wrinklyvet said:
Forgive me, but I don't follow this so can you put it another way?
By the way, thanks for your other post, not all of which I fully understood either.
I do have more than a passing acquaintance with concepts of assessing the value of evidence and of the burden of proof but I can't be totally sure what you mean in your argument.
I am sure you won't mind elaborating.
In the context of this thread, it’s pretty simple. It’s not necessary to get into the standard of proof at all, which I think confuses the issue.
The odds of a doper testing positive—there was a very interesting link here a few weeks ago estimating the percentages for various substances, taken according to various schedules, which maybe I can dig up later—are very low. Sometimes that’s because the standard for a positive test is very rigorous—as with EPO, the biopassport, and testosterone—and usually also because testing is not frequent enough to catch dopers. Every drug has its glow time, the period after which taking it at a PE dose it’s present in the system in high enough concentration to be detected. These time ranges are known, and can be used, in conjunction with data on how often athletes are tested, to determine the probability of a positive test.
That means that for every recognized doper there are numerous athletes who are likely doping, but haven’t tested positive. If, e.g., three athletes in some sport test positive for some substance in a year, and statistically it’s shown that only 10% of the users of this substance are likely to be detected with current testing protocols, this suggests that there might be 20-30 undetected dopers. As I pointed out before, the Clinic tries to identify them, using evidence that is not recognized as relevant to a sanction—e.g., suspicious performances, suspicious associations, what may be said about them by others--but is nevertheless often substantial, even rising to the level of certainty that we often use in our everyday lives.
Many dopers were outed in this forum in this way before they were officially recognized as such. Not just LA, e.g., but Contador, Vino, Frank Schleck, DiLuca (the second or third time around), et al.