What was in this week's Sunday Times?

I am wondering too. Anybody?

Not sure how I missed this last week. I thought the only doping article last week in the Sunday Times was about the head of UK AntiDoping coming across as a cheer leader for positive doping news before Rio.

I just checked today's Sunday Times to see if there was anything this week because David Walsh said he was going to write about it last week and didn't.

I found another article from last week.

The article was titled: "Testing times"

subtitle: "Paula Radcliffe, a stern critic of doping, has run into an ugly row over blood data leaked to The Sunday Times"

Yet the article does not name Radcliffe as being the athlete the Times cast so suspicion about a month ago. Weird. Instead it talks about her outing herself and the 3 blood values cited by Sky News.

It is all very indirect. On Radcliffe releasing her 3 tests:

"It was immediately clear that the figures carried little weight without comparison with other tests. A key element that experts would usually examine to determine doping is any big fluctuation that deviates from an athlete’s normal blood value levels. Radcliffe has so far declined to publish her full testing history."

The Sunday Times has her entire database. They could publish if they wanted.

Next paragraph: "There was also a small discrepancy in her description of the test taken in Portugal. In her 2004 book she wrote: “They did blood tests before the race and afterwards the [official] doctor said they knew from my sample there was no point in testing me for the blood-boosting drug EPO.” Last week, however, she said she was tested for EPO at the time of the Portuguese race."

One small caveat is someone could say there is "no point in testing you for EPO" and still do it because it is the protocol. Everyone at the World Half could have been tested for EPO. The more interesting point to me is the official doctor talking to her. This guy presumable still can talk about what he witnessed. Paula in her book talks about being sick and dehydrated.

I find the first sentence in the next paragraph to be disingenous:

"Her reluctance to release personal data that might be misinterpreted was understandable. Less so was her accusation that The Sunday Times had warned athletes it would look as though they had something to hide if they did not release their medical data. Radcliffe described this as “tantamount to blackmail”.

The Times all but tried to shame Paula into releasing her data by saying Farah or Ennis weren't suspicious and then getting others to release their data. The next paragraph proves my point:

"This newspaper has published the blood test scores of 13 elite athletes (eight British and five foreign). All said they were releasing their personal data because they believed transparency was necessary to clean up their sport. None has complained that the results have been misinterpreted."

I don't see anything from this week.

From the Sunday Times original article,interesting in hindsight:

"The data shows that the athlete’s blood scores increased as their performances improved on the international stage"

Also worth repeating from Ashenden and Parisotto ,in contrast to the rebuttal based on only 3 off-scores.

"We followed the same procedure as IAAF expert panelists when reviewing ABP profiles, classifying results as ‘likely doping’ when we were able to confidently exclude all other potential causes or instead ‘suspicious’ when there was genuine evidence of blood manipulation however further investigation such as target testing would have been required. And for the avoidance of doubt, we based our judgments on the entire blood test profile for the athlete not just on individual scores. "

I don't trust Sunday Times after seeing their insinuations and tiptoeing. Until they come out with fair and square data and accusations, I consider them a bunch of dishonest sissies.

[quote]wejo wrote:

The Sunday Times has her entire database. They could publish if they wanted.

From what I understand the Sunday Times has only published the full data of those athletes who are either convicted dopers (Shobukhova, Goumri) or those who have given their permission (Farah, Pavey etc). Paula doesn't fall into either of those categories so they probably can't publish it.

It seems that they can't or won't publish

Paula doesn't look like doing an interview either.Not in her interest to do so if she wants this to go away.

Has Mo Farah released all data or just the off-scores.Either way its a publicity stunt on his part.He's about as clean as rashid ramzi.

I think it boils down to the Times being cowards. The entirety of the British Press has closed ranks around Paula (as they did around Mo...). As reported by Kimmage, Paula has threatened to sue and the Sunday Times has apparently run up the white flag. They assigned (maybe...) David Walsh, Paula's biographer, to the story. Walsh won't write it without doing a proper interview with her, which, I surmise, she won't give him. Since the story isn't in this week's edition, if anything at all gets published, it will look like a nonsequitor. Britain has concluded that we shouldn't traumatize Paula's kids (that Paula would drag them into it is for me, the most cynical act since Lance accusing Kimmage and Walsh of being pro cancer by going after him... are her young children really being asked by other small children in MONACO about their mother?!? ) by trying to get her to release her blood values. We have the head of UKAD assuring us that he won't ruin the run up to Rio by, you know, doing his job.

And, finally, one of the more influential voices in the sport, the founder of this website, has let his personal connection to PR overcome his objectivity and integrity as a 'reporter'.

This all adds up to the most disappointing few weeks in the battle against PEDs in sport since Novitzky's investigation being dropped.

Found this gem from a few years ago:

http://ideas.time.com/2012/02/06/why-the-wheels-came-off-the-lance-armstrong-case/

It reminds me quite a bit of most of the stories re Paula Radcliffe's doping.

What did you find in common -- bad journalism?

Thanks for following up on this Wejo. Yes, it was disappointing to see nothing appearing in this week’s Sunday Times.

One wonders what is going on behind the scenes. As you noticed from the quotes you’ve noted from last week, I would imagine that the ST lawyers are all over what is being said and what accusations are being made.

And here I am sure it is tricky. Whatever the values say, in strict legal terms it seems like pre 2009 blood readings is not legally submissible at evidence of doping (a point which Paula was at pains to point out in her statement, and something that the IAAF and WADA will back her up on). Then there’s also the fact that the whistleblower, the source of the data, has specifically requested that individual athlete’s data not be released, and although the ST may have been complicit in releasing a certain amount of information so that people could put 2 + 2 together and make 4, that is very different from releasing the whole of Paula’s data. So there is an ethical journalistic element to this as well. I would be fairly sure though that there is a lot of work going on behind the scenes to prepare a big splash where more of the data and surrounding context to the story comes out and the statement she has made so far is challenged. I hope it’s not just an in-depth interview with David Walsh where she tells us how clean she is, but a clinical examination of the facts.

For me, there’s just too many elements of her statement that are clearly ‘misdirection’/untrue to make suspicion the most plausible response.

She says that she was training at altitude before all 3 tests (I assume that she could dismiss the scores according to the revised borderline for suspicious off-scores if an athlete was training at altitude) – but we know that she wasn’t (she was in the UK a minimum of 5+ weeks before the race in Portugal, the date of the only test we know about).

She says that none of the tests came near her best performances (I assume to demonstrate that the London marathon WR time – the one that always come up in discussions in the mainstream media - was not connected to a suspicious blood test), but the Vilamoura test came 2 weeks after setting a world best time in the half marathon and in that actual race, she won the world champs by 90 secs.

Then there’s the inconsistency that the Sunday Times pointed out about in their story that you refer to Wejo.

I’m also not sure about what she says about ‘being ill prior to the race and taking strong antibiotics’ – i.e. which race this referred to. If it was Vilamoura as well, then it was a very short time between running 65 mins the Great North Run, getting ill, taking strong antibiotics, recovering, travelling to Portugal and then smashing a world best field in 67 mins. A general observation would be that Paula seemed often had been ill/had been taking medication of some kind before big races – the fall she had whilst out training prior to London 2003, the anti-inflammatories before Olympics in 2004 etc. That this now being used as reasons to explain high blood scores is kind of interesting.

The main thing though, as everyone is saying, is that we are missing plenty of information to be able to make a full judgement about the Paula situation. But the misdirection/evasiveness in the (pre-prepared) statement is enough to leave me without any doubt that Paula is hiding something. On the generous end of the scale this is maybe that she does not want people delving into the kind of borderline activities i.e. Dr ‘Magic Hands’ injecting ‘anti-inflammatory homeopathic injections’ into her calves (read: Actovegin, extract of calves blood

http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/7324261/germany-dr-hans-wilhelm-muller-wohlfahrta-great-healer-quack-hyperactive-syringe

), taking asthma medicine every day etc. On the other end of the scale is obviously something more sinister. I hope that the journalists can continue to get to the bottom of the story.

She is probably not willing to discuss the missing data :Hgb and retics etc.

UKAD and Lord Coe have no interest in this either

I understand that part. However, Paula has now been identified as the athlete. Go back to the leaker and say "we'd like to publish her data."

And if they are really worried about thejournalistic ethics in not releasing her name, they should have done a better job of keeping her name quiet. They all but said it was her in the way they wrote about the story. "We are ethical" while trying to call out Paula in my book doesn't cut it.

Is the Sunday Times the only ones with the data? It easily could be published in the US. Here are Paula's blood values, here's what we think of them.

That's the first I have heard of this. Do you have any evidence to back that up? It is an easy thing that could be fact checked. Font-Romeu is Paula's base for the summer. She did race in the UK that summer but easily could have gone back to France before Worlds.

I do agree we are missing information and I said all along I expect more information to come out. As is we have an incomplete picture.

DHT123 wrote:

On the generous end of the scale this is maybe that she does not want people delving into the kind of borderline activities i.e. Dr ‘Magic Hands’ injecting ‘anti-inflammatory homeopathic injections’ into her calves (read: Actovegin, extract of calves blood

http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/7324261/germany-dr-hans-wilhelm-muller-wohlfahrta-great-healer-quack-hyperactive-syringe

), taking asthma medicine every day etc. On the other end of the scale is obviously something more sinister. I hope that the journalists can continue to get to the bottom of the story.

One more thing I didn't realize Actovegin isn't banned

At some point it was but it no longer is. Not sure when that happened.

But if actovegin is the key to success people should know that.

I just found this that we wrote in 2006:

http://www.letsrun.com/2006/eurodrugs.php

Actovegin was banned in 2006. Interesting they took it off the list at some point but if it was used in 2003 you'd get banned.

She ran races on 3 consecutive weeks that September, a 5km and a 10km in London, then the Great North Run.

The following weekend, this newspaper article places her in Loughborough:

http://www.theguardian.com/sport/2003/sep/29/athletics.duncanmackay

She also was interviewed by the IAAF pre the world champs 'from her home in the U.K.' earlier that week:

http://www.iaaf.org/news/news/radcliffe-exclusive-interview-why-vilamoura

Assuming she was in the UK at least a couple of days before the 5km race, that's at least 5+ weeks she was not at altitude before the Vilamoura race. Like I said before, for me this is total misdirection. It allows her to state that the scores did not meet the revised off-score limit of 110 (as opposed to 103) for those athletes training at or just returning from altitude training that was widely quoted after Sky News released the blood test data (surely leaked by Paula's camp?). But clearly you can see that she had not just returned from altitude training in October 2003.

As always the question is, why are we being misled? Openness and transparency are the key words. We are getting evasiveness and misdirection.

Actovegin was banned by the IOC for a year or so around 2000. It is "not approved" for treatments in the U.S. (FDA, I assume). It involves multiple injection sites, opening the door for abuse of other substances, I would guess. A grey area like thyroid meds and IV infusions, not sure why Alberto hasn't tried this. Maybe he doesn't like using treatments he doesn't personally administer?

DHT123 wrote:

But the misdirection/evasiveness in the (pre-prepared) statement is enough to leave me without any doubt that Paula is hiding something. On the generous end of the scale this is maybe that she does not want people delving into the kind of borderline activities i.e. Dr ‘Magic Hands’ injecting ‘anti-inflammatory homeopathic injections’ into her calves (read: Actovegin, extract of calves blood

http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/7324261/germany-dr-hans-wilhelm-muller-wohlfahrta-great-healer-quack-hyperactive-syringe

), taking asthma medicine every day etc. On the other end of the scale is obviously something more sinister. I hope that the journalists can continue to get to the bottom of the story.

"Rabin says Actovegin could be used a component of sophisticated blood doping methods, in which athletes withdraw, manipulate, and re-inject their blood to boost their endurance, or in conjunction with the use of erythropoietin, or EPO. It's similar in principle to taking a lot of iron - which is not banned, but helps make banned drugs work.

"If you take EPO and you are depleted in iron, EPO is not going to get the endurance-boosting effect," said Rabin.

Actovegin is rich in iron, manganese, amino acids, and other nutrients that are important in achieving the physiological transformations that dopers are seeking to achieve.

"Anybody who wishes to have blood withdrawn for autologous blood transfusions, or EPO treatment, could have this for support," says Rabin."

I got EPO tested; I didn't get EPO tested.

The temperature was 75; the temperature was 86.

The test was immediate; the test was 90 minutes later.

She was at altitude; she was in the UK.

fred wrote:

I got EPO tested; I didn't get EPO tested.

The temperature was 75; the temperature was 86.

The test was immediate; the test was 90 minutes later.

She was at altitude; she was in the UK.

The altitude is the one I have a quibble with. And nice work for noticing DHT123 that she was a sea level for over a month before Portugal.

She's known as spending a ton of time at altitude. If she trains all summer at altitude and then comes down for weeks to race I have no idea what that does to blood values. Her statement said, "Furthermore, they were all conducted following prolonged periods of altitude training, which is today recognised as significantly impacting blood figures, and is therefore taken into account when interpreting blood data. " I can see how someone would say Portugal was after a prolonged period of altitude. But what really matters is how that should affect your blood if you come down for 5 weeks.

This just reiterates the need for more data to come out. This is the test written about in her book and she said she was sick. Something was clearly wrong with her blood values on that test and she acknowledged that 10 years ago. ABP was in its infancy but I don't see why we shouldn't see the data.

As for EPO test thing, someone can say you don't need to be EPO tested and still EPO test you (ie if all the medallists are automatically tested) so I don't see that as being inconsistent. It's a factual data whether she was EPO tested or not.

Renato Canova has posted on here how it was very hot in the sun and temperatures are taken in the sun. The NY Times said, "The midday sun, although welcome, was too warm. "

IAAF recap " hot sunshine"

The immediate could mean right after the race within the 2 hour window they don't test in now.