Does anybody here genuinely believe El G was clean?

El G never competed again after 2004, so his career effectively ended in 2004. To imply it was 2006 is misleading. A new, improved test for EPO came out in 2005, so perhaps that explains why he kept low, saw which way the land lied and decided to retire.

Or maybe he achieved all he wanted to achieve, and you just can't stomach the fact that he was much faster than Sebastian.

I have two questions:

First, when "Coevett" says "he literally retired the year that proper tests for EPO were introduced." -- which year are we "literally" talking about? 2000? 2004? 2005? 2006?

Second, what were these alleged testing improvements made in 2005 that would frighten athletes like El G into an allegedly "early" retirement (after a lengthy 10+ year pro-career starting in 1994)?

Here is what I found out, related to "proper" EPO-testing:

By 2005, WADA's EPO test had suffered a number of legal challenges questioning the validity and reliability of the EPO test leading to a number of high profile false positives. The only two "improvements" I could find concerned filtering out false positives:

1) a urine stability test to prevent false positives like Bernard Lagat's in 2003, and

2) a 2-dimensional test to prevent false positives from non-EPO proteins

Anything else? From an article in cyclingnews, I found:

In 2002, WADA had commissioned an independent review, resulting in a March 2003 report, with a number of recommendations around 7 main problems with the existing EPO-testing. By September 2005 "none of the recommendations of the independent experts has been put into practice to date".

He looked clean like he showered daily, so he must have been clean, but who knows what is hiding underneath.

I have to be careful here, because I keep getting banned for criticizing you, but I have a right to answer you, and if the mods keep banning me, I'll start Tweeting my replies to WADA, AIU, and the LetsRun account instead of posting them here.

El G retired officially in 2005. He did not officially retire straight after the Games. He announced his retirement in 2005 claiming an injury. Most here regard 2005 as the date when a more effective means of testing for EPO came in.

As far as your earlier question about 'who the shills are', again, I have to tread on ice in order to avoid another ban from the mods. Whether or not you think peds work (and you're just about the only person on the planet who does think that, yet believes the other 6 billion people need to owe you an explanation), doping makes a huge number of people a lot of money. Aside from the direct financial rewards to the athletes doping, and their coaches and managers, the success of Kenyan athletes over the decades must have been worth billions of dollars to the Kenyan economy by raising their profile on the world stage. It's literally (you understand the meaning of this commonly used word?) the thing Kenya is most famous for. If you claim it's outlandish to believe a handful of $2 an hour shills couldn't be bought to influence the foremost running community online, then you are being disingenuous.

Anti-doping posts get downvoted in irregular patterns, such as 5 or more times within a minute. Most pro doping posts are repetitive and are under anonymous handles.

Your behaviour is that of a doping shill, but I don't think you are one, in your case, as I examined your early posting behaviour here, and it seems your obsession with EPO not working was fairly gradual. It's just a very strange obsession on your part to have posted over 10 million words 'arguing' that peds don't work, and thatmost athletes banned for doping offences weren't doping anyway etc etc, while convincing likely not a single person in the 15 years you've been doing it. However, as we all know, you do aid the pro doping cause here by obfuscating and ruining thread after thread (and of course, some of us are guilty of rising to your bait when we should all just ignore you). And of course, the mods do nothing to stop you, in fact protect you.

In 2005 WADA changed the way they interpreted EPO test results due to widespread concern that the current method was ineffective.

Yet we see so many runners who keep going into their late '30's and even '40's. So maybe you can't stomach the more likely fact he doped and chose to end his career rather than risk being caught.

Quite a lot going on here, but let me address a few points briefly:

- It's not that hard to avoid bans if you simply post with respect on the topic

- El G officially announced his retirement in May 22, 2006. That is literally not the same year. If most people regard it as 2005, then most people are wrong. Furthermore, El G had a long and prolific and successful career, achieving everything he possibly could. The timing of his retirement doesn't seem artificially cut short, but rather natural.

- I did not ask "who the shills are", but "who is paying them?" and "what are they shilling for?". You accused, not a handful of anonymous posters, but 43% of ~12,000 poll respondents of being paid shills and bots, for voting they believed El G was clean. After changing the question I asked, you failed to answer your question, instead addressing whether "PEDs work", claiming it is worth billions to the Kenyan economy (El G is Moroccan), and that 2$ shills are being paid to influence the community, while simultaneously claiming I have likely not convinced one single person.

- My "obsession with EPO not working was fairly gradual"? That is a new one. I think I have consistently asked why PEDs don't seem to have ever worked on elite non-Africans since the 1980s, despite anonymized surveys still finding "likely more than 44%" and "up to 57%" doping at two selected events in 2011. My initial "obsession" was built on unfounded claims surrounding skepticism of Renato's training threads and athletes, suggesting things like EPO working on East Africans as well as it works on non-Africans. This just kicks the can, changing the question -- has it ever worked for non-Africans? Historically, that answer is undebatable, so in response, I got a lot of new personal theories about why it hasn't, and no shortage of personal attacks.

You sound like someone who loves to say they are an entrepreneur on first dates

Fact Check: He didn’t officially announce his retirement until 2006, however, he stopped competing after the 2004 Olympics.

So, the tests didn't change, nor the method, but WADA relaxed the criteria for interpreting results. On what basis?

WADA said it wasn't "due to widespread concern", but in their TD document, they explained "Further research and experience has indicated that the identification criteria below are more discriminating".

Your link also suggests how arbitrary the WADA decision was:

"None of these criteria were subject to scientific review, but were unilaterally adopted by WADA, it seems."

Similarly with the "stability test" designed to prevent Lagat-style false positives:

"This modification has never been validated in the usual way of every scientific method, that is by publication in a renown scientific journal submitted to peer review."

I think this justifies my questioning which year "exactly", as I suggested all three years 2004, 2005, and 2006 in my question, and Coevett just confirmed he meant 2005.

El G was 29 when he won his Olympic Golds.

H el G was clean at Olympics. He was a mortal at Olympics.

Every record and top distance athlete from that era was on the sauce. There is absolutely no question. It would be interesting to re-test some of those old samples, if they exist and issue retroactive bans as need be. It will largely be symbolic, but sends the message that no idol is too big to topple.

You know how bad he is with numbers.

You’re both not only missing the point, you’re reinforcing the point made by Armstronglivs. The point is El G was young enough to continue competing. Most people would agree 29 is a very young age for someone to stop running, especially when they’re the best in the world. El G was the same age as Lagat, and we saw what Lagat did those next several years.

So the question is why did El G retire at such a young age? Is it because he achieved all his goals and was therefore satisfied, or was he afraid of the changes in drug testing?

He was also probably earning more in appearance fees every time he showed up for a race than any other track runner before or since. It was at least $100K per race, and that was before he became double Olympic champion. You would also have thought that if he was worried about 'securing his legacy', he would have wanted to go on and prove he could compete no matter what testing was introduced. He must have known his was a crazy era, even if HE was clean, and that we'd be having these debates for the next decades as to whether his times were simply the result of full throttle EPO or not. Imagine if Coe had retired just before the 1986 season, when blood transfusions were made illegal (which he helped lobby for), instead of going on to post his 1500m pb, as well as a 1:43 in 1989 at the age of 32. El G was exactly the same age after the 2004 Games as Coe was in the summer of 1986.