Re: t-and-f: Why we question Chinese marks

[Ed & Dana Parrot]

In a message dated 04/11/2001 8:03:46 PM Pacific Daylight Time, [EMAIL PROTECTED] writes: Even with drugs, these marks are astonishing. If these women (if they really were women) were on drugs, I just wonder how fast they could have run clean because no matter how effective the drugs/doping/supplements are, you can't run like this without tremendous ability and training. and DGS writes: >Classic line of logic, that I find factually flawed.  It is the same argument >many Ben supporters have, although, he was a 10.1 sprinter before, and a 10.1 >runner after.  From what I have seen, drugs have a huge effect on >performance.  Thus illustrated by Ben, and recently by the Chinese.  Neither >of these entities have come close to their tainted runs     I think you're both right.  Ben essentially knocked .3 off his time.  That is approximately a 3 percent improvement, which is huge at the elite level.  This was the difference between being the world record-holder and being an Olympic semi-finalist if he had a good day.   But if you take the Chinese 10K world record and subtract 3 percent, you get a 10K time that would have medalled at every olympics and would have been fairly close to the old world record.   We;ll never really know, because as opposed to Ben, who made several well-publicized comeback attempts, we never heard from most of the Chinese again.  One or two of them left China and had some subsequent world-class perofrmances, and a few of them popped up briefly, but for the most part they disappeared.  And we also have no real idea how good they were before the breakthrough.     - Ed Parrot