the sceptic said:
4:45/mile is pretty insane. Your average joe would need to train really hard to do that for just one mile.
That said though, the world record progression on the marathon seems weird to me.
It took 10 years to break the record set in 1988, by just 50 seconds. So the EPO era did almost nothing for the marathon? Then after that its been a gradual progression with a slight improvement every other year or so. If I didnt know better it almost looks cleans.
The current world record is only 3% ish faster than the pre EPO record.
This all seems weird to me. thoughts?
It seems more "normal" on the women side.
Ive thought about that too before.
What I would say though is that doping, like everything in life, is complex. One shouldn't expect similar patterns when making a simple comparison. In most academic disciplines things look complicated and don't make sense at first and only extensive research can make them simpler.
So I don't think we should expect speeds in all sports to have undergone similar histories to that of cycling.
Anyway, i would make a few observations to your comparison between cycling and marathon
1 in this case you are comparing the world record in marathon to times up climbs in cycling.
A world record is a 1 off time, that doesn't get beaten. Cycling doesn't possess that. We look at times up climbs but those particular mountains get climbed once every few years. Also they come at the end of races, they are not the full race. In marathon the time is the full race.
If Cycling had a record, who knows maybe it would still be possessed by Indurain.
They are so different marathon times and the times we use in cycling, comparisons cant really be made.
2 Becuase the world record exists in marathon, runners often set out to break the record. In fact these days really thats the only way the record falls, if it is planned in advanced. In cycling times mean nothing to the riders, its just the win. Hell these days if anything they want to not climb too fast to not be suspicious.
Would be hillarious though if there was some sort of one of mountain time that counted as the official climbing record and cyclists got a massive prize pot, and prestige for doing it, to see cyclists of today go full out to try and beat the times of the past.
Would the record be viewed as suspicious?
3 Anti doping has had different standards in every sport. E.g. how football and tennis are so behind on blood doping. So if you are looking at a history they get different windows to dope in. Doping was limited in cycling in early 2000's, more so than other sports.
4 Different structures. Cycling uses teams which allowed doping to reach a large number of people very quickly in the 90's. There is also far more money in cycling as a whole, and far more participants. You don't be a pro in marathon if you are the world number 200 or 400. In cycling these days theres 500 pros in the wt alone, and hundreds of others in smaller teams. Teams therefore offered a good opportunity for those wanting to sell doping to get a lot of clients and to sort out the finances and everything
.
Marathon on the other hand its 1 guy at a time. Not as profitable to go straight there, so it may not have experience and epo boom in the 90's like cycling did and it may be late to all drugs. Also some guys who are good responders might never end up with a doping programme. People like Riis or some of the recent TDF winners I would say, were ranked so lowly, in marathon they would have been out of the sport and never had a chance to get in contact with doctors. In cycling some of the lower ranked ones are the best responders, they are still in the sport because there is such a massive pool, and when they get in touch with the doping doctors, they start to go very fast.
5 There will also be a difference in how effective drugs are for each sport. Epo may not be as big a deal in marathon as in cycling because epo in cycling helps also with recovery. Of course EPO is such a super drug, -footballers were heavily on it, and even sprinters have said its magic, that it would help - a lot, in marathon, but still not as much as cycling because its one off.
I remember a few years ago on here there was a discussion on whether in cycling epo tended to help bigger guys, like Indurain more. It benefited big tters more than it did climbers, and allowed tters to hang with climbers on mountains more than it allowed the Rujanos of this world to tt great. That was the theory anyway, I don't know if its true, but if it is, there aren't big guys in marathon to benefit from that for example, since unlike cycling its not mixed discipline.
The implications of epo not being so efficient therefore is that unlike in cycling 1990 doesn't become the clear beginning of next generation doping. In sprinting of course many records fell in the 80's eg flo jo - suggesting pre epo drugs had as big an impact there as epo did in cycling.
If epo wasn't that big a deal in marathon they would have been less reliant on it, more on other drugs.
So these are some of the differences and why I would hesitate to look for patterns in doping across sports. The early 90's saw the big jump in cycling, becuase of EPO and thats when EPO became big, but other drugs became big earlier or later (eg Aicar only in the late 2000's, while steroids in the 70's) There are particular things about cycling that made the early 1990's so different from before. This was not true in all sport.
In other sports, for reasons of structure, physical requirements, finances etc, the super doping era may have began slightly earlier, slightly later , or in many cases there is no solid barrier like in cycling, but instead the super doping era came in more gradually.
Facebook
Twitter
Instagram