I think we have witnessed the emergence of a new drug in marathoning the past month. This reminds me of the early 1990s when suddenly all the 1500 through 10000 top 10 list were completely rewritten and a decade later, all the marathon top 100 lists. At the time we were perplexed, but now we know it was obviously the emergence of EPO first in cycling then on the track, then the marathon. First in massive doses and hence all the track time rewritten, followed by testing for EPO, which led to the micro dosing of EPO, combined with micro dosing of test and L-C.
Now, in the past month we have seen 3 ridiculous performances:
1) First, to anyone who knows the sport and has been following it, it was obvious K. Bekele was done. Hadn't raced well in years, was beyond his prime years, etc. Suddenly he just missed the WR by a couple of seconds AND had a guy with him right to the end. Pretty absurd.
2) Then you Have Kipchoge's 159. While he has been in the range before, this time it was vastly different if you are actually paying attention as oppossed to oohing and aaaahing. This time his 1:59 was not a race effort, but obviously it was just a strong tempo run effort. If you watched it, it was clear that he had a ton left and was not really trying all that much. If he had put in an actual race effort, he would have been in the 1:56-1:57 range. Of course that would have been too revealing and obvious so he stuck to the script.
3) Today a veteran marathoner, battling windy conditions (the top men were well off their PRs), suddenly has as announcer Josh Cox described "an unfathomable breakthrough", running a 4 min PR and blowing out a world class field by 6 (!!!!) minutes.
Something has obviously changed in the past month. Soon, just like happened before when EPO first came out, you will now see performances like these become commonplace. Then about 2 years from now you will hear the name of a the new drug protocol being rumored about. Then about 2 years later, WADA will announced that a new drug has been added to their banned protocol list, but for which no test has yet been developed. Then a year later, you will hear that they finally have developed a test for the new drug. Then a few random fools will get caught, but no big stars, then they will switch to microdosing the new drug, then...