I spent about an hour and a half last night at a clinic in the mid-South (a pickup thing; you won't find it advertised) during which an elite runner spoke from his own experience on the international scene in the mid-to-late 1990s. He is a non-US-national in his mid-30s. He is--or was--a 2:11 marathoner and a 13:50 5K college runner.
He is a non-doper. He is resolutely, even arrogantly, a non-doper. And the tale he spun was both remarkable and disillusioning--at least for a naif like me.
What he claimed is that he returned to his national team during the 1990s after running his 2:11 and enjoying some success at the college level, and found that EVERYBODY on his national team was engaged in serious EPO-consumption. Twice-a-day blood tests, doubled hematocrit levels. 2:20 marathoner who couldn't keep up with him were suddenly running him ragged in the workouts. He wondered how this was possible. Then he found out.
This guy was one heck of a hard trainer, by the way. 160 mile weeks.
His coach assumed, based on his 2:11, that he'd been doping, and didn't pay much attention to him--until the day his first blood test came back and the coach discovered that his 2:11 had been produced "naturally." Then his coach got really excited: here was a guy who, if properly doped, could make a run for the REAL money.
So the coach laid it all out for him--this naive, clean elite runner. He explained how the whole EPO thing worked. He explained that all the top elite runners, on pretty much every national team, were doping.
This runner, profoundly disillusioned, dropped out of the scene soon after. He's been in retirement ever since--although he's still clearly burning with some sort of dream of retreating to the hills, training like a mofo, and showing up unannounced at a national championships in a year or two to kick some ass. Maybe he'll try for the master' s marathon record.
In any case, he talked last night about what it was like to run with doped runners. He claimed he could tell a doped runner simply by looking at him. He claimed, for example, that Alistair Cragg is a doper--claimed he could tell by the reddened face and the way he ran. (He'd seen Cragg run a big meet last year.) But he claimed that Cragg was hardly alone.
The thing about EPO, he said, wasn't that it automatically transformed 2:20 marathoners into 2:08 marathoners; some people responded much better to it than others. East Africans, he smiled, happened to respond particularly well to it. In combination with whatever other (God-or-gene-given) talents they happened to possess, they blossomed into supermen when they doped.
"Of the top 35 runners in the world, in every event from the 1500 up through the marathon," he said, "EVERY ONE is doping. That's just the way it is."
Is that, in fact, the way it is? Kevin Beck has talked about the prevalence of EPO at elite levels, but I guess I never quite believed it could be that bad. Is this guy way off base--and suffering from sour grapes, perhaps, and slandering superior athletes who don't deserve to be slandered--or is he telling the truth?