rekrunner wrote:
Is there “reasonable” suspicion for El G, and Aouita? There might be if we could draw a high correlation between doping and WR holder performances. But you admitted that we can’t. This is an assumption. A belief. Your “reasons” for suspicion always falls back on this assumption, taken for granted, but without strong basis in historical data. With a different assumption, and with all the historical data, it becomes reasonable to suspect that El G and Aouita achieved their best performances without doping.
Well...you have your opinion on Morroco & I have mine. Maybe both El G & Auitoa "achieved their best performances without doping" but I'm very skeptical. Here's my analysis (first of all, IMO, it's a culture of doping over there; 38 doping positives since 03, 10 ABP sanctions, implication in the recent doping ring bust in Spain, family members busted for doping, etc.).
The top 6 all-time fastest Morrocan 1500 runners:
1. El Guerrouj (3:26.00/1998)
2. Iguider (3:28.79/2015)
3. Ramzi (3:29.14/2006) EPO positive (IC/2008)
4. Aouita (3:29.46/1985)
5. Laâlou (3:29.53/2010) M.agent positive (PC/2012) & EPO positive (OOC/2016)
6. Kaouch (3:31.10/2006) EPO positive (IC/2007)
Reasonable suspicion for Aouita is the statements he made advocating doping to some of the athletes he was coaching (not good!), and some of his performance spikes pointed by Coevett & others. Iguider, though his time was posted at Monoco, is running more than a half a second faster than confirmed doper Ramzi. El G ran both WRs in the EPO-era time frame where one could dope with impunity. Also, his biggest performance jump on his career profile was a 3 second increase in 2 yrs from 3:29.05 in 96 to the WR of 3:26 in 98 (~1.4%).
Interestingly, in the "Effects of erythropoietin abuse on exercise performance" meta-analysis, Wilkerson et al. is referenced where in their study that tested the effects of rEPO on time to exhaustion with non-elite subjects, it was extrapolated from their data which suggested a reduction of ~3 seconds in overall running time in elite athletes in the 1500m.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/29113535