Yes, those athletes had inferior training, equipment, nutrition. What was accessible by then were PEDS, whose use was accelerating at that time given the success of the state-sponsored doping programs in the Eastern bloc countries.
It's taken decades for testing programs to at least curb PED use. I'm under no illusion today's athletes are lily-white clean, but it is much harder to dope if there's the threat of unannounced out-of-competition testing along with the ability to retroactively test for drugs from prior competitions.
Jmo, I view these records in the same regard as I view Barry Bonds' 73 HRs in a season - it's the record and more power to whoever eventually breaks it. But some great feat to revere and celebrate? That's a tough sell right there.
It's a tricky subject and there's so much gray area. Reasons for suspicion abound, both for the decades-old world records and the current top athletes.
The WRs of Flo-Jo in the 100 and 200 (1988), Koch in the 400 (1985) and Kratochvilova in the 800 (1983) seem highly unlikely to be "clean" given the weight of historical circumstance, but how can we be assured that today's dopers aren't exploiting the cracks and loopholes that WADA isn't yet wise to? Detection science is always playing catch-up to performance science.
Among the evidence frequently cited against Flo-Jo was her astonishing improvement in just the last few months leading up to the 1988 US trials and Olympics. Well, I'd say that Elaine Thompson's improvement just this summer — and especially between her 3rd place finish in the 100m at the Jamaican trials to threatening the world record in Tokyo and Eugene — is no less astonishing. I guess we're to believe she found just the right training-and-nutrition mojo just in the nick of time?
It's well known now that out-of-competition testing is critical to even a minimal semblance of effective anti-doping control (since only the most obtuse or careless get caught in competition). But when we look under the hood of today's anti-doping structure, we see that compliance with OOC testing rules is, for all practical purposes, in the hands of the national anti-doping organizations (NADOs), which are of widely varying robustness and integrity. It's a minor miracle that, contrasted to the wild success of Jamaican sprinting, the laughable inadequacy of the Jamaican anti-doping agency hasn't yet been a bigger story or led to any significant repercussions.
(ATR) The World Anti-Doping Agency says Jamaica must overhaul its drug testing system or risk expulsion from the Olympics.
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