Aragon wrote:
Lets Tell It Like It Is wrote:
... I post Malm et al and highlight the estimations and you act like a wiseass calling me out on it! I post Sgrò et al today, and you do the same BS...
If you have an issue in taking a deeper look into the source material behind the estimates or about incentives of the people making the estimates, are you implying that one should never go through the material and open the original literature for the 99 % of people who don't bother to locate and go through it?
That's fine...it's your prerogative. If you feel the need to play research scientist and sooth your ego then that's your gig. My perspective (before you dive bombed & attacked me for posting the study in the first place) was that Malm et al estimations were interesting since they match up to many time improvements that is seen with confirmed dopers.
For example, going through IAAF profiles there's Ramzi's 9 sec improvement from 03 to 04 (3:39.30 - 3:30.25/~4%). A little higher than the "3%" in Malm et al, but he's possibly a high-responder to dope (imagine that with Ramzi. Lol).
Mourhit shows a 17 sec improvement in the 5000 from 98 - 00 (13:06.20 - 12:49.71/~2%). Malm et al mentions 20 - 30 secs for any given 5000m (Mourhit's 3000 time improvement is about similar at ~2.4%, roughly over the same time period (98/7:37 - 00/7:26).
Alberico Di Cecco improved a little under 4 mins in the marathon from 03 to 01 (2:12:45 - 2:08:53/~2.9%) This closely resembles the estimated 4 min improvement in the marathon as well as the "3%" in Malm et al. It should noted than none of these dopers returning to competition post-ban ran times anywhere near their PBs.
And there are many other confirmed dopers with similar percentage & time improvements from the 15 up through the marathon.
So, you can criticize & undermine the study all you want, but when correlating some of these improvements in times with dopers they're similar with the estimations given in the study.
https://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0156157#pone.0156157.ref029"Initially, blood transfusion was used to enhance military aviation pilots’ work capacity to fly at high altitude during WWII, when pressurized cockpits were not used [21]. Later, submaximal [22] and maximal [23] running performance was shown to improve with blood transfusion. The discovery of erythropoietin (EPO) [24] simplified blood doping in sports, supplementing blood donation, storage and re-infusion. Similar performance enhancements of 6–12% could now be achieved by a simple recombinant human (rh) EPO injection [25–27]. In a review on blood doping published in 1989, Jones and Tunstall [28] describe increases in performance and VO2max ranging between 0% and 40%, depending on the subjects included and methods used for both testing and doping. From the summarized literature, it can be estimated that elite athletes may improve performance by up to 3% with blood doping, regardless of method [29–31]. This enhancement is equivalent to, for example, seven minutes faster winning time in the 90 km cross country ski race Vasaloppet, 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. In cycling, a 3% increase in performance translate to a more than two hour faster winning time in Tour de France 2014."