Gjert Ingebrigtsen shares the secret to his sons' success - high mileage - and claims "they don’t have any natural speed."

You are free to go with what you want, but it seems it is you dancing around these basic points, to avoid your own unpalatable truth. As I already pointed out, the Pan Arab Games, comprised of 28 different sports, cannot reasonably be called an IAAF event, composed of championship level (track and field) athletes. It's surprising that you repeated it. We can only arrive at 1 in 2, by including and averaging the non-IAAF Pan Arab multi-event Games, comprised of 28 sports. There is no compelling reason to combine the IAAF WCH results with the non-IAAF non-championship PAG results, and it's not clear what such a combined result represents. Going one step further in the wrong direction, we can only arrive at 57% by excluding the only IAAF event surveyed, and just going with the Arab Nations multi-event Games result comprising athletics, among 27 other sports. There is even less reason to reject the IAAF survey results, and suggest that the survey results from 28 sports from Arab athletes is a better estimate of IAAF doping prevalence of championship level track and field athletes. And the icing on the cake is to suggest that these are IAAF estimates. With each post, you seem to add more contradictions. On the contrary, the two surveys themselves, lacking better research, suggest the opposite, that athletics is significantly cleaner than 27 other sports. Assuming the IAAF survey results of 43.6% for athletics, to arrive at 57% in the Pan Arab Games, the weighted average of the other 27 sports must be even higher: 59.3%. Therefore, we can only draw the opposite conclusion: there is no reason to believe that track is any more involved in the practice than other sports -- it could well be much less. I am puzzled by your resistance to improve your knowledge of these survey results, and therefore improve the robustness of your interpretations.

Armstronglivs wrote:

So how many angels can dance in the head of a pin? Your distinctions are mere casuistry, to avoid unpalatable truths. The survey was carried out at IAAF events, the results showed high levels of doping admitted to by athletes - far higher than are caught - and there is no reason to believe track is any less involved in the practice than any other sports - it could well be more so. The survey indicated 57%. In the absence of any better research, I will go with that.

Watch their show wrote:

They just started training intelligently with threshold from age 9. Dad learned theory from Bakken.

They all became aerobic beasts.

Any details on how they determine their threshold? And then what sort of threshold training do they do? - I have heard short reps of 400m and then longer reps of 1600m but I am not sure what sort of the intensities they run these related to their threshold speed.

Armstronglivs wrote:

The survey indicated 57%. In the absence of any better research, I will go with that.

Why do you trust the participants to be 100% truthful or near that? It sounds like you're putting "faith" in them by going along despite a lack of "any better research". Are you a hypocrite who uses this argument against Christians?

"One-third (32 percent) of adults between 18-34 said they may have told a lie in the past week"

What percentage of athletes responded to the survey? Was it mandatory or optional?

Would an athlete deliberately lie in order to encourage the IAAF to take tougher measures on his or her competitors?

Even if 57% is true, then that means potentially 43% are not consistent cheaters. You cannot paint with a broad brush and say every single champion is a cheater.

You might be right to doubt "more than 90%", particularly considering events like the marathon, and the walking events, which have a larger number of participants. As far as I can tell, we do not have any insight into the distribution of the surveys broken down by event. Putting aside the question of which event is "dirtier", what he suggested is that more dirty athletes in sprints are ending up in the top-100 (e.g. 48 out of 100), compared to dirty athletes in distance events (e.g. 2 out of 100).

casual obsever wrote:

Renato Canova wrote:

Armstronglivs, why do you transfer the percentage of "supposed" doped athletes, following their "confession", to the endurance event ? The statistic includes athletes of all the events, and more than 90% of the athletes who filled the form with the specific questions belonged to other groups of events (sprints, jumps and throws).

I doubt that there were less than 10% in the endurance events.

Events were in Daegu:

Sprinting: 7

100, 200, 400 m, 110 + 400 hurdles

4x 100, 4x 400

Field events: 9

Endurance: 8

800 , 1500, 5000, 10000 m, + marathon

3000 m steeple, 20 km + 50 km walk

And, would you argue that endurance athletes are dirtier or cleaner than the others?

Both cases from 2019 (yes, that's how few are caught!) are distance runners.

This was different in the past, yes, when steroids were detectable in contrast to blood doping.

In this discussion, you are actually right about a number of things. For example, it was not an IAAF study, but a Tuebingen-Harvard study, funded by WADA, supported and reviewed and approved by the IAAF.

But - to arrive at 1 in 2, we don't need to include the PAG. Just accept the authors statements, cited verbatim directly from their peer-reviewed, IAAF-approved article:

"The estimated prevalence of past-year doping was 43.6% (95% confidence interval 39.4–47.9)

...

Sensitivity analyses, assessing the robustness of these estimates under numerous hypothetical scenarios of intentional or unintentional noncompliance by respondents, suggested that we were unlikely to have overestimated the true prevalence of doping."

In summary:

1) estimated prevalence 43.6% (or rather, 39 - 48%)

2) only "past-year doping" included

3) unlikely to be overestimated

Adding 1 + 2 + 3, it is hard to argue that 1 in 2 dopers is an overestimation.

In any case, it remains an estimation, but unfortunately the best we have.

Interesting math, or rather, assumptions...

Don't be misled that 57% were championship level athletes competing in track and field subject to the IAAF. The 57% result comes from athletes competing at that Pan Arab Games in 28 different sports. If you read the study, you would see that most of the study mostly concerned itself precisely with that question -- how different forms and degrees of non-compliance would impact the raw survey results versus the true doping prevalence.

facts and reason wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:

The survey indicated 57%. In the absence of any better research, I will go with that.

Why do you trust the participants to be 100% truthful or near that? It sounds like you're putting "faith" in them by going along despite a lack of "any better research". Are you a hypocrite who uses this argument against Christians?

...

"One-third (32 percent) of adults between 18-34 said they may have told a lie in the past week"

What percentage of athletes responded to the survey? Was it mandatory or optional?

Would an athlete deliberately lie in order to encourage the IAAF to take tougher measures on his or her competitors?

Even if 57% is true, then that means potentially 43% are not consistent cheaters. You cannot paint with a broad brush and say every single champion is a cheater.

rekrunner wrote:

Putting aside the question of which event is "dirtier", what he suggested is that more dirty athletes in sprints are ending up in the top-100 (e.g. 48 out of 100), compared to dirty athletes in distance events (e.g. 2 out of 100).

Yes, which I questioned too, because the sprinters drugs of choice were partly detectable since '88, but the endurance athletes blood doping only since the ABP in 2009, and EPO since, well 2000, but then very unreliably so.

Going by recent years, it appears running is not better than sprinting.

For example, look at this century. Olympic champions caught doping (I know I forgot some):

- Jones, Gatlin, Merritt, Fraser-Pryce, ....

- Ramzes, Kiprop, Savinova, Sumgong, ...

If you look at this decade (i.e. after the start of the ABP), running looks worse than sprinting, imo.

And our favorite Sunday Times review from 2015 showed that athletics has become more suspicious than cycling regarding blood doping.

facts and reason wrote:

Why do you trust the participants to be 100% truthful or near that?

What percentage of athletes responded to the survey? Was it mandatory or optional?

Would an athlete deliberately lie in order to encourage the IAAF to take tougher measures on his or her competitors?

"Sensitivity analyses, assessing the robustness of these estimates under numerous hypothetical scenarios of intentional or unintentional noncompliance by respondents, suggested that we were unlikely to have overestimated the true prevalence of doping."

"With adequate sample size, this technique yields high statistical power"

"We obtained excellent cooperation: of the 1,841 registered athletes at WCA, we approached 1,290, of whom 1,203 (93.3%) agreed to participate."

But to arrive at "1 in 2", that is what happened -- you even provided us the reference explaining that. I see and accept the authors words "numerous hypothetical scenarios" and what they "suggested". I will come back to "unlikely" later -- thanks. Regarding my math and assumptions, I'm just going by what existing data and research suggests, and where we are missing data and research to make opposite suggestions. Like the study authors did, these are just suggestions. There may be other reasons I have ignored why the PAG survey results of 57% are not representative of doping prevalence in athletics.

Rekrunner, you work very hard to dismiss the findings of surveys and research which depict serious levels of doping in the sport. Are you seeking to persuade yourself (or others?) that the problem doesn't exist?

The detailed objections you might make to the Tubingen/Harvard survey of IAAF events can only at best qualify our perceptions of its findings. The general picture remains the same. I say that, too, because the survey is not the only information we have about doping. There are many different sources that can tell us about doping, and for myself I include amongst them my contacts over the years with professional sportsmen, coaches, physios and anti-doping officials. Published research of an academic nature cannot tell us everything about a subject that is essentially clandestine. Dopers don't make it a practice to tell the world what they are up to. The interesting thing about the survey (which you somewhat pedantically insist is not an IAAF survey, even though it included IAAF athletes) is that the athletes themselves admitted what they were doing - but only so they couldn't be identified. Whether we can rely upon the 57% figure given, or whether it is in fact somewhat less or more, it is still information that can't be ignored, and more or less confirms what so many other disparate sources are saying: doping is endemic in elite sport in most countries. We can add, that it often occurs with the collusion of sports governance bodies (Renee Anne Shirley, the Jamaican whistleblower.) To deny that is to enable it to continue.

I am not concerned that the research covered a number of sports in addition to track and field. Nothing I have read or learned leads me to believe there are "clean" versus "dirty" sports. Doping benefits all sports. It can even be found in chess. Nor am I disposed to think that because it is found in lower-tier competitors that elite competitors will not be doping. The higher the level of competition and the greater the number of competitors the stronger the pressures are to dope. The rewards are also commensurately greater.

facts and reason wrote:

Armstronglivs wrote:

The survey indicated 57%. In the absence of any better research, I will go with that.

Why do you trust the participants to be 100% truthful or near that? It sounds like you're putting "faith" in them by going along despite a lack of "any better research". Are you a hypocrite who uses this argument against Christians?

http://www.nbcnews.com/id/13819955/ns/us_news-life/t/lying-survey-results-glance

"One-third (32 percent) of adults between 18-34 said they may have told a lie in the past week"

What percentage of athletes responded to the survey? Was it mandatory or optional?

Would an athlete deliberately lie in order to encourage the IAAF to take tougher measures on his or her competitors?

Even if 57% is true, then that means potentially 43% are not consistent cheaters. You cannot paint with a broad brush and say every single champion is a cheater.

I don't say every single champion is a cheater. But nor can I dismiss the possibility or even likelihood of their doping. I also don't take the results of the survey as an "act of faith", but as information arrived at by a clear process. The athletes who responded did so confidentially; they were under no pressure to admit to doping and took no risks in making that admission, as the information would not enable them to be identified. They wouldn't have responded otherwise. Some may have not admitted it or made a false admission, for their own reasons, but given the number of respondents this would not have significantly skewed the statistics.

You still seem to misunderstand the subject of my posts. I didn't raise issues with the study, but your misrepresentations. I accepted the data from the surveys, and the discussion in the study about the impacts of non-compliance. I also accept the "general picture" that among IAAF athletes, doping prevalence is high, and that doping convictions are low. I accepted among Arab athletes, across 28 sports, prevalence is even higher. My points were correcting wrong statements that came from you, which were not "findings of surveys and research", and which attributed findings, and events, to wrong parties. These misstatements are easily fixed (initially you just had to modify two words out of twelve), while maintaining "the general picture" of doping prevalence and convictions. Don't blame me for demonstrating that your statements and depictions of real findings are wrong. By insisting on being wrong, you do yourself, your credibility, anti-doping, and the sport a disservice.

I know you place a great deal of weight on these quotes from the abstract. And you know I don't. I would advise everyone who is interested, for an improved understanding, to read and understand the detailed discussion freely available in the Appendix. I will provide the link at the bottom. The reasons I don't blindly accept the authors suggestion of unlikelihood of over-estimation are, in part, the lack of real data presented by the very same authors to support such a suggestion, and in part, the other words of the authors themselves. Let's put the abstract aside. It seems to be a summary of these last two paragraphs, in the Appendix, interpreting "Table 14":

In the Appendix, Section 4, the authors identified and modeled 8 or 9 scenarios of non-compliance. It would seem they are suggesting "unlikely", based, at least in part, on Table 14 containing many "-" entries, and only 1 "+" entry.

First, nothing in the study gives the authors any special indication of the likelihood of compliance in any of these scenarios. Intuitively, some scenarios (e.g. non-dopers admitting doping) are less likely than others (e.g. dopers lying about doping), but the authors have no way to estimate or measure true compliance or non-compliance in any scenario that they've identified.

Rather, when looking at how Table 14 was produced, we find that the "various assumptions" and "numerous hypothetical scenarios" they spoke of are quite simply blanket assumptions of 30% non-compliance for every scenario. This looks like a useful assumption for discarding several scenarios of non-compliance as having a small effect, even for large non-compliance. But such a blanket assumption, with no supporting data or rationale or other basis, cannot support an overall suggestion of "unlikely to have overestimated".

The other thing about Table 14 is that these various scenarios are not independent, but rather there is a fair amount of overlap. For example, the "Underreporting Doping", with a small modification, would be a superset of all these other scenarios: "Switch from B to A", "Responding to Question A", "Automatic no Responding" and "Cheating with no Responding".

Another issue found in the closing paragraphs is factual. They say "none of the various assumptions would have caused us to overestimate the true prevalence within our sample by more than 3%". This looks factually incorrect, contradicted by Table 12A "Automatic yes Responding". Assuming 30% non-compliance, as they did, the true prevalence becomes 8.9%, resulting in a signficant over-estimate of 34.7% -- way more than 3%. So either:

1) This statement (that helps form the basis for "unlikely to have overestimated") is a lie

2) The authors are now talking about another estimate where "Automatic yes Responding" was already eliminated (see Table 4): 31.4%

So assessing the authors suggesting the unlikelihood of overestimates requires:

- assessing the likelihood of dopers under-reporting doping -- something the authors don't know

- assessing the likelihood of non-dopers over-reporting non-doping -- something the authors don't know

- assessing the likelihood of automatic yes responses -- something the authors don't know

- assessing the likelihood of automatic no responses -- something the authors don't know

- assessing the likelihood of any non-compliance -- something the authors don't know

Any opinion by the authors of the unlikelihood of overestimating, is not based on data that can be found in the study, but based on any preconceptions that they brought with them into the study.

Link to the Appendix:

Can you guys take your drug talk to a different thread, this one is about the Ingebrigtsens training.

I wonder if it´s possible to start one single fcking thread on LRC without it degenerating into the typical doping babble?

i dont care wrote:

Can you guys take your drug talk to a different thread, this one is about the Ingebrigtsens training.

^This

well,, wrote:

I wonder if it´s possible to start one single fcking thread on LRC without it degenerating into the typical doping babble?

No. Even though these athletes are very talented and would still be at the top of the sport without drugs. Just with slower times. These nobodies feel a need to justify why they are slower by drug accusations. Not because of lack of hard work or lack of talent. But they blame drugs. Look at Lasse Viren. Did he do drugs or blood doped, perhaps he did. Probably didn't. But the salty Americans feel the need to justify why there saint pre lost to him was because of doping. Even though pre was probably doping too. Just look at pre, clear signs of anabolic use.

In the first 7 posts, I count 3 of them related to "juicing", and getting away with it.

well,, wrote:

I wonder if it´s possible to start one single fcking thread on LRC without it degenerating into the typical doping babble?