jeff tallon wrote:
of course they havent.no one can.what you have is a lot of extremely talented africans,and when they take drugs,theyre invincible,and unbeatable.
Well you must agree with Rekrunner and Canova that EPO, roids, rat poison, and all the rest that East Africans have been loading up on for years (and still do almost full throttle in Ethiopia) must have small effects time wise, because although it's enough for them to largely dominate, they are not THAT much faster than the rest of the world.
More likely that Kenya has a 'large talent pool' because 98% of their talented sportsmen and women choose distance running, whereas in most countries the corresponding figure is probably less than 1%. Then whey you have a licence to dope far more than any other countries (assuming rather farfetchedly that Western countries with far less financial incentive want to dope as much if they could), you improve times sufficiently to dominate.
My point was really that GB was dominating middle-distance in the 80's and running times that compare are even better than the Kenyans today (given differences in tracks, shoes etc). But you would say that they started doping in the 90's in order to catch up with the Kenyans who started to dominate around 89? Odd that (at least until this year) they were slower for 3 decades.