Doesn't Russian Doping Scandal Prove Canova is Right about EPO?

Dear Renato.

You speak about talent. Can you explain how big is the talent of Shaeen or Bekele??

How do they compare to other worldclass athlete?

How compared to a normal person??

Is it childhood hardship make u talent?

How fast can they run witout official training??

What is the limit of a normal person can he run 8.30 in a 3k and the best talent to 7.2x with the best training???

Thank you for sharing your knowlegde of running:)

Mourhit is Moroccan.You mentioned Portugal before...I don't have much time now.I will respond in about a week why your best non-African candidates are not interesting, using the same "goalposts".

Solution Seeker wrote:

rekrunner wrote:

If the documented Spanish and Portuguese cases are not the ones who set the European records, you can not argue that EPO helps set European records.

????

http://www.abc.net.au/news/2003-05-22/mourhit-suspended-until-may-2004-report/1858206

"The European record holder over 3,000 metres, 5,000m and 10,000m tested positive for the endurance-boosting substance EPO and a masking product on May last year ahead of the World Half Marathon championships in Brussels."

rekrunner wrote:

Mourhit is Moroccan.

You mentioned Portugal before...

I don't have much time now.

I will respond in about a week why your best non-African candidates are not interesting, using the same "goalposts".

No, Mourhit is a Belgian citizen, that is why his records counted as European records and you implied that EPO could not be argued as a factor in the setting of European records in the 1990s/2000s. It is actually getting difficult to find any part of your posts that is actually correct or backed up by facts.

In fact it is not an unreasonable argument to extrapolate that every single European distance running record (championship distances) set in the 1990s to early 2000s time period indoor and outdoor from 1500m to marathon was set by an athlete using EPO.

We can look at the 3 best European Marathon runners (time wise) from that era and again things don't look great:

Julio Rey - busted for PEDs in 1999.

Benoît Zwierzchiewski - caught with doping products at his home by French police in the early 2000s. He never approached anywhere near the level of his 2h 06 XX marathon after this raid.

Antonio Pinto:

From this thread

Searching for blood on the tracks.

By Steven Downes.

2,734 words

6 August 2000

Sunday Herald

12

English

(c) SMG Sunday Newspapers Ltd Not Available for Re-dissemination.

Selected extracts from the article:

The withdrawals from the Sydney Olympics have started already as a new drugs test has been announced which claims there will be no mistake in detecting the use of EPO. Steven Downes looks at widespread use of the drug but believes there are several alternatives for the athletes

THE first withdrawal was announced on Thursday, the news coming from the unlikely source of Pyongyang, capital of North Korea. Song-ok Jong, the woman who had emerged from complete obscurity last year to win the marathon at the Seville World Championships, running a time in the sweltering heat of the day that was three minutes quicker than she had ever managed before, was to retire. At the ripe old age of 25.

It was the day after the International Olympic Committee had said that they would, after all, be testing for EPO at the Sydney Games. The suspicion is that, in endurance sports there will be further high-profile withdrawals between now and September 15, when the Olympic flame is lit in Stadium Australia. Maybe, just maybe, Sydney will not be the EPOlympics after all.

EPO - or erythropoietin, to give the blood-boosting hormone its proper name - is just one of a number of chemical acronyms believed to be coursing through the veins of some of the world's top sportsmen and women. Because EPO is a naturally occurring hormone, the task of the drug-busters is to determine that the substance has been artificially introduced to the body.

This week's announcement from Lausanne was that, through using a combination of new, separate blood and urine tests, there will be no doubt when the two tests results complement each other. We shall see.

Perhaps more than any other substance, EPO has had a remarkable effect on international sport. Two days before the start of the 1998 Tour de France French customs officials opened the trunk of a team masseur's car on its way to Dublin, and discovered 234 doses of EPO, plus 24 vials of growth hormones and testosterone, and 60 capsules of Asaflow, a blood-thinning agent - all banned from international sport.

EPO is a real magic bullet. Other performance-enhancing drugs, such as anabolic steroids, only permit the user to train harder, or to recover from their exertions more quickly. The steroid cheat still has to work hard. EPO, however, is different: it delivers an immediate 10% improvement in performance. The drug increases the red cell count in the blood giving the athlete a greater capacity to store oxygen and therefore increases their stamina. At elite level, in the big-money marathons such as New York, Chicago, Boston, London or Rotterdam, it is enough to turn a 2hr 12min back of the pack contender into a millionaire record-breaker.

We can trace the impact of EPO on distance running because it has only been on the market for a decade. It has been a decade of fantastic improvements in standards. If we accept 2hr 10min as the benchmark for a male marathoner, it is worthwhile considering that in 1987, just two runners raced inside that time. In the five-year period between 1989 and 1993, there was a total of 41 sub-2:10 performances, a rate of about eight per year. Last year, 55 men ran 2:10 or faster.

"The marathon is saturated with EPO," according to Britain's top marathon runner, Vancouver-based Jon Brown. "Five years ago, it was virtually non-existent in distance running, but now it's got to the stage where drug-taking is almost accepted," says Brown.

"You see people with modest ability producing fantastic times. It's very frustrating. I've seen a lot of weird things in the last two years or so. Some of the main players are operating on the stuff. It's most obvious in the marathon."

Erythopoietin was first biologically manufactured and distributed by AmGen, a Californian biotech firm, in 1989. It was designed to help people with kidney disease, the chronically anaemic, it has even been used to help treat people with cancer, or HIV patients who are undergoing the debilitating AZT treatment. Available over the counter at pharmacists throughout most of Europe without prescription, it did not take long for the unscrupulous athletes to latch on to EPO's sporting potential. It was around 1991 that the first EPO-linked deaths were being reported in Belgium and Holland. In EPO's first decade, as many as two dozen professional cyclists are believed to have died as a result of EPO use without careful medical supervision. There was also a spate of around 10 mysterious deaths among Scandinavian orienteers in the early 1990s.

Oversaturated with oxygen-carrying red cells, the EPO-user's blood can thicken to the consistency of runny jam, clogging the aerteries, and putting the heart under immense strain. At night, as the user sleeps, the pulse can slow down to such a point that their heart just stops working. At least one former world champion is said to go to sleep with a heart-rate monitor strapped to his chest and rigged to an alarm: if his pulse falls below a certain, safe level, the alarm goes off, and the sportsmen gets up to walk around his bedroom for a few minutes to get the blood pumping properly again. Another top European runner always insists on an opt-out clause if the race day temperature is above 30 degrees.

"It's because he's on EPO," according a race director who asked not to be named. "He's scared that if he dehydrates too much during the course of the race, his blood will turn to sludge."

Unusually for an athlete, Brown has no fear about naming names. He points out one rival, Portugal's Antonio Pinto. Until the mid-1990s, Pinto had had a lengthy, if hardly outstanding, international career in which he never managed to run faster than 28min for 10,000m. Then, in his early 30s, after years being regarded as a journeyman marathon runner, he suddenly began rapid improvement across a range of distances, slicing more than 20 seconds off his 5,000m best to get close to the 13-minute mark, and two minutes off his half-marathon best to run inside the hour. So when Pinto beat Brown and the rest of the European Championship 10,000m field in Budapest in 1998, the desolate Brit, having finished fourth, wandered off the track and said: "It's a joke. Everyone knows what's going on, but Pinto's not going to test positive, so there's nothing I can do."

Since then, the silver medallist in that race, Dieter Baumann, has tested positive for the anabolic steroid, nandrolone, and awaits an international arbitration hearing. According to Brown, Stephan Franke, the bronze medallist in Budapest, had also aroused suspicions. Sure enough, a few months later, the German team doctor, Karl-Heinz Graff, admitted administering an illegal blood-thinning agent HES to Franke and his training partner, Damian Kallabis, a runner who improved his steeplechase time by over half a minute in 1998 to take the European title. "They were using it to mask EPO," said Dr Graff.

"It's becoming accepted that if you want to be competitive you take EPO," Brown said. "The problem they have had in cycling was that it became part and parcel of the sport, and that's what I see happening in distance running. Money is the motivation." The irony of Brown's accusations is that, a year earlier, Pinto had been the accuser. It was Pinto who named Abel Anton as an EPO user, claims which the Spaniard denied (of course), shortly before going on to win the marathon world title in Athens. "I am very suspicious of Anton's methods," Pinto had said, "He has made progress very quickly."

But nor was Pinto the first to point the finger at Anton. Pablo Sierra, Anton's marathon team-mate with a 2:11 personal best, told a Spanish national newspaper that the 1997 world champion, and his predecessor as world number one, Martin Fiz, both used EPO. Fiz, Sierra pointed out, is coached by Dr Sabina Padilla, whose previous claim to fame was as the team doctor to the Banes to professional cycling team and the five-time Tour de France winner, Miguel Indurain.

"In Spain, EPO is easily available," Sierra said. "It is not a question of who is using EPO - it is more a case of who is not using EPO." For his rash candour, Sierra was rewarded by the Spanish national athletics federation with a six-month ban, and a block on on his state-funded elite grant. Then, at the beginning of last year, a leaked lab report revealed that Fiz had actually tested positive for another banned hormone, testosterone, on three separate occasions. Use of testosterone for distance runners would work in a two-fold manner: as well as assisting the body to recover from heavy training more quickly, extra testosterone would also stimulate production of another hormone: EPO.

While there is nice anecdotal information in the article, it is still obvious that the author is either sloppy with the facts and/or intentionally cherry-picking performance data to support his thesis about rEPO. Slightly OFF-topic, but take a look at these items:

It is interesting that there is an information blackout about his marathon progression. The article mentions elsewhere the 2:10 marathon time as an important threshold, but curiously neglects to mention that Pinto almost broke that barrier as early as 1992 when winning the London Marathon (2:10:02). Pinto also broke the 28:00 at 10000m already in 1994 when he was 28 years old (27:48.1), so the improvement to 27:10-ish times in 4-5 years shouldn't be totally unusual while still suspicious. In essence, his marathon times are almost flat until 2000.

2000 2:06:36 (How come the article missed this one?)

1999 2:09:00

1998 2:08:13

1997 2:07:55

1996 2:08:38

1995 2:08:48

1994 2:08:31

1992 2:10:02

While the "over half a minute"- reference could be in comparison to his personal best during 1998 season before the European Championships, the actual Y-O-Y improvement (1997-1998) for Damian Kallabis was actually "only" 24 seconds (8:37 -> 8:13). Even the HES/rEPO-quote by Graff is weirdish, because there was no blood testing at all in athletics and indeed some sources quote him saying that HES could be used as blood diluter (a common practice in cycling and XC-skiing at that time).

You are naturally not responsible for the mistakes in the article and some of the sudden performance leaps are suspicious (the ~5 % leap for Kallabis).

Good reminder of drug cheat Baumann, who held the 5000 m European Record before Mourhit. To date, he is still the fastest 5000 m runner without African parents. Another example of a very successful drug cheat.

His case also demonstrates that it is too simplifying to focus exclusively on EPO. Any comparison of the 80s with the 90s should include a consideration of increased testing and decreased state support for doping of all Cold War countries in the 90s.

casual obsever wrote:

His case also demonstrates that it is too simplifying to focus exclusively on EPO. Any comparison of the 80s with the 90s should include a consideration of increased testing and decreased state support for doping of all Cold War countries in the 90s.

Exactly. It is more realistic to suppose that EPO was something that was added to the PED arsenal used by athletes during the 1990s. The fact that it was (and still is) difficult to reliably detect did nevertheless make it useful in the situation of increased testing.

jCo wrote:

Seriously, all these doped athletes and not a single marathoner below 2:12, not a single 10,000m runner below 27:30; not a single 5000m runner below 13:20; not a single steeplechaser under 8:20; not a single 1500m runner below 3:35.

Doping is not the be-all, end all. I think Canova is right about doping. It is not a magic elixir like we all would like to believe.

Age 45

3:51.22 Vyacheslav Shabunin Russia 27.09.69 45 10.06.15 Moscow Russia

No. No one "in medicine" nor "in doping" extrapolates drug based performance improvement "in this way" across all ranges of talent."Medicine" might recommend an East African experiencing great blood loss or low red blood cell count for a transfusion or EPO treatments, to save their life, but will not characterise expectations for changes in race times for healthy elite East Africans versus non-elite non-East Africans. And medicine is often wrong, when patients do not respond to medicinal treatment.Similarly, a doping study that finds a 6% improvement in 11:00 3K runners does not attempt to conclude that this is a universal expectation across the board, for all levels of talent, and all levels of training. They only report an aggregated average and standard deviation for the study group. An improvement would be, as Aragon observed earlier, finding the inverse relation between drug effectiveness and developed talent -- but no study has even attempted that to my knowledge.WADA does not extrapolate either, and did not make any finding about the broadness of efficacy of EPO. WADA does not require showing broad efficacy, but only a "potential" to enhance performance. The question is too messy for WADA, so they avoid it completely using subjective criteria to develop objective lists. Note, even "potential" enhancement is not required, if the drug "represents an actual or potential health risk" and "violates the spirit of sport". Note again, the repeated use of the word "potential" and the vagueness of the expression "spirit of the sport". There is a lot of subjectivity in what WADA decides to prohibit. (For example, why ban meldonium, but allow thyroid drugs? The evidence and arguments seem virtually identical, with opposite outcomes.)And even if "in medicine and in doping", they pretty much universally extrapolate in this way, for the sake of argument, lest you find one counter-example to prove "almost universal", they would be subject to the often observed in the real world "dangers of extrapolation".

Mr. Obvious wrote:

You are wrong. It is pretty much universal practice in medicine and in doping to extrapolate in this way. WADA looked at the mechanisms involved and the broad based evidence for efficacy of EPO and decided it was an effective PED and banned it for all competitors.

rekrunner wrote:

subjectivity in what WADA decides to prohibit. (For example, why ban meldonium, but allow thyroid drugs? The evidence and arguments seem virtually identical, with opposite outcomes.)

.

[/quote]

So you don't see any difference here?

"eldonium's inhibition of γ-butyrobetaine hydroxylase gives a half maximal inhibitory concentration (IC50) value of 62 micromolar, which other study authors have described as "potent."[15][non-primary source needed][16] Meldonium is an example of an inhibitor that acts as a non-peptidyl substrate mimic.[17]

In further primary research reports, meldonium has been shown—by nuclear magnetic resonance—to also bind to carnitine acetyltransferase, a ubiquitous enzyme that plays a role in cellular energy metabolism; it also inhibits this enzyme, although even more weakly (inhibition constant, KI, of 1.6 millimolar)."

i think about 13 minutes over 5000 meters is about as fast as a (highly trained,highly talented)human being can go,without drugs,and about a 2.07 marathon.i think epo works very well indeed,and possibly works even better in combination with other drugs.east africans are brilliant,with or without drugs,but whatever theyre on is giving them even more of an edge.

The Independent:

"The tribunal concluded that, whatever her position may have been in 2006, “there was in 2016 no diagnosis and no therapeutic advice supporting the continuing use of Mildronate. If she had believed that there was a continuing medical need to use Mildronate then she would have consulted a medical practitioner. The manner of its use, on match days and when undertaking intensive training, is only consistent with an intention to boost her energy levels.

“It may be that she genuinely believed that Mildronate had some general beneficial effect on her health, but the manner in which the medication was taken, its concealment from the anti-doping authorities, her failure to disclose it even to her own team, and the lack of any medical justification must inevitably lead to the conclusion that she took Mildronate for the purpose of enhancing her performance.”

Basically, no.For some insight, see "Experts say there's little evidence meldonium enhances performance" -- specifically all the quotes by Don Catlin.http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/olympics/2016/04/05/meldonium-experts-wada-performance-enhancing-drug/82663156/Seems like WADA's primary reason to ban it was its own belief of what athletes believe, or intend.Your wikipedia "cut and paste" doesn't help me too much. I'm more a specialist in physics and mathematics than organic chemistry. Can you actually translate that to sports performance? How does replacing production of "the products L-carnitine, succinate, and carbon dioxide" with "malonic acid semialdehyde, formaldehyde, dimethylamine, and (1-methylimidazolidin-4-yl)acetic acid" improve performance? Formaldehyde? According to Wikipedia "Formaldehyde is highly toxic to all animals".Your "Independent" link is equally unhelpful. WADA shouldn't be banning substances on the basis of athletes' beliefs or intentions. The same argument for banning thyroid medication was rejected by WADA, despite repeated efforts by USADA and UKAD to ban it.

Billy Fap wrote:

rekrunner wrote:

subjectivity in what WADA decides to prohibit. (For example, why ban meldonium, but allow thyroid drugs? The evidence and arguments seem virtually identical, with opposite outcomes.)

So you don't see any difference here?

Well Gary, I only had 3 maths in university about 25 years before you, so it is probably obsolete.

However I will research this and get back to you in a week.

Gary. Ha ha.That would make you 75?Honestly, just show me where WADA found meldonium to enhance distance running performance.I didn't research this much, but it seems like the scientific evidence is scarce, and WADA's reported justification was that athletes are taking it, so it must be bad.

Billy Fap wrote:

Well Gary, I only had 3 maths in university about 25 years before you, so it is probably obsolete.

However I will research this and get back to you in a week.

jCo wrote:

Obviously I am talking about Men.

EPO does not work on men.

Why would you think oxygen-vector doping doesn't work with men? There's a good study showing EPO works very well with trained male runners:

One reason you're not seeing incredible times by the Russians is because they, like most other nations, are bounded by the Athlete Biological Passport (ABP). The ABP restricts 02-vector doping considerably, but doesn't eliminate it. There's no industrial-strength doping allowed by the ABP (i.e., Armstrong-style doping). But give the Russians some credit, Lord knows how hard they've tried to go industrial-strength: Since the implentation of ABP in 09, they lead the World in passport sanctions in the 800m up to the marathon with 28! The U.S. & U.K.? Nada...as in 0.

As promised...solution seeker,Sorry for the long response, but since you replied so many times, I will try to capture why they are all irrelevant below, when looking from the viewpoint of the magnitude of movement of Area and World records.To recap, initially, when I said that “non-African male athletes (were) unable to produce times significantly faster than their own 1980's-era predecessors” and that, if EPO works so well, then counter-intuitively “Western men must be low responders to EPO (except Lombard and Hellebuyck)”, you responded saying I “have conveniently have left out a slew of Spaniards and Portuguese” and further naming Portuguese athletes “Pinto, Jesus, Castro, Silva” and then “Spain (and Portugal to a lesser extent) have a multiple cases of EPO”.To that, I responded “If the documented Spanish and Portuguese cases are not the ones who set the European records, you can not argue that EPO helps set European records.”This is the statement you seem to key on, by providing many counter examples. Note I had previously explicitly excluded “African descendants, like Moroccans in Belgium, and Kenyans in Denmark and USA”. from my discussion. The whole “non-African” population over two decades should be broad enough to demonstrate a universal benefit of a largely undetectable drug. I also did not consider “indoor” records, since they tend to be much weaker.But never mind that and let’s look at the examples you have named.Your first example was Mohammed Mourhit. Whether you consider him Moroccan or Belgian, I do not consider him an example from “documented Spanish and Portuguese cases” — an important part of the statement to which you directly replied. Nevertheless, his times are better than Europeans, but still significantly below East Africans that preceded him. His 3000m record in 2000 was 10th best performance at the time, and 6 seconds slower than Komen’s 7:20.67 from 1996. His 5000m record of 12:49.71 from 2000 was 10th best performance at the time and 10 seconds slower than Geb’s 12:39 run in 1998. His 10000m record of 26:52.30 from 1999 is 37 seconds slower than Geb in 1998.Alberto Garcio ran 13:11.39 indoors, in 2003, beating a record of 13:20.8 from 1976. Compare that to Dave Moorcroft running 13:00 (outdoors) in 1982, or Bekele running 12:49.60 in 2004, or Geb and Komen running 12:50 and 12:51 in 1999 and 1998 respectively. Even Emile Puttemans ran 13:13 (outdoors) in 1972.According to “alltime-athletics.com” only 50 indoor performances beat Emile Puttemans 13:20.8 since 1976.Sergio Sanchez ran 7:32.41 in 2010 to beat Alberto Garcio’s 7:32.98 from 2003. Moorcroft ran 7:32.79 outdoors in 1983. Indoors Geb ran 7:26.15 and Komen ran 7:24.90 in 1998.Neither Garcia nor Sanchez set any European outdoor records in 3000m or 5000m.Marathon runners:Julio Rey ran a slow 2:07:37 compared to Carlos Lopes in 2:07:12 in 1985.Benoit Zwierzchiewski ran a faster 2:06:36 in 2003, 36 seconds faster than Lopes, but still 89 seconds slower than Tergat’s record set later that same year. Benoit was not found with EPO. There were accusations of steroids, but it’s not clear how steroids would help in a marathon.Antonio Pinto — also ran 2:06:36. Accused by Jon Brown, but otherwise not linked to EPO or any other drug. Sounds more like sour grapes from Jon Brown.Regarding your Portuguese examples, only Fernando Silva was caught with EPO (and ABP), and his times are not interesting even at the European record level of 1985.Again, the context here is that EPO helped set all these blazing world record times during the EPO-era, set exclusively by East Africans and North Africans. And supposedly we know that EPO works for East Africans, because it works for everybody.Yet European (and American and Australian) athletes did not significantly outperform athletes from the pre-EPO era, while they were significantly outperformed by the East Africans.Assuming your Spanish and Moroccan and Portuguese are among the best examples of EPO setting “area” records, this seems like a very weak case for EPO’s ability to cause record level performances. Note that all of the European athletes mentioned above set their European records after 2000 (unless you still insist on counting Mourhit's 10000m from 1999 -- the weakest of his European records). And the Spanish only set them in the weaker “indoor” events. Where were the native nationals from Europe (and America and Australia) in the 1990’s — the decade where EPO was completely undetectable, East Africans (and some North Africans) were taking distance running to a new level, and the whole cycling world was taking cycling to a new level?

rekrunner wrote:

Mourhit is Moroccan.

You mentioned Portugal before...

I don't have much time now.

I will respond in about a week why your best non-African candidates are not interesting, using the same "goalposts".

rekrunner wrote:

To recap, initially, when I said that “non-African male athletes (were) unable to produce times significantly faster than their own 1980's-era predecessors” and that, if EPO works so well, then counter-intuitively “Western men must be low responders to EPO (except Lombard and Hellebuyck)”, you responded saying I “have conveniently have left out a slew of Spaniards and Portuguese” and further naming Portuguese athletes “Pinto, Jesus, Castro, Silva” and then “Spain (and Portugal to a lesser extent) have a multiple cases of EPO”.

To that, I responded “If the documented Spanish and Portuguese cases are not the ones who set the European records, you can not argue that EPO helps set European records.”

You initially implied that Lombard and Hellebuyck were the exceptions of western men reponding to EPO.

I pointed you to many examples of athletes from Sapin and Portugal who responded well to EPO in terms of performance improvement.

You then moved the goalpoasts in saying that "you can not argue that EPO helps set European records"

It was then fair enough to actually look at the athletes who actually set European records (for the sake of argument 1500m to Marathon) in the 1990s - 2000s and you can see that most of them were set by athletes who tested positive for EPO or who can be reasonably suspected to have used EPO.

Then you started moving goalpoasts again and implied that Mourhit does not count (I was using the European Athletics Federation rules for European records- you seem to be applying your own personal rules as to what is a European record) and now you say that indoor records do not count for you even though never originally specified indoor or outdoor records.

You are now also nitpicking that Garcia, Sanchez, Mourhit were a few seconds slower than Geb or whoever. These three runners won multiple medals in distance running at global championships and they were close to the top of the world's pile (Mourhit had very dominant victories at the World Cross champs). Or maybe performances in global championships also do not count for you?

Rather than nitpicking you should be asking the question - did EPO help Garcia, Sanchez or Mourhit (or other European athletes who also tested positive for EPO) or could they have ran just as well without it? That is because you are the one who implied that Western men distance runners were poor responders to EPO and that EPO could not be argued to have helped set European records.

Actually this is exactly what they do. A drug goes through a clinical trials process and gets approved. Doctors prescribe it to patients across the range (race, gender, age, etc) because they extrapolate that if it is effective in the study population, it is generally assumed to be effective in all populations. This is not always true, but it is the operating assumption. That's why there is such a focus on getting a broader pool of people into clinical trials. Usually differences in efficacy arise from post-release reports and take a long time to be observed and correlated. It's also what WADA does (and they are the authority which is properly designated to do this, and you argue in other areas that their findings deserve complete deference). They look at the clinical studies and general findings and then make a ruling for all athletes, across the range. Of course you have done here what you so often due while trolling in support of drug use--you define the question so narrowly that there is no possible way of answering it. The range of people, medications, dollars, studies, etc. is not sufficient to study every single sub-population. So they don't. They make a decision based on applying general principles to all. If you would like to prove that a substance does not work in a particular subgroup, then it would be up to you to provide that evidence for that argument. It's why I find the whole argument so disingenuous. People want to narrow down the range of people to a very, very small sample (the most talented East Africans, born, raised, and training at altitude, while following the very best training, etc. etc. etc.) then claim there is no specific evidence that one, or several specific substances don't work on that specific group. OK, that is certainly possible, but it is up to the person making the argument to prove it.

rekrunner wrote:

No. No one "in medicine" nor "in doping" extrapolates drug based performance improvement "in this way" across all ranges of talent.

Mr. Obvious wrote:

You are wrong. It is pretty much universal practice in medicine and in doping to extrapolate in this way. WADA looked at the mechanisms involved and the broad based evidence for efficacy of EPO and decided it was an effective PED and banned it for all competitors.