There is no “genetic superiority” when it comes to distance running. Literally everyone sub 2:09 is just doping.

The psychopathy: why do you rate your value of your post or content on votes or downvotes? Seems childish.

It seems rather childish to blame me because your heightened focus on East Africans is unpopular, or to care about upvotes/downvotes in the first place.

With respect to this thread, and the question of whether the answer can be reduced to: a) genetics, or b) doping; the established answer is c) in part, all of the above, and more. I have no doubt that non-East Africans can improve on Ryan Hall's and Sondre Moen's success after long term training at altitude.

It was comical to watch both you and Armstronglivs firmly deny Kenya was the best "country" on the track, between 1964-1979, yet unable to answer which country you thought was better than Kenya, preferring instead to make up your own metrics.

Curiously Armstronglivs picked a measure (Olympic gold medals) which, when you consider the 1976 boycott, means that there are no data points possible representing the years 1973-1979 -- roughly half the period in question. How stupid is that?

You picked the marathon -- nothing to do with all of the distance track events in question -- as the best representative indication of best "country" on the track, long before East Africans participated in large numbers on the roads. Since 1979, the East Africans first began their real "world" domination in World Cross Country, before EPO, in the 1980s, and then the track in the 1990s, before they dominated on the roads, post-2000, both quantitatively and qualitatively.

Here is my statistics from page 55 again (which is not online anymore).

Because you liked it so much Coevett, I thought you should be reminded on this one (I don't address it to Armstrong who just can't understand).

The NRs (1964, 1969, 1974, 1979) of the 6 leading track distance running nations in the period 1964 - 1979 (Australia only in the 60s, Finland mainly only in the 70s, but those were the most successful nations in this period).

I thought a five year gap between the records should be enough, but if you Coevett would like to see it more accurately (every 3 years) I can do it for you. I can also add the 3000m and 1 Mile distances if you need the information. It would increase Kenya's lead, so I think it's highly appreciated by you, isn't it?

Lol, I don't care in the slightest slowwer. I'm pointing out the childishness of you constantly posting under different handles and downvoting anybody who calls you out on your explicit scientific racism that is used to mask the sickening exploitation of young Kenyan runners by Western managers, coaches, and promoters.

LOL. A classic rekrunner. Now that your ban is finally over (congrats), you go back to your same old deflection nonsense and insults.

1) Missing one Olympics between 64 and 79 means missing one out of four Olympics. "roughly half the period in question" is as irrelevant as wrong: you can't consider the three years before, 1976 itself, and three years after as belonging to 1976. If Olympics 1976 represents 1977, then surely Olympics 1972 represents 1973 by the same logic. It's therefore four years out of sixteen that were missed by the Kenyans.

2) This thread is mainly about the marathon - read the thread title. It's you and slowwer who keep trying to go off topic with the steeples and whatnot.

Trolls will be trolls.

The mods look after rekrunner. He needs all the help he can get, because his arguments don't cut it.

Predictable self-projection.

1) There is no way to deny that looking only at Olympic Gold medals and given a boycott of 1976, there is no possible way to represent any performance between the 1972 and 1980 Olympics, including the 7 years between 1973-1979. There are better indications and measures of success by country than a metric which limits you to 5 or 6 data points every 4 years.

2) This thread, reading the title, is mainly about denying "genetic superiority", and attributing literally all sub-2:09 marathons (like Derek Clayton from 1960s) to doping. It is not me or "slowwer" "going off-topic". Looking at other events before 1990 is a direct response and a direct contradiction to posters like Coevett "going off-topic" by suggesting there were no signs of world greatness before EPO, ignoring the evidence of early success in the 1960s and 1970s on the track, and then in the 1980s in World Cross country.

Something is not adding up here, as I only count 7, and 2 of them were for "missed tests".

Given that Coe from 1981 is still #3 all time in the 800m, can we get rid of any notion that EPO has had any influence on the "top" 800m performances?

You were banned? Really that is quite funny. How many Kenyans were busted for using the ineffective performance enhancing drugs whilst you were absent?

No -- that is fiction.

It is fiction that Kenyans were busted - or busted for using ineffective substances?

Maybe both are true.

From Running Magazine. I guess the data doesn't lie.

Over the course of one year, 40 per cent of all the [positive drug tests] recorded in global athletics are in Kenya,” World Athletics (WA) president Seb Coe said following a 2022 WA council meeting. Coe added that WA has been eyeing the ever-growing doping issues in Kenya for some time, and he and his team seriously considered issuing an outright ban of all Kenyan athletes until the problem was sorted.

Data doesn't lie, but this isn't prevalence data, nor performance data.

Again, the existence of doping, and doping problem, in Kenya was never in doubt. A 2017 WADA funded study shed some light on some of the reasons. But make no mistake, the absolute numbers will be large because the pool of Kenyan athletes tested are so large to begin with -- for reasons which may or may not include doping (subject of this thread).

My bigger interest is performance. Can you connect positive tests to performance? For example, how have the remaining 60% of positive drug tested athletes performed compared to Kenyan athletes? Surely we should be able to see the emporer's clothes from a pool of 60%.

And can we yet conclude rates of prevelance by country from proportions of positive tests? Don't fall into the trap of counting apples to conclude an orange. In another thread, I showed with more detail how, when we assume the same "average" prevalence, we must still predict a high number of Kenyan positives by the sheer fact that there are so many talented Kenyans in the testing pools and on the podiums. In that thread, jacksprat gave the example of sub-2:10 marathon runners. Of the 1281 runners, 41.5% (532) of them were Kenyan. If we assume Kenyan doping prevalence is the same as the world average, then from this group, we should predict ~40% of positive tests coming from Kenyans -- again, for the same average prevalence rate -- by virtue of the fact that 532 out of 1281 athletes are Kenyan.

In that example, sub-2:10 was a rather generous cutoff, permitting many non-Africans who would not make higher performance cutoffs. When I looked at "top" performers post-1990 through to 2018, relative to pre-EPO benchmarks (2:07:11), before the effect of new shoes, Kenyans accounted for 61% of the performance result in the marathon, and, when de-duplicated, 56% across the six distance events. Ethiopians accounted for 28% and 22%, respectively. The rest of the non-African world, throwing in South Africa, for those 28 years covering the EPO-era, accounted for just 6%, and 8%, respectively, in this era of a globally available, globally untestable and the largely undetectable, presumed powerful, endurance drug. Depending on which performance pools you pick, again assuming the same "average" prevalence rate, Kenyan doping positives should outnumber the rest of the world by up to a factor of 10.

In order for me to conclude what you have conditioned yourself to believe, you need to provide more relevant data.