The Magnificent Ones: Lasse Viren

... but Lance made admissions of doping that found their way into articles and books well before the USADA case, some half a dozen people claimed having heard him confessing his PED use (1995, 1996, 1999 and 2001).

AFAIK, there exists zero claims that Viren admitted blood doping explicitly or implicitly to anyone, ie. there is a difference between the two.

Caffeine has been shown to be a performance enhancer. If drinking coffee before a race is banned in a decade, will you speak ill of 2018 me for doing it?

well,, wrote:

Raindearmilk wrote:

Magnificent blood transfusions. Lopes gold, Pre bronze.

Are you saying that a clean Virén, with his perfect form and perfect running body, couldn´t beat the short legged, stocky Pre?

I saw Viren lose to a short stocky Eamon Coghlan. Not to mention a bunch of other no names without great form. Come to think of it, Viren's form didn't look that great as he dawdled home out of the placings, the straight behind. He didn't get any better in any of his other races on the tour.

HRE wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:

He wasn't coached by Lydiard. Vasala was.

Viren's coach was Rolf Haikkola (which I almost certainly misspelled.) Lydiard had been hired as Finland's national coach. He was there to advise coaches rather than to coach specific athletes, i.e., he taught the coaches his methods and they adapted what he'd taught them in their own ways. You can see a load of Lydiard's stuff in samples of Viren's training but it does not look like what you find in samples shown in Lydiard's books.

Lydiard produced world champions in his native New Zealand, but the administrators wouldn't give him a coaching position, so he went to Finland and helped produce Olympic champions there. I understood he was quite closely involved in helping Vasala. Lydiard's methods transformed distance running in the 60's. Just about everybody since has dipped into his well.

Aragon wrote:

... but Lance made admissions of doping that found their way into articles and books well before the USADA case, some half a dozen people claimed having heard him confessing his PED use (1995, 1996, 1999 and 2001).

AFAIK, there exists zero claims that Viren admitted blood doping explicitly or implicitly to anyone, ie. there is a difference between the two.

I think you are missing the point. If Lance admitted to doping, it would only have been to those who were part of his team or entourage. Publicly, he consistently denied it. He even practised his denials in the mirror! I know of no doper who confessed publicly when they weren't caught. (Sorry - one. English middle-distance runner Alan Simpson after the '66 Commonwealth Games.) If Viren had doped I see no reason why he would admit to it - he wasn't part of a team whose cooperation he required - and his denial with the "reindeer milk" comment to reporters sounds completely cynical. Public positions by dopers tell us nothing. We rarely hear, if ever, what they say to those they confide in.

Two Finnish steeplechasers, Mikko Ali Leppilampa and Jouko Kuha, were known to have blood doped in the late 60s. Kuha actually had the world record briefly. So the technique was known before Viren came along but not very widely. It was his performance at Munich that probably did the most to publicize the technique and knowing that some Finns had done it obviously raised suspicions about Viren, Marrti Vaino's episode in 1980 where he was found to have PEDs in blood that was reinfused through blood doping didn't help dispel questions about Viren.

None of this proves anything about Viren's situation. None of us will ever know unless he one day says that he did blood dope and I don't see that day coming. In 1975 I was racing in Finland and was in several races with him. He was completely unimpressive and that was normal for him in non Olympic years. Ron Clarke told me that Viren was racing in Australia in some non Olympic year and Clarke's son Marcus, who was not nearly the runner his dad was, beat Viren over 3,000 meters.

That was by design. I had a good chat in '75 with a guy who did a lot of training with Viren. He told me that Viren did not do any sort of pace or speed training in "off" years. It was all pure distance work. He also told me that he did not believe that Viren blood doped but that Viren loved having his competitors believe that he did as he thought it gave him a psychological edge for them to think he had something going for him that the competitors did not.

It's evidently impossible to have a discussion about Viren that ultimately doesn't center on the issue of blood doping and no one here is going to change anyone else's mind. When I was there I stayed with a guy who had been one of their best marathon runners several years earlier who had gone on to become "someone" in their athletics organization. I was sort of adopted as a local and learned a tiny bit about the goings on there and in order to learn even that tiny bit I was sworn to secrecy. I came away convinced that there was definitely stuff going on in Finnish athletics that wasn't supposed to go on but that stuff was not Viren reinfusing blood because a),there was not and never has been anything but rumors to that effect, and b) because even if he was reinfusing blood at the time doing so was okay.

canoosite wrote:

Caffeine has been shown to be a performance enhancer. If drinking coffee before a race is banned in a decade, will you speak ill of 2018 me for doing it?

Who are you that I or anyone would care what you do? Keep drinking your coffee.

You are probably right, that the issue will never be resolved. But I would ask, what kind of champion - this is a double "double Olympic champion" - would be so indifferent about his career that he would be content to consistently lose to nobodies outside a 4-yearly world championship? How could such a runner be invincible at two Olympics and achieve so little in the years between times? If he was truly a great talent we wouldn't see that disappear for protracted periods - and then suddenly reappear on demand. With the information about blood-doping coming out of Finland in the late '60's and early 70's it's easy to see how the rumours developed about Viren. I can't think of another Olympic champion with a career of such contrasts as his.

Thanks that was great.

The point wasn't whether absense of confessions means anything, because the incentives of champions to confess are nonexistent. No argument there. The point was whether there exists confessions from Lance vs. Viren and in the case of Lance, there are confessions that were publicly known before the USADA case and in the case of Viren this type of material just doesn't exist.

HRE wrote:

Two Finnish steeplechasers, Mikko Ali Leppilampa and Jouko Kuha, were known to have blood doped in the late 60s. Kuha actually had the world record briefly. So the technique was known before Viren came along but not very widely...

I wouldn't be too convinced about the accuracy of the alleged 1968 transfusion of Jouko Kuha even when some reliable people such as Kari Sinkkonen (coach of Pekka Vasala) have referred to it in passing later. Because the information is second or third-hand gossip, it could've been simply iron injection and it isn't clear why Juha Väätäinen was treated with iron injections in 1969 if transfusion had been applied with success earlier.

About Viren, it is interesting that the Swedish discus star Ricky Bruch claimed in 1977 or 1978 that a member of the Finnish team had told him that Viren had been treated with a transfusion at the '76 games, and it is equally interesting that Finnish steeplechaser Mikko Ala-Leppilampi claimed in 1981 that he "read" certain indirect comments made to him in 1972 by the Finnish team doctor Pekka Peltokallio in a such a manner that Lasse Viren had been treated with blood doping. Ala-Leppilampi went later on to claim that a Finnish endurance runner not treated with a transfusion in the 1970's was an exception.

It still should be taken into account that the guy's reliability was much in doubt, because Ala-Leppilampi sold his confession about his own blood doping use to a sensational tabloid under heavy financial pressures, and at least a portion of what he told was simply inaccurate. He claimed - for instance - that a transfusion enhances 3000m steeplechase time by 20 seconds, but he improved his own PR by only 3.7 seconds after 1971 when he told he got introduced into the mysterious brotherhood of blood. And his account even changed on the detail whether he used the method 3 or 5 times when he recalled his career later.

***

As one interesting anecdote, I had an opportunity to discuss the subject with the journalist who was the first one to contact the Finnish team doctor Pekka Peltokallio in 1981 after Ala-Leppilampi had made his confession and mentioned the team doctor by name implying that Peltokallio administered the transfusion to him in 1972. The doctor confessed that the 1972 blood doping incident was accurate even when he insisted that the allegations about the other Finns weren't true and he "was under no obligation to tell where and how the operation was done". Correspondingly the journalist wrote an article titled "EVEN WHEN THE SPORTS LEADERS DENY IT, BLOOD DOPING IS RAMPANT IN FINLAND".

While the impression of the journalist not-too-long time ago was that Ala-Leppilampi was mostly reliable, he wanted to emphasize to me that he always felt that Lasse Viren hadn't blood doped based on his character.

Armstronglivs wrote:

canoosite wrote:

Caffeine has been shown to be a performance enhancer. If drinking coffee before a race is banned in a decade, will you speak ill of 2018 me for doing it?

Who are you that I or anyone would care what you do? Keep drinking your coffee.

Why does who I am impact the morality of my actions? You have a problem with people blood doping in the 70s, not just elites.

well,, wrote:

Raindearmilk wrote:

Magnificent blood transfusions. Lopes gold, Pre bronze.

Are you saying that a clean Virén, with his perfect form and perfect running body, couldn´t beat the short legged, stocky Pre?

Well, it is indisputable that Viren blood doped, and he still didn't beat Pre by much at all.

So the rumours existed in the late 1960s, throughout the 1970s, but they were only doing it in the early 80s?

Nobody has claimed that the Finnish blood doping "program" started "only" in the 1980's

because the team doctor admitted the '72 transfusion to Ala-Leppilampi having taken place and there is other evidence also. The rest of Ala-Leppilampi' s story is another matter altogether.

I read somewhere, ages ago, that Kuha had acknowledged that he had blood doped and blamed it for some physical problems he had shortly afterward. But it's been so long since I saw this that I won't begin to claim I'm correct. And as you say, there are many questions about the validity of Ala-Leppilampi's stories ,but they certainly show that it was possible for Viren to have blood doped. But I imagine we all would know that even without such stories. We'll believe what we believe or in some cases, accept that we don't believe either thing.

Looking at Viren's shoddy performances between Olympics doesn't clear anything up. I've seen that used as an argument to show that he did blood dope ("he only did it in championship years and that's why he was so mediocre in other years") and as argument to show that he didn't ("Why wouldn't he have blood doped in non championship years as well and run fast then? And if he blood doped to win major championships he must have done it in '74 for the Euros and he was not good there.")

If, as his training partner told me, he really did not care at all about his results in odd numbered years I suppose there would be no reason to bother with infusions in those years. And he had been hurt prior to the '74 Euros and probably wasn't fit enough to win, infused or not. Why he didn't care about his performances in non championship years is beyond anyone but him, I reckon. Ron Clarke had no respect for him at all for that very reason but I suppose Viren could point out that maybe he knew a bit more about how to go about getting Olympic gold medals than Ron did.

I think I once swore off of looking at threads about Viren here because they long ago stopped covering any new information and are so easy to get sucked into. Personally, I don't know why it's such an issue. The reaction seems to be like we'd have to someone who cheated their way to medals but blood doped or not, that's not what Viren did.

Armstronglivs wrote:

Lydiard produced world champions in his native New Zealand, but the administrators wouldn't give him a coaching position, so he went to Finland and helped produce Olympic champions there. I understood he was quite closely involved in helping Vasala. Lydiard's methods transformed distance running in the 60's. Just about everybody since has dipped into his well.

Lydiard introduced doping to many other countries, and the rest of the world.

well,, wrote:

Are you saying that a clean Virén, with his perfect form and perfect running body, couldn´t beat the short legged, stocky Pre?

consider this wrote:

Well, it is indisputable that Viren blood doped, and he still didn't beat Pre by much at all.

Therefore, Pre blood doped much more than Viren, who probably didn't blood dope at all.

I'm glad we've finally cleared this all up.

well,, wrote:

Raindearmilk wrote:

Magnificent blood transfusions. Lopes gold, Pre bronze.

Are you saying that a clean Virén, with his perfect form and perfect running body, couldn´t beat the short legged, stocky Pre?

And dead too.