blackcat said:
no one has contested an improvement. But the human evolution has hit an apogee in the previous decades, evolution has been over multitude millennia, million years,
nutrition, training, etc, these are diminishing marginal returns, that had been exhausted on a material measure, a decade back.
as D-Queued's pithy epigram goes, marginal gains aint even a rounding error on a comprehensive doping program.
when good doping gets a FSP improvement of 20%, you are telling us, that without this 20% from the hight of the EPO era, that cycling is now recruiting from a different base of talented athletes, and those like Hinault and Lemond in the previous era, were naturally genetics-wise, mediocre athletes, and the sport drew from a very narrow and small pool of potential athletes?
yeah, sounds legit
good grief
I'm not telling you anything. I am questioning whether or not using individual performance benchmarked against previous 'doping era' performance as some kind of proof of guilt is legitimate. And the good grief seems somewhat unnecessary.
From what you've written it seems that it is not the fact that there has been an improvement that you question, per se, but the rate of improvement which is really suspect. The issue becomes, then, what ‘rate of transformation’ is inherently suspect? Where is the ‘normal/abnormal’ threshold, and what rate does this threshold change due to (let’s call it) ‘natural progress’.
Human performance moves forward. It does not leap forward from doping as it didn't the 90's and then stay at the same level, perfectly because of one team that had no results figuring out all of a sudden how to eclipse all previous clean human performance in one year.
You are asserting this as fact, but is it?
Human evolution offers an interesting comparator actually. For the most part, it does not progress by slow, small steady shifts but by sudden shifts prompted by increased stresses. Does progress in sport operate in the same way – i.e. by sudden ‘great leaps forward’ by freakishly talented individuals and/or during periods of intense competition when people are pushing the (let’s say Natural) boundaries / methods? I don’t know what the evidence is but is there
actual evidence – as opposed to opinion on offer here?
If it did progress in the ‘leaps and bounds’ model, like evolution, surely outlying performances should be expected as part of the way change happens, even if they appear to be outlandish and invite suspicion? Isn't it worth contemplating the possibility at least rather than dismissing it?
Look at the women's world records in athetics (
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of...s_in_athletics). Why haven't the records for 100m-400m been broken in over 25 years? All but one of middle distance records are still from the mid 90s.
If 'the history of all sport is continuous improvement', please explain why any of these records haven't been broken? Do current athletes lack the necessary talent? Don't train as hard as the East Germans did?
Im sorry, but that is ‘cherry-picking data’ as previously stated and though your example may be right it does not in and of itself offer much insight into the history of progress in sport as a whole. I’m sure I could find a period in, say, under 23 men’s butterfly swim when records were changing every weekend. And likewise find a sport which no change had happened for decades.
The breakthrough was not with the climber beating what doctors told him. The breakthrough is finding out doctors are not the gods we once thought, but human entirely and utterly. No better or smarter than you or I.
Your example is also very useful. As a climber looking to climb oxygen poor altitudes, EPO and the like would have helped tremendously. Just as we believe it has helped Froome, climb and time trial.
If your climber had failed to ascend Mt Fuji, for example, sans oxygen, and then succeeded to ascend Everest et all unaided, we would be approaching an analogy that matches Froome's pre and post-2011 Vuelta change in performance.
If your climber then came out and said, "I had bilharzia" or any other excuse... well.. I hope you see what I am getting at.
I understand completely – what you are saying is that it is the transformation – the rate of change – which is questionable, and I don’t necessarily disagree with either the viewpoint or your particular example. And I also agree that justifying said change with apparently inconsistent statements which don’t appear to bear a great deal of scrutiny makes these transformations even more suspect.
I just offer up the above as another perspective.
What saddens me, I suppose, is that there is an assumption of guilt inherent in the position of ‘anyone climbing faster than in the past must be a doper’. And that starts out with a blanket questioning of every rider’s integrity without knowing anything about them. It is generally much harder for a rider to prove himself innocent than to be proven guilty, especially if one’s world view is ‘that there is stuff out there which we don’t know about and that cannot be tested for at the moment’ By those terms, no test will ever be good enough and therefore no rider will ever be able to demonstrate their innocence by not testing positive. (The fact that they need to 'demonstrate their innocence is pretty sad, if inevitable, considering the sports history). it seems to me that the only way not to be suspect is to be rubbish compared to your peers. That doesn’t seem very fair to me. Indeed, why bother even trying either to ride clean or to even engage in a debate on the subject with doubters?
I don’t say this with any personal axe to grind about Sky or Froome or in reference to any particular rider. I personally would not be at all surprised to find they were doped to the gunnels. But I also believe that performance alone is insufficient ‘evidence’ in and of itself, and that though it might raise suspicions transformation isn’t actually proof of anything.
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