Bought the Times. Makes good reading. Identification of the athlete is gender neutral and script is designed to give no clues away. Dirty races are 2001 to date - 1500, 20km walk, 800 5,000 3k steeplechase, 10k 50k walk heptahlon/decathlon, marathon. So it was somebody in that set.
Useful quotes ".....three occasions in their career the athlete's test results were so "abnormal" that there was only a one in a thousand chance that they were natural. ....One of those scores was recorded just days before winning a major race.
"The athlete firmly states that they "never cheated" and supports calls for more money to be spend on stamping out blood-doping.
"The IAAF put a red mark agains the athlete's name, which experts say should have resulted in folllow-up tests. Several years later the athlete was investigated by the IAAF but it decided not to take any action.
" Was this athlete cheating or was there some explanation for the scores? At the meeting with The Sunday Times in a hotel lobby last week, the athlete swore on the lives of loved ones that they had never blood doped but they did not want their results to be published here in full."
"You print it and I sue you [and] you won't be getting any money back in future like Lance Armstrong - I promise you that."
"Last week the athlete said their score had been elevated because it had been taken when they were dehydrated after winning a race in summer temperatures. "I would have been targeted afterwards. And they didn't come back to me becasue there isn't anythign to show." the athlete said.
"The files show that nine other athletese were also tested after teh same event, yet the British Athelte recorded the highest off-score by some way.
"The experts consulted by the Sunday Times say that dehydration may have a small effect on blodd values, but the British athlete's off-score was 40% higher on the day of the race than in a test taken two days before the race.
"Such a rise in the concentration of red blood cells could have been achieved by an illicit blood transfusion, but this is only a suspicion and certainly not proven by the results.
"one of our experts queried whether the result could be instrument error, but there were 29 other tests with the same device that were at normal levels.
"A second high test several years later did spark an investigation by the IAAF. The British athlete said that 12 experts from the IAAF had viewed the data o these tests and 11 had concluded that the results were consistent with an athlete training at altitude.
"The Sunday times has not seen the 12 experts' assessments, but other experts we have spoken to say that altitude training has only a limited effect on an athlete's blood scores."
There is also a para that states that "Before 2009 the IAAF would not ban any athlete for high blood scores alone and used the only as a guid to whether an athlete should be targeted for urine testing..."
So I think our athlete was active up to 2009. So we have those races and a window 2001 to 2009. And an event in which the field is so large that a total of 10 athletes in that same event which the Brit won were tested. And we have a blind eye turned first and years later a record of a red having been flagged and investigated by the IAAF and dismissed.
Next step all the runners and riders.
However - What was it that Brit director of the IAAF said about the previous leak of PRs data - we did investigate it and there was nothing and it should have stayed in the IAAF safe in Monaco where it belonged. Then he went out and took more snaps of PR with kittens and children (- ok no kittens or children but what other retired athlete who lives in Monaco gets their picture for running a half marathon in Monaco on the International Governing body's web site taken by a director who also lives in Monaco. Protection ! ) and posted them up on the IAAF website.
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