A closer look at EPO-era performances

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casual obsever wrote:

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rekrunner wrote:
- This point should interest Sprintgeezer: for the 100m, all the data and analysis is inconclusive: "we are left with a startling choice - either doping is ineffective, or we cannot distinguish between a group of known dopers and a random selection of the same size from the all-time list. The inescapable and unpalatable conclusion is that most of the world 's top 100m runners are doped." I note that the choice is not exclusive. Both choices can be true. The data and analysis brings us no closer to deciding. In other words, whatever bias you brought going into the analysis remains uncontradicted.

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You are both wrong. "most of the world 's top 100m runners are doped" is a fact neither a conclusion nor a choice.

Top-10
Bolt (doped trainer partner)
Blake - doped
Gay - doped
Powell - doped
Gatlin - doped
Coleman (3 whereabout failures in 10 months)
Carter - doped
Greene - doped
Mullings - doped
Thompson

Facts: 4 of the top-5 doped; 7 of the top-10 doped (and two more highly suspect). Coleman would have been banned by now, had the USADA tester not wasted his time, and initiate the testing at 7:59 instead of 8:01. Lucky guy...
Bias? LOL

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rekrunner wrote:
- The 10000m seems to support a hypothesis built on EPO effect, improved testing, and subsequent microdosing. One thing he ignores, which I felt was important to highlight in this thread -- nearly all of the 10000m performances (sub-27) in this analysis comes from East Africans.

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I don't find that important. I also don't find it important to point out the heritage of the top-100 m sprinters.

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rekrunner wrote:
- For the 1500m, there are no graphs, but the summary finding is that "there is no similar trend (as the 10000m)" and "The periods before and after EPO testing becomes effective are markedly similar."

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And yet, the 1500 has slowed down too since the introduction of the ABP/better EPO testing.

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casual obsever wrote:
Two years later, and all of that is still true:

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casual obsever wrote:
Other observations with focus on male non-Africans as per rek's guidelines:
- times improved a lot from the 70's to the 80's (roid time)
- 5000 m times improved hugely after the 80's as well (no test for EPO)
- the fastest decade in the 5000 was the 00's (pre ABP)
- the fastest decade in the 800 was the 80's (roid time)
- the fastest 800 overall was in the 80's (roid time)
- the fastest 5000 overall was in the 90's (no test for EPO)

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And of that list, Point 2 and 4 have changed, thanks to Kipchoge/Kiptum (LOL)/Kamworor/Keitany (suspicious ABP passport)/Kosgei/Vaporfly.

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casual obsever wrote:
As for world records in long distance running:
- vast majority between late 90's and early 00's
- no male world record after ABP introduction and outing of corrupt Diack
- female world records continue to be broken, from countries with only rudimentary OOC testing and athletes on the IAAF likely doping list
- female marathon world record from the EPO era remains untouched.

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rekrunner wrote:
My guideline wasn't to look decade by decade. If you look at the 5000m (top-5 average) by 4-year Olympic cycles, you will see that non-Africans peaked in 2009-2012, with post-ABP performances. Peaked is a big word, as overall progress from 1981-2012 was rather small.

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rekrunner wrote:
Another guideline is that you need to do more than juxtapose fast performances in an era with the doping reputation of that era.

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I also recall another recent study comparing 2011 World Championship data with 2013 World Championship data, hypothesizing a reduction of blood doping estimation from 2011 to 2013, as a result of the deterrent effect of ABP prosecutions, and finding the data didn't support the hypothesis, with Russia being the rare exception.

Then, when you look at 5000m from 2009-2012, it was Solinsky, Tegenkamp, Ritz, and Rupp all running sub-13. Afterwards, Solinsky got injured. Tegenkamp retired. Ritz moved up to the marathon. Rupp's main event was the 10000m, and eventually he also moved up to the marathon. The next cycle between 2013-2016, with three new Americans, was as fast as the previous 4 cycles, from 1993-2008, +/- 1 second.

There are ways to show correlation of doping among the fastest performances, and yours is not one of them. Even for the sub-elite runners in the papers from well established science, we cannot draw the same conclusions you want about their fastest performances.

Read again:

"people ... limited their doping", not: fewer people doped.

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casual obsever wrote:
Read again:

"people ... limited their doping", not: fewer people doped.

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What's with all the troll responses? You argue against stuff I haven't said, and then confirm what I have said, to then conclude that I am wrong.

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rekrunner wrote:

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casual obsever wrote:
Read again:

"people ... limited their doping", not: fewer people doped.

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Read again my response.

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rekrunner wrote:
In any case, "limited their doping" remains your own personal speculation. It is your own custom rationalization to modify a hypothesis to better accomodate new contradictory information, but it remains an unconfirmed hypothesis, which apparently doesn't fit other known data.

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You said, and asked me to re-read "Recall that the last blood-doping paper used 2013 as the border for pre- and post-ABP, because that's when it got serious and people were caught and limited their doping."

With all due respect, I'm just trying to make sense of the timeframe here, as it relates to the non-African men's 5000m. And, since you said that doping and the best performances were correlated, I'm looking for any signs of correlation in the data we know.

The 2011 data and 2013 data doesn't supported "limited their doping" either, with Russia being an exception. For most countries, their was no significant change. The metric used doesn't break down into "number of blood dopers" or "number of extreme values", so I don't see how where "limited their doping" is coming from, with respect to 2012.

Since there was a decline in Russia, it does make some sense to look at Russian women pre-2012 versus post-2012. But generally, and specifically for the USA men (who drove the 2012 period and 2016 period 5000m times), the data was stable, and furthermore, the USA data was not particularly high, but rather both average.

When you say I argued for b), I argued against it for 2012 (except for Russia), and for it in 2005.
Then I looked for the correlation to performance over all these periods dating back to 1993, finding no correlation, or sometimes a negative correlation, with non-African men's 5000m performances.