rekrunner wrote:
Crickets chirp at night -- and since it was night, I was sleeping.
If you really ever understood some of what I was saying, I don't find "proof by example" very strong evidence of anything except for that individual example. It's not because we can add one more high profile example to a handful of other examples, that logical fallacies suddenly become valid arguments. Someone astutely said that the plural of anecdote is not proof.
I never denied that the faith in EPO is very strong, and can even reach the top. We can see by the number of athletes who point up to the sky, and make the cross sign, and other symbolic gestures, that even elite athletes make faith an important part of their lives.
It's unfortunate that a new high profile name is added to the list of doping positives. Either Kiprop, or someone around him, had faith in EPO (assuming Kiprop intentionally took EPO for performance), and it's also looking bad for the Rosa's, who, as the brojos put it, are either incompetent (for not managing their athletes with enough oversight), or complicit.
It's a real shame that they obviously did not read my "Closer look at performances in the EPO era" thread, as the 1500m is the one "distance" event which showed comparatively small progress in the EPO era, measured by both quantity and quality. Only 13 athletes ran faster than my pre-EPO threshold in the two decades of 1990-2009. Since the passing of the ABP, when you would expect EPO performances to decline, in only 9 years, the rate more than doubled, as 13 more have run faster, interestingly only at Monaco.
Two important questions for me:
1) When did he start? His last "fast" performance was three years ago in 2015. If we assume he doped in 2015 and before, and continued doping, then we are left with an awkward explanation for why his performances were so bad since, including Rio. If he only doped after, it would fit a pattern of an athlete having a couple years of disappointing performances, tempted to take something to help restore his previous capability. Maybe Rio was the turning point.