Renato Canova wrote:
How do we know ALL the athletes faster than the doped athletes are doped too, in spite they NEVER were positive in any doping control?
How do we know you are honest and not a thief ?
Ciao Renato!
You know, Renato, people are multi-faceted. I think it's great that you have come back onto the board, really great.
Of course I knew in my heart of hearts exactly what you would say, but that doesn't matter. Just the fact that you are here is fantastic, it is a great opportunity for everybody.
We talked years ago, and I told you that I know something about sprint PED's and their effectiveness while knowing essentially nothing about distance PED's and their effectiveness--to which you responded that yes the sprint world and sprint drugs are different.
So here we are with the EPO situation, again. One thing you should be aware of: when you say "fact", you have to know what you are saying. Sometimes you say you are going to give facts, then you immediately give opinion, conjecture, supposition, and suggestion. When an athlete has not returned any positive results, the basic "fact" is not that they are "clean", the basic fact is that none of the samples they gave were reported as having tested positive.
That is the basic fact, nothing more. Your argument would be more convincing if you stuck to actual facts.
In answer to your last question above, the bottom line is that you don't "know" whether I am honest or a thief, regardless of whether or not I have ever been convicted.
People have brought up Lance a million times as someone who never tested positive but who used, you should get past the idea that just because someone was never reported as having tested positive, that that means that they are clean. You must understand that it is unconvincing, and for good reason.
In answer to your first question, nobody will ever "know" except for the athlete himself, and maybe not even then. We don't "know", we "decide". In the case of any particular athlete, we decide based on all sorts of evidence. In the sprint world there is an abundance of evidence that suggests that Bolt has used, as an example of a guy who is faster than all the doped athletes at 9.80 or under.
Is the fact that every other athlete 9.80 or better has been popped "evidence" that Bolt has used, since he was 9.80 or better? In fact, it is. Forget about the fact that he was faster than all of them. He belongs to a population of people, all of whom save for him and Maurice Greene were found to have metabolites or markers of banned substances in the samples of bodily fluids that they gave, and that they therefore permitted banned substances to be introduced into their bodies. If you consider him as an abstract member of that population, you can say with a certain degree of confidence that just by virtue of his membership in that population, he has therefore permitted banned substances to be introduced into his body.
Yes you could expand your population to a larger size, depending on your criteria for "eliteness", but the best basis of comparison are those athletes who have similar experiences of victory, testing, championships, times, etc.
In the sprint case, it is quite easy to reasonably decide that Bolt has used, based on not only the above evidence, but on all sorts of evidence more particular to Bolt as an individual--his performance trajectory, his injury history, his training site, his national federation, his personal affiliations, his medical treatment history, his training partners, his personal decisions, etc.
Although I don't know, it is probably also easy to reasonably decide the same about super-elite distance athletes who have not yet been reported as having returned a positive test result. This is what people on here are doing.
You are in a tough spot. You MUST realize that you cannot affirmatively prove a negative in a case like this, because there is no mutually exclusive alternative. For instance, if you know that there is only one coin and that either person A or B has it, you can prove that person A does NOT have it by proving that person B DOES have it, because the coin can be possessed by only one of the two people, not both.
That is not the situation that you are dealing with.
Thanks for coming out, if you were more careful about making your arguments, they would be stronger. Good luck!