I read all the Sunday Times stories last night and they gave much more perspective. We're going to see if they can be republished on LetsRun.com.
Some factors are more alarming after reading the whole thing, in terms of cover-ups.
I'm in the Minnesota wilderness but some highlights:
The 2 experts marked samples as "yellow" = suspicious and requiring more follow up (they said this indicated a 1/1000 chance of being natural) or red = "likely to be doping".
(Side note, 1/1000 to me seems like it would be likely to be doping so I'd like to ask them more about this).
The amount of suspicious tests (this is only for athletes with abnormal blood values indicating possible blood boosting/doping, the experts did nothing to look at steroid usage) by country
Russia 415, Ukraine 102, Morocco 82, Spain 81, Kenya 77, Turkey 52, Greece 42, Belarus 42, Romania 32, Portugal 32, USA 32, Britain 12
So Kenya gets a ton of attention, but it is less suspicious as a country than Morocco or Spain who have a lot less top level athletes. USA is nearly half the level of Kenya.
Am I surprised it is easy to get EPO in Kenya? No. The more troubling aspects to all of this for me are possible coverups.
I don't think athletes could be sanctioned for these offenses until 2009 and it says since 2009 70 athletes have had suspicious values and not received the proper scrutiny. That is the part that is alarming to me.
But the good thing it it would mean by the vast majority of these things were before 2009. So since 2009 when athletes new they could get sanctioned the most blatant cheating has stopped.
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The paper also talks about "Off-scores" and its a measure of whether the blood values are natural. It talks abut 1/10000 chances and 1/100,000 chances. I think at that level we should be sanctioning athletes unless it means 1/10000 athletes can have blood values like that.
It says Andy Baddeley was beaten by an athlete with a 158 off score which means 1/million chance of being clean. If the precision is really that accurate all of these people should be sanctioned.
They talked to Lisa Dobriskey at length and talked about how she was battling with 2 likely dopers without naming the person or the race. Dobriskey was never 3rd at a major championship but was 2nd at Worlds and 4th at the Olympics.
2008 Olympics
1. Nancy Langat KEN
2. Irina Lishschinska UKR
3. Nataliya Tobias UKR
4. Lisa Dobriskey
2009 1. Maryam Yusuf JAMAL BRN
2. Lisa DOBRISKEY GBR
3. Shannon ROWBURY USA
4. Nuria FERNÁNDEZ ESP
Now the way the article is written most likely it is a race where 2 people beat her. But I didn't need leaked blood values to tell you the 2008 Olympics silver and bronze were very suspicious. 7 years later I've never heard of them.
And that reminds me of the LRC doping polls: https://www.letsrun.com/tag/doping-poll/
One British athlete gets singled out, the newspapers points to blood doping with their own blood as being a possibility. The athlete says they'd sue if their name came out and the paper says a later test was investigated by an Iaaf panel that looked at their results and 11 out of 12 experts cleared them saying it could come from training at altitude.
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The IAAF spends 5% of its income on anti-doping. They act like this is very little but I bet it blows away other sports with perhaps the exception of cycling. Anyone know figures for other sports?