Radcliffe blood values released

Is it odd that several of Paula's numbers dance with the upper limits of what is allowed? Aren't the limits generally set fairly high to allow for outliers. For her to be right around the limit several times might indicate manipulation of her levels.

Just interested wrote:

What exactly would 'clear' Paula Radcliffe?

People are accusing her of taking drugs based on the fact that she ran fast times for the marathon. There is nothing that can convince cynics that she was a clean athlete.

I disagree. I was pretty ambivalent towards whether she doped or not until this whole story emerged and it is primarily her actions and efforts to NOT come clean about her test results that have lead me to be very cynical.

The fast times are just an obvious hook, and given circumstantial evidence, one that shouldn't be ignored. Regardless, for me the inferrence that her scores should be contextualized distracts from the fact that she had suspicious scores anyway. If she was clean, she could release every blood score she ever registered and that would be the end of it. That is not what she has done. And she has a ton to lose, like Armstrong, so it's no wonder she is fighting hard.

I'm not a doctor.

But...

I thought the idea was that if you're dehydrated you have "thicker" blood. It means that concentrations of anything in your system show up at a higher proportion because you've lost volume. This would certainly be true if it's an EPO urine test where you are looking at concentrations of the body's chemicals coming from a person who has just peed after a long, hot race. I don't pee for hours after my marathons. It's a rousing success when I finally get a tinkle. Many people piss blood. It's not an accurate representation at all of your normal values.

The trouble is just that it's not exactly easy to take a sample on the starting line, either.

Antonio Cabral disagrees.

More anecdotal evidence that you can't trust what she says. And if you can't trust what she says...

"The lady doth protest too much, methinks"...

EPO cheats out, Paula

Am i missing something? Where are the blood values? And I mean the total picture not just 1 or 3 indicators.

If she released it all I will vote "clean" if she didn't; than the combination of the long time she took to respond i would vote for "cheat"

You should be using "Off-HR Worst-case at altitude."

"Worst case Off-HR" numbers take into account ethnicity and endurance training's effects on Hb (main factor in the Second-generation blood tests to detect EPO.)

"Off-HR at altitude" is the worst case above plus training at altitude thus even more conservative.

Paper authors admit that they are not sure how long the effects of altitude training persist once athlete goes back to sea level, but that just a question of whether the cutoff is closer to "worst case" or "altitude" numbers.

Note that Sky News, mentioned 111.7 as a typical cutoff for females training at altitude. You can find that number as in Table 2 as 1 in 100 (false positive chance) cutoff for "worst-case at altitude" using OFF-hr test. Based on my calculations odds of her results are nowhere close to 1 in 1000, they are 1 in 63 for 109.3, 1 in 70 for 109.86, and 1 in 207 for 114.86.

Very misleading wrote:

Why does the home page say that 'Sky news claim she is now exonerated'?

It doesn't say anything of the sort it just reports statements and factual data. No opinion is given.

For those of you who don't know what the poster is talking about. When i saw that this article was out (by reading this thread), i put a link to the article on the front page under the title "Radcliffe's 3 suspicious blood values are published by Sky News - Sky News now says she's exonerated."

"Very misleading" you aren't the only one wondering about the title. .Weldon (of all people) called me and asked why the front page said that as well. I said, "Have you read the headline of the article and the headline on Sky News? That's what it says."

The article may not say anything about her being cleared but the sky news front page and the title of the article were very clear - “Blood Tests That Cleared Paula Radcliffe” .

So what I wrote was factual. Exonerated and cleared are synonyms.

But to not confuse people we have changed the title. It now says, "3 Of Radcliffe’s Suspicious Blood Values Are Published By Sky News Under Headline “Blood Tests That Cleared Paula Radcliffe” .

I'm putting this into this thread because the discussion keeps migrating:

wejo wrote:

So is the worse case Off-HR at altitude the level to use? or is that way too simplistic?

That is what we are assuming but the race was at sea level.

That is why it is best to see all the blood data for all of her tests. A one off offscore is more confusing that most of us thought.

And I'd like to hear specifics on how dehydration would affect her score specifically. I assume this will all get analyzed in decent time.

It seems the Sunday Times at least tried to do all of this.

"Overview of how blood profiles were evaluated

• The data base comprised key blood results such as haemoglobin and reticulocyte levels, from which the OFF score was calculated;

• Sorting the data according to these key variables quickly flagged those results that exceeded published thresholds utilised by anti-doping authorities to designate results as abnormal. Such results indicate the possible use of blood doping;

• When an abnormal result was present, the entire profile for the athlete was extracted from the data base and evaluated in its entirety;

• When potential medical and physiological factors that can affect the key blood profiles could confidently be excluded, the athlete was flagged as ‘likely blood doping’;

• Results that were flagged as ‘suspicious’ represented genuine evidence of potential doping, but other factors such as medical or physiological conditions could not be confidently ruled out. Such profiles required further investigation, such as targeted testing, to determine whether blood doping had indeed taken place.

• These two categories (‘likely blood doping’ and ‘suspicious’) are equivalent to the designations that IAAF expert panelists are asked to submit when ‘raw data’ in ABP profiles containing abnormal results are sent for expert review.

...

"Specifically, every athlete was assessed in terms of their entire blood profile. Appropriate weighting was afforded to results in light of the standard of blood collection at the time the sample was collected. Further, as attested to by the IAAF’s published article, it was possible to make an allowance for altitude where necessary because the altitude of the testing location depicted in the database followed a distribution similar to that of the altitude of the training location."

How are you coming up with the 17%?

"For Radcliffes numbers though, it has been shown that her change in HGB means that her plasma volume went down 17%!"

Off scores are totally irrelevant in this instance unless you see a series of scores and what would represent 'normal' for her, for example if she has readings of 70 or 80 the week before. They also don't say how the off scores were calculated nor are they released with the other data.

larkim wrote:

She says "never cheated". I think that's a fairly clear and umambiguous statement to be honest. It encompasses "I never took a banned substance" because that is cheating. It includes "I never blood doped" because that is cheating. It includes "I never fiddled a test" because that is cheating.

She doesn't need to give a list of things she didn't do. She says she never cheated, and that means she never took anything or did anything which is prohibited.

In her mind she might believe she didn't cheat because 'everyone else is doing it' and therefore all she's doing is putting herself on a level playing field.

seems that 3 values in the abstract can't prove anything, she could be that 1/1000 athlete or 1/100 or 1/10 that has those values without any wrongdoing

especially without seeing other values, I get that if she had 1000 values and 997 of them were in the 80-90 range but these 3 are all >= 110 then that would look potentially suspicious, but even then if her value post world record marathon was say 89 and in that 80-90 range then is that proof that she was not cheating???

if I read that article right and understand it right, maybe I do not, then the test is not a test that identifies or proves epo usage, it is a test that identifies blood values that statistically are based on samples and show that statistically 99/100 people do not have that value but 1 does naturally, and that if people use enough epo then their blood values will hit or exceed that #.

So if we tested 100 people and all 100 exceeded the target blood value we could say statistically that indicates 99 used epo to get that result and 1 person had the result naturally.

So the analysis/test/values is basically if it has feathers, swims 10mph, and eats fish then 99% chance it is a duck on epo, but 1% chance it could be a penguin

i was suspicious before but now that I understand, I think, the testing/values I think I am in support of Radcliffe. How can she possibly, or any athlete, prove that she is the 1/100 and how can anyone prove she isn't? Wouldn't we expect the "outlier" = "world champ" = "world record" to be a physical anomaly? This is a test based on assumptions about human systems functioning and effects of performance but is not a test that says artificial epo has been found in the blood.

Again, I am open to being educated better, as perhaps I am wrong.

It's like not really a test but more like guidelines.

"This ability to identify dopers should be weighed against the likelihood of encountering an athlete who possesses this score as a result of natural biological variability."

So 1/100 means 99 cheaters and 1 innocent athlete and no way to reasonably distinguish with definiteness amongst them.

joho wrote:

How are you coming up with the 17%?

"For Radcliffes numbers though, it has been shown that her change in HGB means that her plasma volume went down 17%!"

I posted it here, but a poster on a different forum made the first observation, and post I saw

clerk wroteAnd re: 17%, that's assuming 10L of blood, and a starting point ghb of 14. It similar even as you change those assumptions (starting hgb of 15, or a little less blood volume, or a little more).

The change in hgb concentration (assuming that hgb was constant, that there was no transfusion): 14/16.8= .83. If she started with 10L of blood, (that assumption is an assumption, of course, but not going to change much), then she would have had to have a new volume of 8.3L, to change the concentration by 2.8.

I haven't had time to read this thread but here is a video segment where Sky News reveals the Radcliffe data and says it means she's cleared:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?t=41&v=tcECIZteFzE