Doping In Athletics

[sniper]

Re: Re:

Another case in point:
http://www.nltimes.nl/2015/07/22/survey-four-percent-of-elite-dutch-athletes-are-doping/
Again a survey is used to draw conclusions about actual numbers of dopers, again we're being misinformed.
Such surveys merely serve as an indication of a minimum number of dopers and most reporters fail to make that explicit.

 

[armchairclimber]

Re: Re:

1. No confirmation that it is her.
2. Not hers
3. Super injunction? Bllx.
4. What protection?
5. Changing her mind? Er...oh yeah, I do that a lot.
6. No it doesn't.

If you are going to go after someone, do it properly.

Tbh if you actually believe radcliffe was clean at this stage then you are beyond help. The only remotely favourable argument was that she appeared anti doping and that's shown to be a sham since she decided to throw her support behind fraud seb coe.

Well, I have my reasons. Being beyond hope in your eyes doesn't worry me unduly, even if you are generally one of the more sane voices in here. There is one "out there" performance which was (rightly in my view) disregarded as a WR for a while. Her career progression showed no red flags to me from the age of 14 onwards. The big leap...where she found she could win at World level was the move from 10 k to the marathon, a distance which suited her (one paced...no kick).
She was finishing in the top three nationally (over XC) from the age of 13 IIRC. She was very consistent through the junior ranks and eventually winning World Junior XC a few years later. I don't believe she was doping then. I don't see any real red flags subsequently apart from the marathon WR...which, as you know, took place at an event where she ran with men. I don't see other outliers. I see someone who was very good and very often beaten at world level until she found her distance.

There are plenty of athletes, including Brit stars, who I suspect. She is not at the top of the list.

Why would you be against the release of your blood data if you have nothing to hide? It would help remove some of the suspicion from her, something I'm sure she would be seeking if possible.
If you're active, sure, you don't want to give your rivals any of your data. But what's the problem once you're no longer particularly competitive/retired? And anyway, she didn't say that she didn't want to release her data - she said she was against the whole concept of it (If everyone else starts releasing their data and it's clean, it puts pressure on the dirty athletes to release theirs too, to the point where refusal to do so would almost become a confession)

I can only speak for myself. If an athlete I was involved with, who I was pretty sure was clean, had some unusual off scores in their ABP (it happens for many reasons), I'd probably suggest that releasing the data would only lead to a few sheet sniffers on web forums creating a lot of ill-informed noise. I would have no issue with passing the data to someone like Ashenden, who actually knows wtf he is talking about.

 

[Cramps]

Re: Re:

There are plenty of athletes, including Brit stars, who I suspect. She is not at the top of the list.

Fair enough -- but then who do you think might be the top British athlete with three suspicious off-scores?
We know the athlete was active between 2001 and most likely prior to 2009; definitely from one of these events: 800, 1500, 3k steeplechase, 5k, 10k, heptathlon/decathlon, marathon, or various walking events; and definitely not Mo Farah (or any of the other Brit athletes releasing blood scores, eg Jo Pavey).

800m, 1500m -- Kelly Holmes
5k, 10k, marathon -- Radcliffe
Heptathlon -- Ennis (timeframe might be early for her); Lewis (timeframe might be late for her)
No famous British walkers or steeplechasers I don't think
No British men came to mind in these events, but feel like I'm missing someone/s

 

[armchairclimber]

Re: Re:

There are plenty of athletes, including Brit stars, who I suspect. She is not at the top of the list.

Fair enough -- but then who do you think might be the top British athlete with three suspicious off-scores?
We know the athlete was active between 2001 and most likely prior to 2009; definitely from one of these events: 800, 1500, 3k steeplechase, 5k, 10k, heptathlon/decathlon, marathon, or various walking events; and definitely not Mo Farah (or any of the other Brit athletes releasing blood scores, eg Jo Pavey).

800m, 1500m -- Kelly Holmes
5k, 10k, marathon -- Radcliffe
Heptathlon -- Ennis (timeframe might be early for her); Lewis (timeframe might be late for her)
No famous British walkers or steeplechasers I don't think
No British men came to mind in these events, but feel like I'm missing someone/s

Whilst I won't speculate on who that athlete was, I will say that I thought KH's sudden brilliance was extraordinary.

 

[The Carrot]

http://www.express.co.uk/sport/othersport/599744/Olympic-and-World-Champion-Usain-Bolt-has-no-issues-if-medical-data-is-released

Usain Bolt doesn't seem to have any issue releasing data.

 

[More Strides than Rides]

Re: Re:

1. No confirmation that it is her.
2. Not hers
3. Super injunction? Bllx.
4. What protection?
5. Changing her mind? Er...oh yeah, I do that a lot.
6. No it doesn't.

If you are going to go after someone, do it properly.

Tbh if you actually believe radcliffe was clean at this stage then you are beyond help. The only remotely favourable argument was that she appeared anti doping and that's shown to be a sham since she decided to throw her support behind fraud seb coe.

Well, I have my reasons. Being beyond hope in your eyes doesn't worry me unduly, even if you are generally one of the more sane voices in here. There is one "out there" performance which was (rightly in my view) disregarded as a WR for a while. Her career progression showed no red flags to me from the age of 14 onwards. The big leap...where she found she could win at World level was the move from 10 k to the marathon, a distance which suited her (one paced...no kick).
She was finishing in the top three nationally (over XC) from the age of 13 IIRC. She was very consistent through the junior ranks and eventually winning World Junior XC a few years later. I don't believe she was doping then. I don't see any real red flags subsequently apart from the marathon WR...which, as you know, took place at an event where she ran with men. I don't see other outliers. I see someone who was very good and very often beaten at world level until she found her distance.

There are plenty of athletes, including Brit stars, who I suspect. She is not at the top of the list.

Why would you be against the release of your blood data if you have nothing to hide? It would help remove some of the suspicion from her, something I'm sure she would be seeking if possible.
If you're active, sure, you don't want to give your rivals any of your data. But what's the problem once you're no longer particularly competitive/retired? And anyway, she didn't say that she didn't want to release her data - she said she was against the whole concept of it (If everyone else starts releasing their data and it's clean, it puts pressure on the dirty athletes to release theirs too, to the point where refusal to do so would almost become a confession)

I can only speak for myself. If an athlete I was involved with, who I was pretty sure was clean, had some unusual off scores in their ABP (it happens for many reasons), I'd probably suggest that releasing the data would only lead to a few sheet sniffers on web forums creating a lot of ill-informed noise. I would have no issue with passing the data to someone like Ashenden, who actually knows wtf he is talking about.

No it doesn't. The off acore calculation is designed so that normal fluctuations are not outside allowable range.

Dehydration and air travel: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22805050/

Stomach problems: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/21110289/

Storage process can causes differences but not large enough to matter (especially it standard protocol is followed: http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/22060177/?i=4&from=/25545030/related

 

[WillemS]

Re: Re:

No it doesn't. The off score calculation is designed so that normal fluctuations are not outside allowable range.

Yes, that is the design. However, it's important to pay attention to how that works, statistically, as that does not mean that fluctuation outside of the "allowable" range are impossible without "unnatural" causes: they are just very unlikely to occur. So if there are no other explanations for those out-of-range values, your posterior probability (after presenting the "evidence", the new blood sample and updating all of the other nodes, to the Bayesian network) of doping use rises. Yet, albeit unlikely, given the large number of athletes tested, I would suspect that at least some of those rare, natural cases have been observed. So, it's not correct to say that "normal fluctuations are not outside allowable range".

If I'm not mistaken, the off score range uses a confidence level of 99.9%. That means that, on average, 1 in 1000 of the non-doped samples will fall outside of the range, despite being "non-doped".

 

[Bernie's eyesore]

Re: Re:

There are plenty of athletes, including Brit stars, who I suspect. She is not at the top of the list.

Fair enough -- but then who do you think might be the top British athlete with three suspicious off-scores?
We know the athlete was active between 2001 and most likely prior to 2009; definitely from one of these events: 800, 1500, 3k steeplechase, 5k, 10k, heptathlon/decathlon, marathon, or various walking events; and definitely not Mo Farah (or any of the other Brit athletes releasing blood scores, eg Jo Pavey).

800m, 1500m -- Kelly Holmes
5k, 10k, marathon -- Radcliffe
Heptathlon -- Ennis (timeframe might be early for her); Lewis (timeframe might be late for her)
No famous British walkers or steeplechasers I don't think
No British men came to mind in these events, but feel like I'm missing someone/s

Whilst I won't speculate on who that athlete was, I will say that I thought KH's sudden brilliance was extraordinary.

Holmes was an obvious doper but there was no sudden brilliance. She was consistently one of the top 3 or 4 middle distance runners in the world for more than a decade prior to her Olympic golds. Whilst it was a bit of a surprise that she was able to win double gold at 34, her performances were not really an improvement on what she had been doing for years. Radcliffe on the other hand, transformed massively when she took up the marathon, not just in terms of what she was doing on the roads but her track performances showed significant improvement too. Not normal.

 

[More Strides than Rides]

Re: Re:

No it doesn't. The off score calculation is designed so that normal fluctuations are not outside allowable range.

Yes, that is the design. However, it's important to pay attention to how that works, statistically, as that does not mean that fluctuation outside of the "allowable" range are impossible without "unnatural" causes: they are just very unlikely to occur. So if there are no other explanations for those out-of-range values, your posterior probability (after presenting the "evidence", the new blood sample and updating all of the other nodes, to the Bayesian network) of doping use rises. Yet, albeit unlikely, given the large number of athletes tested, I would suspect that at least some of those rare, natural cases have been observed. So, it's not correct to say that "normal fluctuations are not outside allowable range".

If I'm not mistaken, the off score range uses a confidence level of 99.9%. That means that, on average, 1 in 1000 of the non-doped samples will fall outside of the range, despite being "non-doped".

Thrn why not release a medical record to back up an excusable off score? Release the data, and a "I was violently ill" doctor's visit or prescription or whatever. And relase the whole numbers, not just the offscore, so that everyone can see that the trigger of the off score was consistent with the explanation.

 

[The Hitch]

Re: Re:

.

There are plenty of athletes, including Brit stars, who I suspect. She is not at the top of the list.

Such as?

 

[armchairclimber]

Re: Re:

.

There are plenty of athletes, including Brit stars, who I suspect. She is not at the top of the list.

Such as?

You do have a habit of asking questions without reading earlier posts Hitch. Holmes, Ohorugu, Farah are three that spring to mind.

 

[armchairclimber]

Re: Re:

There are plenty of athletes, including Brit stars, who I suspect. She is not at the top of the list.

Fair enough -- but then who do you think might be the top British athlete with three suspicious off-scores?
We know the athlete was active between 2001 and most likely prior to 2009; definitely from one of these events: 800, 1500, 3k steeplechase, 5k, 10k, heptathlon/decathlon, marathon, or various walking events; and definitely not Mo Farah (or any of the other Brit athletes releasing blood scores, eg Jo Pavey).

800m, 1500m -- Kelly Holmes
5k, 10k, marathon -- Radcliffe
Heptathlon -- Ennis (timeframe might be early for her); Lewis (timeframe might be late for her)
No famous British walkers or steeplechasers I don't think
No British men came to mind in these events, but feel like I'm missing someone/s

Whilst I won't speculate on who that athlete was, I will say that I thought KH's sudden brilliance was extraordinary.

Holmes was an obvious doper but there was no sudden brilliance. She was consistently one of the top 3 or 4 middle distance runners in the world for more than a decade prior to her Olympic golds. Whilst it was a bit of a surprise that she was able to win double gold at 34, her performances were not really an improvement on what she had been doing for years. Radcliffe on the other hand, transformed massively when she took up the marathon, not just in terms of what she was doing on the roads but her track performances showed significant improvement too. Not normal.

Er, ok, ya.

 

[The Hitch]

Re: Re:

.

There are plenty of athletes, including Brit stars, who I suspect. She is not at the top of the list.

Such as?

You do have a habit of asking questions without reading earlier posts Hitch. Holmes, Ohorugu, Farah are three that spring to mind.

The non brits?

 

[the sceptic]

Even if I take my biggest believer glasses on there is absolutely no way to make Paula appear cleans.

Being british doesn't count when we know the UKAD barely does any testing on their own athletes.

We know the IAAF is corrupt. So "never tested positive" goes out the window.

Then we have the biggest WR outlier in Athletics coupled with dodgy blood values.

A sudden PR change from "I want to be transparent" to "No one understands blood values"

If she was chinese there would be no doubt. Obvious doping is obvious.

 

[sniper]

i wonder if she has something on our good Lord.
something that will make him wanna try even harder to shove Paula's doping under the carpet.
a "you protect me, I don't spill" kind of deal.

 

[Fearless Greg Lemond]

Good to see the scherpschutter back, now only het varken and we are complete.

Welkom terug buddy.

 

[hondated]

I am just hoping that those we have identified as clearly having cheated are held to account by whatever authorities necessary just as those so called celebrities have been who took part in sexual misdemeanours all those years ago and are now sitting in prison cells.

Rest assured that if it was me or you that had committed any type of crime how ever long ago it may have been we would be made to account for our actions and we wouldn't get away either with just looking googly eyed when questioned about them.

 

[WillemS]

Re: Re:

Thrn why not release a medical record to back up an excusable off score? Release the data, and a "I was violently ill" doctor's visit or prescription or whatever. And relase the whole numbers, not just the offscore, so that everyone can see that the trigger of the off score was consistent with the explanation.

Don't attack me for people not releasing data, I'm not against it and that was not the point I was arguing against.

The point was, and it's clear from this reply that you've missed it, that even off scores outside of the "allowable" range may have a normal origin, without needing any special reason for falling outside of that range. The width of the range is calculated, statistically, so that it would encompass 99.9% of all normal samples. So, on average, 0.1% of all normal samples will be outside of the defined range. (That is, on average, for every 1000 "normal" samples, no doping or any other special circumstances like illness, 1 tends to fall outside of the range.)

So there does not have to be a "trigger" for a normal sample to fall outside of the range, that's just how the statistics work. That's why we go through all the trouble of actually modelling a network to determine if a given set of evidence (blood samples, biometrical data, background variables such as altitude training or illness) increases or decreases the so called posterior probability of doping (or, if you wish, the odds ratio of doping:not doping).

If you have probable "triggers" for abnormal values, and that why all the dopers have those lame excuses like altitude, catching rare bugs and eating spoiled food, the likelihood of observing out-of-range values despite being "clean" only increases. Luckily, more and more research is done to determine what factors may or may not influence the variability of certain scores, such as the studies you've linked, but there are still plenty of factors that could possible influence things like the "off score".

That's why some of the experts in the field say that you cannot look at a couple of numbers of an individual and conclude whether or not they're clean.

However, the opposite is true as well. Despite being unable to determine, for individual athletes, if some violations of the allowable range truly indicate doping, if a large number of athletes show abnormal values, the possibility of them all having those values because of "natural causes" is negligible. While you may be unable to pinpoint for whom the values are normal and for whom the numbers are indicative of doping, you can conclude, on a group level, that there's something going on. (But this is just an echo of a post I made earlier.) Therefore, the biggest contribution of the published report by Parisotto and Ashenden is not the identification of individual dopers, as that might be impossible from the data, but the strong evidence that something very strange is going on in athletics as a whole.

 

[gillan1969]

Re: Re:

Thrn why not release a medical record to back up an excusable off score? Release the data, and a "I was violently ill" doctor's visit or prescription or whatever. And relase the whole numbers, not just the offscore, so that everyone can see that the trigger of the off score was consistent with the explanation.

Don't attack me for people not releasing data, I'm not against it and that was not the point I was arguing against.

The point was, and it's clear from this reply that you've missed it, that even off scores outside of the "allowable" range may have a normal origin, without needing any special reason for falling outside of that range. The width of the range is calculated, statistically, so that it would encompass 99.9% of all normal samples. So, on average, 0.01% of all normal samples will be outside of the defined range. (That is, on average, for every 1000 "normal" samples, no doping or any other special circumstances like illness, 1 tends to fall outside of the range.)

So there does not have to be a "trigger" for a normal sample to fall outside of the range, that's just how the statistics work. That's why we go through all the trouble of actually modelling a network to determine if a given set of evidence (blood samples, biometrical data, background variables such as altitude training or illness) increases or decreases the so called posterior probability of doping (or, if you wish, the odds ratio of doping:not doping).

If you have probable "triggers" for abnormal values, and that why all the dopers have those lame excuses like altitude, catching rare bugs and eating spoiled food, the likelihood of observing out-of-range values despite being "clean" only increases. Luckily, more and more research is done to determine what factors may or may not influence the variability of certain scores, such as the studies you've linked, but there are still plenty of factors that could possible influence things like the "off score".

That's why some of the experts in the field say that you cannot look at a couple of numbers of an individual and conclude whether or not they're clean.

However, the opposite is true as well. Despite being unable to determine, for individual athletes, if some violations of the allowable range truly indicate doping, if a large number of athletes show abnormal values, the possibility of them all having those values because of "natural causes" is negligible. While you may be unable to pinpoint for whom the values are normal and for whom the numbers are indicative of doping, you can conclude, on a group level, that there's something going on. (But this is just an echo of a post I made earlier.) Therefore, the biggest contribution of the published report by Parisotto and Ashenden is not the identification of individual dopers, as that might be impossible from the data, but the strong evidence that something very strange is going on in athletics as a whole.

but do we not have three from this athlete...which gives us 1 in every 1000000000...????

 

[Cramps]

Re: Re:

but do we not have three from this athlete...which gives us 1 in every 1000000000...????

Yes, and in addition the first was a change in off score 40% higher on the day of the race than in a test two days previous.

True a test with a false alarm rate of only .1% would falsely incriminate several athletes a year. That's why other evidence and expert analysis has to be brought in. In this particular case there seems to be plenty, and the IAAF have just been negligent and derelict.

 

[The Hitch]

The headline on the back page of the Evening Standard yesterday was something like - " 'Team GB is 100% clean', says British Athletics Chief".

It doesn't matter to me so much if the athletes go down. The people that need to go down are the enablers like this guy. Like Ligget and Fotheringham and those other hacks did in the 2000's. They promise and promise and promise its all clean and make so much money of these lies and then when the athletes do get caught doping, no one makes them accountable for their crimes which were bigger than what the athlete did.

 

[WillemS]

Re: Re:

but do we not have three from this athlete...which gives us 1 in every 1000000000...????

That depends on whether we believe or assume those samples are truly independent of each other. If they are not independent, blindly multiplying the probabilities as if they were independent will, probably greatly, underestimate the probably of observing three such samples in a random individual. However, finding more and more "abnormal" values would indeed decrease the probability of them occurring naturally.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------

I must state that I'm not that interested in bringing this or that athlete to justice, as it not only it reeks of sensationalism and the love of scandals to me, but will actually cloud any serious discussing on the issue of doping in sports. As it's quite hard, both legally and scientifically, to successfully establish the guilt of individual athletes based on the published data, focussing on that only leads us astray as we probably won't get anywhere. As you can clearly see, the defenders of, in this case, athletics can still claim that there is no actual proof for doping in individual cases and that you can't use this data with absolute certainty for individuals.

The better path would to regard the data on the group level to establish that something terribly strange is going on in athletics, but that the current anti-doping regime clearly failed to highlight any of it. Even if we now find some strange singularity, a truly unique natural oddity that explains all of those abnormal values for all of those athletes, it's very strange that the system has not brought this situation to light and there was no initiative to investigate it whatsoever. Instead of arguing over individual athletes and whether or not this or that number suggests, proves or denies the use of doping, look at the whole pattern of values over the whole group of athletes and conclude that the pattern is not normal, that something is going on. We don't need to identify individual dopers to conclude that doping seems to be problem in athletics.

To me, the conclusion would be that the current anti-doping regime in athletics is worthless. It's not able to catch dopers, it's not even able to highlight a very evident pattern of abnormal values on a group level. (The latter, the group level, is much easier to analyse than the former, the individual level.)

 

[Cramps]

Re: Re:

but do we not have three from this athlete...which gives us 1 in every 1000000000...????

That depends on whether we believe or assume those samples are truly independent of each other.

In this case the evidence is damning. Not one bad test, not samples from a single day analysed multiple times. A pattern involving three bad tests, years apart, with baselines for the individual and for competitors. In at least one case, clearly timelocked to competition, 40% higher off-score the day of competition that 2 days previous.

To me, the conclusion would be that the current anti-doping regime in athletics is worthless. It's not able to catch dopers, it's not even able to highlight a very evident pattern of abnormal values on a group level. (The latter, the group level, is much easier to analyse than the former, the individual level.)

To clarify and possibly agree with you, it's not worthless in principle. The regime were able to identify this doper, but unwilling. Likewise the widespread cheating leaked to the Times, experts were perfectly able to identify the pattern, but the IAAF has been unwilling.

 

[Poursuivant]

Gatlin to beat Bolt for the lolz

 

[the sceptic]

Re:

The headline on the back page of the Evening Standard yesterday was something like - " 'Team GB is 100% clean', says British Athletics Chief".

It doesn't matter to me so much if the athletes go down. The people that need to go down are the enablers like this guy. Like Ligget and Fotheringham and those other hacks did in the 2000's. They promise and promise and promise its all clean and make so much money of these lies and then when the athletes do get caught doping, no one makes them accountable for their crimes which were bigger than what the athlete did.

Yup, brits are clean. Even though the UKAD doesn't do any meaningful testing. And hey, since no expert in the entire world can understand british blood values, not even the people who set up the bio passport, it means the passport is worthless to. (except to catch eastern euro dopers)

People like Fotheringham are so indoctrinated they believe all the nonsense they are writing.