) chose to argue with me about what I believe is generally true about the top East African athletes, as if you were a better authority about what I believe than I am. It's amusing and flattering that you care so much about my belief, but makes me wonder if you are so insecure in your own beliefs that you see mine as an existential threat to your world view.
You approach to winning this argument about what my belief means appears to be relaxing the definitions, and then accusing me of shifting the goalposts, and suggesting that a few exceptions to the rule would invalidate the general rule, as if the stated belief was meant to be some sort of absolute, fundamentalist declaration of cleanliness at the top.