You are a one-track mind poster, thinking that every topic about Kenyans or doping is the same topic "EPO works". You think this conversation is about "proving" whether Sumgong improved because of EPO.
(tldr: 1) you are having the wrong conversation and 2) it is also not compelling)
Sorry for the lengthy response, but I want to catalog all the reasons why you are not compelling, and there are too many to be brief.
The instant topic of conversation is my stated belief from 2012 that Kenyans and Ethiopians and other top East Africans are not taking EPO. These (all post-2012) exceptions show that there exists some athletes, even some top athletes, that were busted for EPO. This does not change my general belief, stated back in 2012, for the remaining top East Africans, even after acknowledging that there also exists more that have gone undetected.
Your arguments are not compelling for a whole host of reasons:
- While you and "Thermo Dino" and others dwell on Sumgong and other Kenyans busted for EPO/ABP, this approach fails because it fails to address the much larger remaining pool of top Kenyan athletes. You think it is compelling to analyze the exceptions, use "confirmation bias" to speculate why they improve, and project your non-expert speculation onto the general population of top Kenyan athletes. Just among Kenyan women in the marathon Sumgong is outside of the top-10 all time fastest. To be compelling, you must address these top-10 too.
- Proof by example cannot be very compelling, even when you understand EPO/high responder/low responder/macro/micro dosing.
- I don't believe Sumgong was only a 2:28 runner clean. I won't speculate why she improved, but to be compelling *you* must talk specifically about her training/pacing/diet and other local race specific factors -- and account for all of these factors in all of her races. This is what makes "proof by example" so weak.
- When Sumgong is in shape to run 2:28, I would accept that she is a high responder to many factors. When she is in shape to run a 2:20 marathon, she would be a low or a no responder.
- A Sunday Times breakdown of leaked blood data showed us "suspicion" for Olympic and World Championship medals, your holy grail of sporting achievements. Of all the medals available for the marathon, between 2001-2012, only 11% were won by athletes with suspicious blood values in the database. And this 11% figure was inflated in three ways: 1) combining "likely doping" and "at the very least abnormal" into one broad category of "suspicious", 2) by defining "suspicion" as any value in the database, rather than a local value relevant to the medal win, and 3) other co-factors, such as doping with testosterone, HGH, steroids, etc. were not controlled, and these factors alone may have put EPO users on the podium. Even brushing aside this inflation by a faulty method of the reporters, to be compelling you need to address these other 8 in 9 medals, won by athletes that never blood tested "suspicious".
While you may respect the words of Ross Tucker and Steve Magness, neither of them have any direct experience training the kinds of top-runners we are talking about, and I suspect neither of them have any direct experience with using EPO on athletes. They may have an extra advantage with their physiology background, but their observations and comments also ignore the remaining pool of top Kenyan athletes not busted for EPO or ABP.
- Ross tells us "how effective EPO may be in elites" -- we know right away, from "may be", that this is pure speculation about one possibility, rather than some compelling conclusion not requiring further thought; Ross tries to start conversations, not finish them.
- Ross then points to a study with known flaws with respect to the Kenyans which we have covered many times. The obvious ones are that initial training wasn't controlled, and the lack of a control group. The less obvious one, but the one that undermines any improvement conclusions completely, is shown by the RPE values measured in the study -- the Kenyans were not trying to run 3000m fast. They "tempo'd" the time trials rather than racing them. The Kenyan runners had previous performances equivalent to 8:00 for 3000m, but in the study they ran 9:00 time trials. This means that there "baseline" 3000m time trial was run at about marathon pace, while their "EPO" time trial was run at half-marathon pace. To become "compelling", they would need to first train the Kenyans to run their predicted 8:00, then start the EPO intervention.
- To give a better perspective, these near elite athletes ran the 3000m time trials as fast as the best high school girls in the 1970s.
- Magness is correct to say that athletes react differently, but gives us no guidance as to whether an athlete like Sumgong would be a high responder to EPO.