THREE KENYANS BANNED FOR DOPING

JKL wrote:

And I can't stop laughing at the people who think the TdF is a comparable event to a marathon. If you want to compare cycling, look at single race events, not a month-long slog through the mountains of France.

I am not trying to compare TdF with marathon. Even sprinters use EPO like Marion Jones. Boxers use EPO. It must provide some type of benefit, otherwise athletes would not risk their lives. Now to say such bullcrap that EPO would not help an elite marathoner, please. Well, it comes from a guy that considers El G white. Maybe his wife is Arab?

synch wrote:Would Ramzi be considered too good for EPO had he not been caught? Did EPO not help him go from 3:39 to 3:30 in 1 year?

ramzi is biggest name ever to test +ve for epo ( a newer derivative which i assume he thought he was less detectable )

we need to re-examine him

consensus is that he doped to go from 3'39 to 3'30 in '04, but that may not be whole story

he was a newbie beforehand with rumours of erratic training & not really serious about the sport

that 3'39 prior ability is likely nonsense

the 3'30 was more noted for whupping hicham rather than the time ( hicham's 1st loss in a circuit 1500/mile for ?7y )

this made him a medal favourite for athens, but he bombed in the semi

elite-talent guys who are doping don't fail to reach finals

i think he might even have been clean in '04 & a natural 3'30

now, it's possible he found the next year that he wasn't really getting much quicker ( an actual 3'30.00 call it 3'29 in a perfect race ) & greedily wanted wr & golds

he definitely seemed to be doping by '06 when he ran 3'29.1 off a suicidal 52+ start - probably 3'27 at even-pace with drafting to bell

similarly, in '08 that outrageous prelim looked to have him in 3'27 shape

i think he probably was a "natural" 3'29 talent, who doped to 3'27 ability with epo sometime from '06 onwards

spot on (again). thanks for the analysis.

'i think he might even have been clean in '04 & a natural 3'30'

2006 3:29.14 Roma 14 JUL

2005 3:30.00 Roma 08 JUL

2004 3:30.25 Roma 02 JUL

2003 3:39.30 Rabat 31 MAY

So it more likely he started doping in 2004 than 2003!

It's unlikely anyone runs 3:30 then decides to dope. He either started in 2003 onwards or was always on it

'elite-talent guys who are doping don't fail to reach finals'

Any evidence of that, there are any number of reasons why you can run badly

eh ?

what part of "erratic & not really serious about the sport" did you not comprehend ??

dopers don't finish 11th in a semi with a 3'44 !

i expected him to win bronze that meet

we might know a little more of ramzi's progression if wada/iaaf retest his heksinki 2005 samples before time runs out later this year.

he's still the 800/1500 world champion from that year

Doesnt_Take_a_Genius wrote:

Arguments: EPO is only good for recovery. Marathon runners don't need extra power it provides, but need the ability to run sustained high aerobic pace. They need elasticity, some blood markers mentioned etc. that only come from training.

Maybe EPO (and other drugs) don't necessarily work if only used on marathon race day. But if used in training and the athlete recovers faster, he can get in more hard workouts and make the physical adaptations required in a shorter period of time. Therefore, the race is improved. Is this improvement not due to the drug?

Where does this idea that EPO improves recovery come from?

It's just more druggie BS. Better recovery comes from better fitness and pace judgement.

with epo you can run at threshold for a much longer time.

exactly the kind of stimulus a marathon runner needs.

Ramzi was caught for CERA (EPO), but I would be surprised if he wasn't also taking some kind of steroids. He stayed on the EPO because it was supposed to be undetectable, but probably cycled off the steroids to avoid testing positive.

Here a doping expert and journalist speaks of this tip of the iceberg a little: http://can.milesplit.com/articles/101299-hajo-seppelt-interview-on-apparent-kenyan-doping

Here's a question that Canova asked a couple pages back:" And, about recovering hard workouts, are we sure that training hard almost every day can produce better results than training at very high specific intensity may be once every 4-5 days, waiting your body can recover NATURALLY the previous hard training, without helping this recovery with any external support ?"

Doesnt_Take_a_Genius wrote:

Arguments: EPO is only good for recovery. Marathon runners don't need extra power it provides, but need the ability to run sustained high aerobic pace. They need elasticity, some blood markers mentioned etc. that only come from training.

Maybe EPO (and other drugs) don't necessarily work if only used on marathon race day. But if used in training and the athlete recovers faster, he can get in more hard workouts and make the physical adaptations required in a shorter period of time. Therefore, the race is improved. Is this improvement not due to the drug?

it sounds more like a silly excuse to me.

9.5/10? That's good, right? But not perfect. Here's some extra credit.All I'm really saying is that there are many areas of doubt, depending in too many uncontrolled variables, where the reality can be one way or the other:- Responses to drugs are not universal. You can have high-responders and low-responders. You can even have no response, or adverse responses. How do we know that East African "highlanders" have the same EPO response profile (min/max/average/median) as Western "lowlanders", when it comes to oxygen related drugs/procedures? Why wouldn't there be some adaptations to their unique low-oxygen environment? We see measurable short term changes in "sea-level" athletes in as few as 4 weeks at altitude.- Even if we take for granted that EPO always increases red-blood cell count the same way for everyone, how do we reliably translate RBC, and Hematocrit, to performance improvements? After all, it is their times that are suspicious, not the red blood cells. Is their a direct and universal relation? If not, why not, and what are other important variables? Current state of training? Current state of recovery? Inherent talent/potential? Blood viscosity? MCV? Tissue Elasticity? Blood volume?- How do we rule out placebo effect?- If we, for the sake of discussion, absolutely reject the idea that some people are "immune" to EPO, wouldn't there still be some inverse relation of improvement, based on your current ability versus your ideal potential? That is, if you are in bad shape versus your true potential, EPO helps more. If so, at some point close to elite performances, what is the effective difference between this "small improvement" and "no improvement"? Does this marginal difference merit any discussion?It's too easy to take too many things for granted.Ramzi was middle distance. Just like multi-stage cycling is not running, the 1500m is not the marathon. The speed, strength, and endurance demands are different. We also don't know if EPO was the only thing Ramzi took.I'm not sure you use the term "logical fallacy" correctly. If I'm wrong, which kind of logical fallacy is Renato perpetuating: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_fallaciesAs was argued before, being 27 years old is an advantage, compared to older "end of life" athletes of past decades.

synch wrote:

How do you know the athletes running 2:05 who are 'too good' for EPO didn't use EPO to get there?

Would Ramzi be considered too good for EPO had he not been caught? Did EPO not help him go from 3:39 to 3:30 in 1 year?

This is just one of the logical fallacies that Renato is trying to perpetuate. You don't know if ANY of these guys are 'too good' for EPO - even if such a thing is possible they might be using the EPO to get to those 'too-good' times in the first place.

rekrunner - 9.5/10 on trollmeter

Yeah 27-year old first timer athletes running 2:04 is due to money on the roads... even though if anything there is less money than in the 80s.

yyy wrote:

with epo you can run at threshold for a much longer time.

exactly the kind of stimulus a marathon runner needs.

That's just more druggie BS.

ask those who tried.

Thanks for the reflexive response, but what does your brain tell you? It's actually a question, not a statement, or an excuse. You didn't answer the question, but accused the motives of the one asking. That's one tactic of debate I guess, but not a very interesting one, intellectually.Actually, the possibility suggested by "Doesn't take a Genius" was that "maybe" EPO would allow the athlete "to get in more hard workouts", "recover faster", and "make the physical adaptations required in a shorter period of time". Curiously, he didn't even suggest bigger adaptations, just the same adaptations in less time, yet he presumed better race times anyway.A better suggestion is that EPO would allow a higher volume of intensity, with accelerated recovery, leading to higher fitness, and better race times -- but he didn't say that.Just the same, the open question is, how can you be sure? Is the certainty based on real life experience? Expressing cynicism is not a substitute for certainty of opinion.I think there are still a couple of areas of doubt:- Do marathons need more "hard sessions"? A marathon needs efficiency (more speed with less oxygen), and fuel management (more energy from fat). Does EPO help train these things?- Lydiard limited his "hard sessions" (hardest sessions required 48 hours of recovery) to 3-4 weeks, which brought sufficiently-maximal desired adaptations. What would EPO do? Shorten this time to 2 weeks?- Most training plans include the same workouts just once a week. E.g. a "typical" plan might have one speed, one tempo, and one long run per week for six weeks. How would adding a regime of EPO affect these parameters?

yyy wrote:

it sounds more like a silly excuse to me.

synch wrote:

How do you know the athletes running 2:05 who are 'too good' for EPO didn't use EPO to get there?

I think I wrote something earlier in the thread that even if it were true that clean 2:03-2:04 guys were too fit for EPO to help them you still could have 2:05-2:07 "clean" guys using EPO to get down to 2:03-2:04. As I see it, that pretty much negates the argument that running 2:03-2:04 somehow proves a runner isn't using anything.

Nobody has answered my question...

Is it EPO that allows these 2:05 guys to run 4:30s in the middle of a marathon and 14:teen 5k splits after 30k?

Even if Canova and others are saying it won't help the marathon it will sure as hell help one run these insane 5k splits and recover from them and maintain the pace they do all the way to the finish line.

Maybe if it was a perfectly even paced race it wouldn't help...though I still think it would over the last 10k as most of the 2:05 elites are not glycogen depleted as they are not out there for that long.

Thoughts?

I did see a study where EPO increased time to exhaustion at some fixed "sub-maximal" effort on a bike (in a lab). I wondered at the time how that translates to running.

pseudoscience detector wrote:

That's just more druggie BS.