Number 33 wrote:
Yes, 2% performance difference and then you subtract 6% for the EPO. Steve Jones aline would be sub 2 hours easily with Kipchige EPO and super shoes.
1 in 1000 British teens aspire to be a marathon runner. 999 out of 1000 Ethiopian and Kenyan teens aspire to be a marathon runner. Add the rampant EPO abuse which improves marathon times by 10 minutes and you get your East African domination.
Kenyan performance levels have dropped off a cliff in the 5000 since the EPO era. Even the marathon is increasingly dominated by Ethiopians. The only reason is Kenya has been forced to bring in testing, and Ethiopia is a much harder nut to crack.
What is Number 33? Are you numbering the different handles you use?
If it was a simple matter of EPO bringing 7 minutes (6%) or 10 minutes, we wouldn’t be talking about Steve Jones’ performance from the pre-EPO era of the mid-‘80s:
- Number of “East African” Brits faster than Steve Jones after three decades of EPO: 1
- Number of “non-East African” Brits faster than Steve Jones after three decades of EPO: 0
Similar story for all non-Africans worldwide, for more than three decades, and for the 5000m, where we can count about a dozen non-African runners in the entirety of the EPO-era faster than the Brits of the 1980s, and then only by 1.1% (marathon) and by 0.6% (5000m).
To explain Kenyan performance in 5000m, we also have to consider other factors:
- It’s not true that Kenyan performances have dropped off a cliff; they are still better than non-African levels of performance
- lack of incentive
- lack of opportunity
