Alex Hutchinson calls out CANOVA over study confirming EPO works on Kenyan runners

Fresh is better wrote:

EPO is fresh new blood. Blood doping is old half worn out blood.

New blood works better or the body wouldn't bother replacing it at such a rate.

That is just armchair speculation and here is a quotation from the study published in 1991 where both were tested simultaneously to elevate Hct at similar level:

Vo2Max increased from 4.67 before to 4.97 l/min (6.4%; P < 0.001) after the rhEpo treatment period and from 4.66 before to 5.03 l/min (7.9%; P < 0.001) after the reinfusion of the RBC. There was no significant difference between the values of Vo2Max before the rhEPO and RBC treatments, and similarly, there was no significant difference in the increase in Vo2MAX as a result of the treatments.

Time to exhaustion performance also increased roughly similarly. Whether Hct remains elevated for a slightly longer time period after rHuEPO treatment is a different matter, because there are proportionally higher amount of fresh RBCs (as you state correctly)

By arguing you tripped and admitted that blood doping and EPO work. Well done.

casual obsever wrote:

Interesting. 1% - 1.5% is apparently Ashenden's opinion for 1500 m and blood doping.

What's your opinion, Aragon?

And would you add another couple of seconds for the synergistic effect when combining blood doping with steroids?

I have thought very little about how blood doping enhances elite performance, but I think the magnitude would be something like that perhaps even more with someone with a very high lung diffusion/perfusion - capacity related to body size and with good peripheral factors to use the extra oxygen "offered". How steroids enhance endurance performance is one topic of where there is practically zero research about and I have no clear opinion, but I do know that one Finnish middle distance runner claimed in the 1980's that one prominent Finnish sports doctor (presumably Lasse Viren's personal doctor) told him in 1974 that steroid (methandienone) could enhance 1500 m performance by 3-5 seconds when the doctor wrote him a prescription.

Those are by no means my last opinion about the subject.

If your view is that the Ekblom-Berglund study or the paragraph independently prove that rHuEPO and transfusions "work" with elite level athletes, it does so regardless of one nonentity named Aragon quoting from it and his alleged "admittance" doesn't change its credibility or importance to one way or another by one iota.

That study is a canonical study mentioned in the daily media (Washington Post etc) as well as in the literature of practically every rHuEPO-doping study, so it is quite troubling if LR's house blood doping expert wasn't clearly aware of its existence because I can't recall seeing it been referenced to.

Link?

Aragon wrote:

I couldn't care less whether an estimate is conservative or not but only whether it is based on anything or not and Malm's own literature barely back up his claims about elite athletes of which one source specifically warns not necessarily to extrapolate the findings.

The sentence where he uses the meaningless almost 3 percent change in running/XC skiing speed to estimate that a TDF rider would be over two hours faster with rHuEpo means that he hadn't thought the issue through when neglecting air resistance, draft effect etc of cycling and thinking that a percent is a percent.

Why the trash talking on Malm? He provides a professional opinion of "3%"....so what? Why do you come out like a raging pitbull and start undermining his paper and discredit him? Why not just say I don't agree with his opinion but he's entitled to it? You seem to get nervous or something that his opinion was in a peer-reviewed, multi-authored paper.

You don't have a background in this field (recall in the debates last year you disclosed your background is in computer science, or something along those lines, and this 02-vector stuff is just a hobby of yours). So, what's all the heavy-handed, self-proclaimed expertise in this field now? Trash talking qualified researchers like this is some NFL football forum. Have you published any studies? And who cares about the cycling aspect - we're talking running here. Malm specifically mentions "20–30 seconds faster time in any given 5000 m run at world class level, and four minutes faster finishing time in a marathon race."

You're not fooling me...you have delusions of grandeur. Like a shark in the water who senses blood, you always get confrontational and overbearing everytime the subject of 02-vector doping and performance comes up. You don't know everything! Show some respect for other people's opinions and not just yours - your agenda is showing! Btw, things must be kinda boring over at CN's "The Clinic." ?

The Ashenden quote proves my case enough about use of "opinions" in general, so use if you are interested, use PubMed and words such as eryhtropoietin, Heuberger, Cohen, Lodewijkx and your brain and you'll come up with the (mostly cycling related) research about literature reviews, meta-analysis of rHuEPO and about the speed trends of the TDF and different ascents where no EPO-era speed improvement was seen.

The material had been questioned and I have found some errors from their use of sources and don't appeal to their authority, but as some material is a direct response to research (El Helou et al) claiming supranormal speed trends during the 1990's and El Helou and his pals haven't responded, should we conclude that such an EPO era didn't exist?

I am not discrediting his paper nor even discrediting him, but if one estimates something and his source material to come up with the estimate is dubious and his applying the estimate is weird to say the least, this should be taken into account when thinking how accurate and well thought the figure is.

Or are you claiming that he says 3 %, end of story, no questions to be asked, he is beyond scrutiny? I think you are the one suppressing views now.

Aragon wrote:

Andrew Bingham: So in the grand scheme of things that is quite significant and, as The Sunday Times reported, British athletes have been—I hesitate to say cheated out of medals, but have lost medals to people suspected of this. It is quite a significant advantage then.

Dr Ashenden: No question. The efficacy of blood doping, in terms of the performance advantage that it bestows is head and shoulders above the benefit that you can get from anything else, like taking steroids to improve your training and things like that. Two or three seconds might not sound like a lot—

[/quote]

The 1% advantage of 2 or 3 seconds is enough to turn someone running 3:33/34 into a serious medal contender. That is 6.66s-10s over 5,000m. I think this is a conservative estimate.

Aragon wrote:

How steroids enhance endurance performance is one topic of where there is practically zero research about and I have no clear opinion, but I do know that one Finnish middle distance runner claimed in the 1980's that one prominent Finnish sports doctor (presumably Lasse Viren's personal doctor) told him in 1974 that steroid (methandienone) could enhance 1500 m performance by 3-5 seconds when the doctor wrote him a prescription.

Those are by no means my last opinion about the subject.

Where did to read/here this? Source?

On the steriods in endurance events, I think that the East Germans covered this one as well. Someone can put that up here.

Fresh is better wrote:

Aragon wrote:

That is just armchair speculation and here is a quotation from the study published in 1991 where both were tested simultaneously to elevate Hct at similar level:

Time to exhaustion performance also increased roughly similarly. Whether Hct remains elevated for a slightly longer time period after rHuEPO treatment is a different matter, because there are proportionally higher amount of fresh RBCs (as you state correctly)

By arguing you tripped and admitted that blood doping and EPO work. Well done.

True. The other thing is that epo can be used every couple of weeks (or days without substantial testing) all year round. Whereas transfusions are limited for a key event (eg championships). So while Aragon's figures ⬆are no doubt correct, the gains from training hard all year around on epo are greater than one off gains from a transfusion. This is why Kiprop was busted for a sample in November and why the longer distance records set in the 1980s melted in the 1990s, when athletes from the former had access to transfusions. Large transfusions can also rupture the heart and then there is tale of Tyler Hamilton's black urine.

Subway Surfers wrote:

....the gains from training hard all year around on epo are greater than one off gains from a transfusion.

If your view is that increased training load accounts for more than half of the performance enhancement of rHuEPO, let's just state that those are quite hyperbolic words for a theory of which there exists practically no solid academic research to back up either about the actual mechanism or about the magnitude.

You are right that there exists some anecdotal evidence here and there and the Sgro paper has a few speculative paragraphs, but even they mostly just armchair speculate with some more or less relevant references far from claiming that the evidence is conclusive.

Subway Surfers wrote:

On the steriods in endurance events, I think that the East Germans covered this one as well.

Yes. And the Russians. And Dieter Baumann. Or look at Salazar who clearly is convinced of the importance of both high testo and Hb levels:

- Decker used testosterone

- Rupp got "testosterone medication" as a teenager

- Salazar asked USADA for permission to raise Kara's Hb level via injections back from 13 to its "normal levels" of 15.5 - nice try

- Rupp got flagged by USADA for an unusually elevated testo level while in marathon training

- Rupp got flagged by IAAF for an unusually elevated Hb level while in marathon training

To keep testo and Hb from falling in marathon training is already interesting, but to spike so drastically even beyond the ABP thresholds is quite a challenge. Again, the Kenyans in this story stayed on average within these thresholds, as did EPO cheat Poistogova.

No, you can't invent your own phsyiology. Homeostasis is real, ever present and very finely tuned. Denying it is delusional. Posting about body builders is a complete red herring. Their muscle mass includes huge amount of water retention. Just what has that got to do with running?

Yeah...and they even reward dopers now - Poistagova was elevated from bronze to silver. Poistagova admitted to doping per the ARD-recordings, explaining the program she was on in the lead-up prep for London (EPO & oxandrolone).

Oh...geez..I forgot; Her passport was deemed "normal" by anti-doping experts. So...I get it; admit to doping but make sure you dope within the threasholds and you'll be rewarded. How can the IAAF be taken serious anymore...it's a barrel of laughs ?

JonO. wrote:

No, you can't invent your own phsyiology. Homeostasis is real, ever present and very finely tuned. Denying it is delusional. Posting about body builders is a complete red herring. Their muscle mass includes huge amount of water retention. Just what has that got to do with running?

It's also not fixed and "trainable".

JonO. wrote:

No, you can't invent your own phsyiology. Homeostasis is real, ever present and very finely tuned. Denying it is delusional. Posting about body builders is a complete red herring. Their muscle mass includes huge amount of water retention. Just what has that got to do with running?

Um, wouldn't homeostasis stop them from retaining water?

No

Interestingly, our good friend Mr Doped to the Max, posted a study on here only a couple of weeks ago that should certain steroid/testosterone regimes had been shown to increase Hct/Hgb.

Thyroid meds and androgel in his pocket, ha.