Chivito550 wrote: » http://m.dailytelegraph.com.au/sport/olympic-400m-dope-cheat-lashawn-merritt-blames-penis-growth-pill/story-e6frexni-1225940685359
The_Kew_Tour wrote: » J I'm not referring to Gillick here, I'm talking in general.
Giruilla wrote: » Anyone who thinks this is a non story, and its all ifs and buts.. is simply wrong. Two different independent sports scientists analysed the data and said the blood values the saw for certain athletes had a one in a million chance of being natural. The reason your not hearing any athletes being named is that the source of the leak asked the ST not to name anyone who hasn't already failed a drugs test and been banned. The ST and German paper are honoring this.
walshb wrote: » What about joe soap athlete/runner who runs and trains and works hard and eats and sleeps and looks after his body? If this person did not ever intend on taking PEDs, just looked after himself and trained hard, what would his chances be of passing a PED test? Some of you fellas here, for example.
Giruilla wrote: » Anyone who thinks this is a non story, and its all ifs and buts.. is simply wrong. Two different independent sports scientists analysed the data and said the blood values the saw for certain athletes had a one in a million chance of being natural.
youngrun wrote: » These analysts worked for WADA and ICU and should have been doing their day job . ie checking out these profiles at the time. Who is to say this was not done?? The Irish Times today nails it last paragraph According to expert interpretation of the leaked data, a third of medals won during that period (146 in all, including 55 gold) could now be considered suspicious of doping, taking in the last three Olympic Games, and six World Athletics Championships from 2001 to 2011. Yet none of the evidence is enough to enforce a ban, retrospectively or otherwise. This has a political overtone to it no doubt in my mind. I hope the IAAF come out and state that these profiles were investigated at the time. Which is what you would expect them to do . Also are top athletes likely to have better blood profiles than Joe Soap the man in the street?
Pherekydes wrote: » Just checked the ST there. It says 'one in a thousand'. Why exaggerate? Regardless, 'one in a million' or even 'one in a billion' doesn't prove anything. It's called the prosecutor's fallacy.
Giruilla wrote: » One in a thousand was said specifically about the top UK athlete, who is -female -vocally denied doping, and hence been accused -called for more money to be put into anti-doping -is a national hero, squeaky clean image. -is possibly the biggest hypocrite in the history of athletics The paper pointedly points out it isn't jessica ennis.
average_runner wrote: » If it is who I think your aiming at, I will stop watching athletics for good, as it be the final straw.
The test for blood-doping involves cross-referencing the numbers of new and old red cells in an athlete’s blood. The result is called an off-score. Any score above 103 is abnormal for female athletes; the Russians were way above that. The winner, Tatyana Tomashova, who was the world champion and Olympic silver medallist, had an extraordinary off-score of 129 on the day of the race. Yuliya Chizhenko-Fomenko was even higher with a score of 140. She finished second but was disqualified for pushing and her silver medal went to Olga Yegorova — who in 2001 had tested positive for EPO but got off on a technicality. Yegorova’s off-score at Helsinki was 124. Yelena Soboleva, who came fifth, scored 136. Athletes sometimes argue that their high off-scores are natural, particularly if the tests are taken after a race. The probability of Tomashova’s and Yegorova’s results being natural were close to one in 100,000, however. And when an off-score is over 131 — as it was for the other two Russians — there is just a one-in-a-million chance of it being due to natural causes, according to one of the biggest scientific studies of elite endurance athletes undertaken, which was published two years before the Helsinki race. The odds against all four teammates in the same race having naturally high off-scores was in the trillions. There could only be one conclusion: the experts believe they were cheating.
Ramzi had had an unremarkable career but his fortunes had changed when he went to Bahrain to train alongside Brahim Boulami, a Moroccan world record holder who had been caught using EPO. Steve Cram, the British former 1500m world champion, would later write of Ramzi’s triumphs in Helsinki: “He almost embarrassed his competitors with his ease of victory. New-found ability in your mid-20s has the odour of North Shields fish quay on a warm day.” There was certainly more than a whiff of scandal about his doping test results, which can now be revealed. For men, any off-score over 119 is regarded as abnormal. On the day that Ramzi cruised to victory in the 1500m, his off-score was 158. When he won the 800m it was 148. Both results had a one-in-a-million chance of being natural. He too was competing with a dangerously viscous blood that should have put him in hospital.
In 2009, Ramzi tested positive for CERA, a previously undetectable successor to EPO, following his gold at the 2008 Beijing Olympics. The four Russian women were caught substituting their urine with someone else’s in tests designed to detect EPO. But all five were allowed to keep their world championship medals from 2005.
youngrun wrote: » Yet none of the evidence is enough to enforce a ban, retrospectively or otherwise.
walshb wrote: » You'll stop watching it because of this whiff of suspicion surrounding the athlete?
average_runner wrote: » I stop watching if she is found guilty
walshb wrote: » Okey doke. But 'guilty' of what? Having a not so natural blood profile? Because that is all that seems to be getting reported at the moment.
average_runner wrote: » Providing the tests results aren't from the time she was pregnant, then her blood levels should stay within a certain percentage as with her other tests. Anything different needs explanation. But why block the media if nothing to hide? Also remember she had her blood samples frozen for future testing so they are there to be retested
Though the readings were suspicious, they were not enough to register an anti-doping rule violation at the time because before 2009, such tests were only used to spur target testing for EPO. In response to the allegations of doping, the athlete said last week that their levels had been elevated due to dehydration after running a race in summer temperatures. “They didn’t come back to me because there isn’t anything to show,” they said.The athlete’s second abnormal test, years later, did spark an IAAF investigation, but the athlete said 11 out of 12 experts who viewed the data concluded that the reading was consistent with an athlete training at altitude. Experts agreed that dehydration can affect natural blood values, but the British athlete’s off-sc0re, the measure used to determine if an athlete has blood doped, was 40pc higher on the day of the race compared to two days earlier. The athlete, who cannot be named due to the inconclusive nature of the evidence and threat of legal action, firmly denied cheating and swore to reporters on the lives of loved ones that they had never blood doped.
pconn062 wrote: » I'm not sure what is the point of listing known drug offenses in athletics is? You seem to be missing my point, it's a good thing that we know about all these doping violations, it means that the system for catching cheats in athletics is working. Are you really naive enough to think that athletics is worse than other professional sports? So rather than bash athletics constantly, why not ask ourselves why do we not hear of big scandals like this in other sports, where unlike athletics, the rewards for doping are much greater in terms of monetary value?! The more I hear about drug offenses in athletics makes me sad for the genuinely clean athletes in the sport, but it also makes me glad that more cheats are being caught.
clear thinking wrote: » The one in a million thing does matter, the standard in science for evidence is 1/3.5m going on the 5 sigma proof for the Higgs Boson. 1/3.5m chances would convince me, as does 1/1000.
dna_leri wrote: » The problem with incomplete leaks of "data" is that the suspicion falls on the clean as well as the dirty athlete. The description given so far can fit at least two british female athletes.
Pherekydes wrote: » This is the prosecutor's fallacy exactly.
