Can clean athletes win?

I came across this article written by Matt Fitzgerald and, with his kind permission, thought I'd share it with you. It's pretty short but raises one or two very good points; enjoy.

Can Clean Athletes Win?I believe that the majority of championship races in the endurance sports are won by clean athletes, and that the majority of world records in endurance sports are held by clean athletes. So does Jim Stray-Gunderson, one of the world's leading experts on the effects of performance-enhancing drugs on endurance performance. Here are some quotes from an interview of Stray-Gunderson that I conducted a few years ago:"I’ve been the principal investigator in a number of studies where we’ve given EPO to athletes and seen what the effects were. EPO can confer a 2 to 6 percent improvement in performance. Good altitude training is about 2 percent on the average."

"Regardless of doping, at an international level today, you have to have all your ducks in a row. It takes years of preparation and you have to have all of the ancillary aspects lined up. That means massage, quick access to sports medicine ducks, proper nutrition, various ways of enhancing recovery such as underwater running, and so forth."

"The East Germans think of doping as lazy man’s drugs. What it does is it allows you a much larger training envelope in your training program with your athlete. You can be much more aggressive and not worry about overtraining, not worry so much about errors in having a consistent program over time, not worry so much about getting recovery therapy right, because these sorts of errors can be mitigated by the doping. They believe that top performances are possible without doping. They are a lot harder to get. There are more ways of falling off the horse."

"I have a study where we did blood testing in the cross-country skiing world championships in Finland in 2001. More than 50 percent of the medallists had such abnormal blood profiles that they almost could only be due to doping. That was at a time when cross-country skiing was not effectively policed. And then in the 2002 Games you had a number of those people getting caught. The other thing to say is that 50 percent of those medallists in Finland had normal profiles. You could say, 'Well, half the people were cheating. Look how bad cheating is.' Or you could say, 'Half the people won medals clean.' And that’s good news. So it can be done."

"That’s one of the things that make it so hard to catch. You can’t just look at performance and say that because an athlete all of a sudden blossoms he must be cheating. I think that it is clearly possible for a good athlete to win a gold medal or set a world record cleanly."

After reading some of Matt's other work, it would seem that with EPO a 3 or 4% increase is seen, is this enough to explain some of the the slightly "weird" results out there (like Germany’s Sandra Wallenhorst who won Ironman Austria in 8:47:25, with a 70 minute PB), is everyone in the peleton on gear (if you read Bad Blood or From Lance to Landis then the answer is yes), can clean athletes win? Of course they can, but it raises some good points.