3 pages ago, I said I considered the repeated suggestion that doping was necessary to beat the mile world record a statement of faith, not because it is true or false, but because it lacked relevant facts and references.
This can only be cured by providing such facts and references, something you have failed to do before and since.
I am prepared to be proved wrong only if you can provide direct facts and references.
Your serial list of petty personal attacks only shows me you are unable to do more.
You may find "over 20 years old, set at the height of the EPO era" persuasive, but I do not. As I have argued elsewhere in a performance thread, it is not obvious there ever was an EPO-era for running among the fastest performances. It may be more accurate to call it an African era.
The scientist in me isn't interested in one record, and whether it is doped, and whether such doping is necessary or incidental. To determine the answers, we need to look for larger trends across the whole population of athletes over the course of decades -- something I did in two other threads.
If we assume, as you do, "at least 40% doping prevalence", and 2 to 3 seconds improvement in the most talented high responders, "scientists" should predict large numbers of athletes, including large numbers of non-Africans, beating the 1980s times of Cram, Coe, Aouita and even Ovett, by significant margins.
If we assume, as many do here, that EPO is necessary to beat the world record, then training at high altitude would help. As I have shown elsewhere, in a 1997 study, one group of men "hi-lo" training was able to improve their 5K performance by more than 6% over the course of a 14 week study. Note that many Africans have lived at high-altitude, something comparable to micro-dosing EPO, all of their lives -- this makes me wonder what the lifelong effect of permanent and continuous EPO-microdosing would have on performance.
I deny that I am a denier.