Could an athlete then be disciplined simply for performing too well?
“That would be unfair,” says Tucker. “The final verdict is only ever going to be reached by testing. It has to be.” In recent years, cycling authorities have successfully prosecuted athletes for having anomalous blood profiles, even when banned substances such as EPO could not be found. But performance is too far removed from taking a banned substance and influenced by too many outside factors to convict someone of doping, Tucker says. “When we look at this young swimmer from China who breaks a world record, that’s not proof of anything. It asks a question or two.”
This article is reproduced with permission from the magazine Nature. The article was first published on August 1, 2012.
*Clarification (8/6/12): The year was added after the original posting to reflect the change made to the story on the Nature site.
Editor's note (8/6/12): This story drew an extraordinary amount of outraged responses, the volume of which overwhelmed Nature's commenting system and resulted in the accidental deletion of some comments. Nature's top editors have posted an explanation here; a portion of that response is reproduced below:
The news story was triggered by a debate that was already active, concerning the scale of Ye Shiwen’s victory. Such debates have arisen over many outstanding feats in the past, by athletes from many countries, and it is wrong to suggest, as many of the critics do, that we singled her out because of her nationality.
The story’s intention as an explainer was to examine how science can help resolve debates over extraordinary performances, not to examine those performance statistics in detail. Several analyses done by others convinced us that it was fair to characterize Ye’s performance as "anomalous"—in the sense that it was statistically unusual. But we acknowledge that the combination of errors discussed above and the absence of a more detailed discussion of the statistics (which with hindsight we regret) gave the impression that we were supporting accusations against her, even though this was emphatically not our intention. For that, we apologize to our readers and to Ye Shiwen.
Tim Appenzeller Chief Magazine Editor, Nature
Philip Campbell Editor in Chief, Nature
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68 Comments
Add CommentSo in other words, all athletes who perform better than the rest are automatically guilty of cheating until they prove themselves innocent.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt some point I would just call it quits and not bother competing. What would be the point if any win I have is always considered cheating.
Maybe just maybe there is a case for someone who has no past in the sport and starts breaking records. But to accuse a 16 year old of cheating or even suspect her of it after she has effectively spent her entire life from early childhood training to be a fast swimming. In fact, I would be surprised if a girl with this kind of training didn't break records.
How about going back to innocent until proven guilty.
I agree. Everyone is on a witchhunt.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is not as if she only started swimming a year ago. One can understand then if they started breaking so many records, but all these people have invested so much time and effort into training and I think this particular athlete really was put to the grind for a very long time.
We cannot live in a society where people are immediately guilty and they must prove that they are not. As far as I know she went through the tests required.. and passed. So, for those who still question her, they need to get over it.
No, there's an important subtle difference - athletes who perform radically and suddenly better than THEMSELVES are under greater suspicion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLike the article pointed out, simply penalizing athletes when their performances are good is unfair. But using sudden or improbable rises in performance as grounds to conduct drug testing is entirely fiar, and I think a very good wise to keep tabs on those who are very unethically trying to get an unnatural edge on their honest and hard-working competitors.
Excessive use of steroids may be dangerous to health. Use only for building muscle mass and enhancing athletic performance but not in competitive sports where they are banned.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell put!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAlso, I understand that China invites particular scrutiny due to some very recent drug test failures among their athletes.
Well, well... Not much water has flowed under the bridge since the start of the Euro2012 soccer championships, and again some Western journalists (or unnamed "experts") are planting unfounded allegations, this time against Far East.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNo drug can teach you to swim freestyle, teach you to swim efficiently. Should we suspect the men's 400m medley winner Mr Lochte of using some space-age drug just because of his huge, almost *four-second* gain over the rest of the field? (His feat was even more impressive because of his relatively slow finish, which he repeated later in the relay, losing to France.) No, we shouldn't, why do all of us understand that?
When you look at both 400m medley final results at www.london2012.com/swimming, there are more than 128 lap-times to compare. But his finishing *50m* was in fact *faster* than Ms Ye's, as was 4 other men's finalists'. Some of her female rivals were also faster than her at some laps.
Another key to the riddle is that the medley and all mid-distance races require some nontrivial optimization of the swimmer's effort. Yet another secret lies in the proper rest and regeneration before a major competition.
How about noticing there are well over 90 million physically fit young women in China? Or returning to scientific analyses like SA's http://blogs.scientificamerican.com/observations/2012/07/23/push-comes-to-pull-whats-the-best-freestyle-swimming-stroke-video/?
Above I meant, of course, the finishing *100 metres*, where the paradox just vanishes...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is a hot topic generating many news articles, but here's a few that may justify some skepticism about the Chinese swim team in general, if not Ye Shiwen in particular:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://news.discovery.com/adventure/ye-shiwen-doping-scandal-olympic-swimming-120801.html
"The other bit of circumstantial evidence comes from the history of doping in the Chinese swimming program. Most occurred during the 1990s. But more recently, 16-year-old swimmer Li Zhesi, who broke a world record in the 400-meter individual medley at the 2009 World Games, tested positive for a banned hormone in March, according to Xinhua [news agency]."
"The IOC is also keeping blood samples of Olympic athletes on ice for eight years to re-check them as screens for new drugs are developed. In 2009, these retroactive tests caught five Olympic medalists with the new blood-boosting drug CERA."
""Unfortunately, the negative test doesn’t mean a lot these days," Dugan said. "People have beat the system plenty of times before.""
According to
http://www.theepochtimes.com/n2/health/if-youre-doping-we-ll-catch-you-says-ioc-at-london-2012-272726.html
"The International Olympic Committee (IOC) confirmed that in the last few months 100 athletes had been banned from the Games after testing positive to performance-enhancing drugs."
"During the 1990s 40 swimmers from China tested positive for banned substances, and seven before the Beijing Games in 2008."
As stated in http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/07/doping-accusations-dog-chinese-swim-champion/
"Yet there is sometimes another reason Chinese athletes test positive for performance-enhancing drugs: contaminated food. AFP reported earlier that Chinese Olympians have been on a strict meat free diet in order to avoid the additive clenbuterol, a substance banned under anti-doping rules but often found in Chinese meat..."
In 2008, two Chinese athletes were banned for life after testing positive for clenbuterol.
I am deeply disturbed, disappointed, and quite frankly, outraged by Mr. Ewen Callaway’s article on nature.com (http://www.nature.com/news/why-great-olympic-feats-raise-suspicions-1.11109#/comments) claiming “performance profiling could help to catch cheaters in sports”, which used Ms. Ye Shiwen’s Olympic performance as an example with her image prominent shown aside.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI am outraged that Mr. Callaway conveys a racial discriminative message under the name of science, “The resulting debate has been tinged with racial and political undertones, but little science,” he wrote, yet auite ironically, as many commentators have already pointed out, it is Mr. Callaway who lacks the capability and training of rigorous scientific reasoning and analysis, or he simply chose to manipulate and fabricate data to serve his malicious purpose. “Was Ye’s performance anomalous?” Mr. Callaway asked, and “Yes,” he asserted. In supporting his claim, he fabricated “7 seconds” improvement of Ye’s performance, while in reality it is 5 second. He cited “a major meet in July” without giving its year, leaving a false impression that Ye improved in just one month, while in reality it is one year. He ignored the fact that such improvement is nothing anomalous among young elite swimmers, Thorpe, Phelps, and Beisel have all done that at comparable age, to name a few, and the only thing “anomalous” here is that Ye is a Chinese. He also chose to single out the last 50 meters to compare Ye’s time with Lochte’s, ignoring the fact that Lochte’s overall time was almost 24 seconds faster than Ye’s, his last 50 meter is anything but elite, and quite a few female swimmers were faster. Any one of these fabrications and manipulations may suggest Mr. Callaway’s ignorance, and putting everything together, you can draw your own conclusion.
I am equally disturbed and disappointed that Nature and its editors can allow such a racial discriminative and deep biased article published under the name of science. As a premier science journal, you have a responsibility to scientific community and general public of conveying science objectively without bias. By publishing this article, you have successfully degraded yourself to the level of CNN, BBC and alike, misled numerous readers using false science, and lost your credibility as a serious scientific forum.
I respectfully urge you to do the honorable thing, fire Mr. Ewen Callaway and the responsible editor, formally apologize to Ms. Ye Shiwen and Chinese people, and restore the integrity and credibility of Nature.
Just go to check yourself how many American athletes were caught doping? Will you accuse even more "unbelievable" and "incredible" Phelps because of that? Your racial profiling humiliates nobody but yourself.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis article should be published in "Non-scientific American"...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhen the author used Ye as an example for performance profiling, he didn't even bother to verify his data. Let me clarify the basic data on Ye's record in 400IM :
2010 Oct 4'33.79" in Asian Games (age 14)
2011 Jul 4'35.15" in World Championships (age 15)
2012 Jul 4'28.43" in London Olympics (age 16).
The author's statement that "Her time in the 400 IM was more than 7 seconds faster than her time in the same event at a major meet in July" missed the year "2011". That is, one year ago. So her record this year is less than 7 seconds faster than one years ago and more than 5 seconds faster than 2 years ago. That's an improvement of 5 seconds over 270 seconds and for a growing-up young athlete. Anomalous? Go do more research!
As comparison, Michael Phelps improved his time in 200m butterfly stroke by more than 7 seconds for less a year when he was 15. That is far more "anomalous“ than Ye per the author's performance profiling. Another female American swimmer Ms. Beisel improved her personal record in 400IM by 8 seconds in a year when she was 16. Her profile is more "anomalous“ than Ye's per the author's standard.
About the limits of human physiology, again the author forget to mention (1) overall Lochte is 23 seconds faster than Ye in the 400IM event; (2) Lochte performed poorly in his last 50m and his time only ranks 5th out of 8 final competitors in the event. He admitted later he was a little exhaust for the last 50m while Ye's strategy was to save her energy for the last 50m; (3) Ye's last 50m free style record in the 400IM is more than 5 seconds slower than the record of the women 50m free style record which is 23'73". It is also slower than the last 50m record in the 100m free style world record and 200m free style world record, and only a little faster than the last 50m record in the 800m free style record . Ye's performance in the last 50m is great and is still in the normal range among world-record breakers.
Get it real. No solid data in performance profiling can support the suspicion on Ye. The only profiling which can single Ye out for doping suspicion is racial/political profiling. Please do not pretend you are doing a "scientific" performance profiling when you even did not bother to collect and verify your data.
About Ms Beisel's record, I made a mistake. She actually improved 12 seconds in a year and totally 18 seconds in 2 years when she was at the same age of Ye.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisElizabeth Beisel, (born 1992)
2006: 4:50.31
2007: 4:44.87
2008: 4:32.87
You accusation that I am somehow racially profiling anyone is unfair and unwarranted. I have accused no Olympic athletes of anything, regardless of anyone's race. Your indiscriminate accusations of racism levied against me and others certainly raises questions about your own personal integrity!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBesides, this article's discussion of performance profiling techniques has absolutely nothing to do with race or racial profiling, as it should obviously be indiscriminately applied to all Olympic performances.
But I made no mention whatsoever of any Olympic performances. I only mentioned a few reports of positive tests for banned performance enhancing substances.
It seems that the Chinese Olympic teams, especially have tested positive for banned substances dozens of times in the past few decades, including a young world record holder on the swim team who tested positive for a banned hormone earlier this year. These many instances of violations by especially Chinese swimmers has nothing to do with their race and everything to do with their team's evident willingness to violate the rules.
If you are not a racist, as you claimed to be, then simply answer the following questions to clear your name:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1. How many American athletes were caught doping? Why there was no single mentioning of these facts in your post, why did you single out Chinese athletes?
2. Do you agree the data cited in this Nature article is highly misleading, manipulated, and sometimes completely false? Can we agree on some basic facts here that Ye's performance is anything but anomaly among young elite athletes, and many have similar improvement at comparable age, and quite few female swimmers were faster than that male swimmer in the last 50 meters.
You can prove your integrity by check this fact and have a honest answer, to yourself, as I do not really need it.
I don't agree with the author for his second point: Was Ye’s performance anomalous?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst, The author states that Ye’s time in the 400 IM was more than 7 seconds faster than her time in the same event at a major meet in July. Her previous personal best was 4:33.79 at Asian Games 2010. You can not compare one’s worst result with your best result and claim you are a winner in a scientific paper, right? There are so many swimmers had an ‘anomalous’ improvement in one year when they were young: Ian Thorpe, who has won five Olympic golds, says from the age of 15 to 16, his personal best in the 400m freestyle improved by five seconds, allowing him to take the world record. Adrian Moorhouse, the British swimmer who took gold in the 100m breaststroke at the 1988 Olympics in Seoul, makes the same point.When he was 17, he bettered his personal best by four seconds, explaining it was a "natural growth spurt". American Michael Phelps, improves more than 4 second in 400 IM between the year 2006 and 2007.
Second, Ye is not the only female 400 IM swimmer faster than Mr. Ryan Lochte for the last 50M: Yuya Horihata (27.87), Thomas Fraser-Holmes (28.35), Michael Phelps (28.44), Kosuke Hagino (28.52), they all beat Lochte (29.10). This is not a girl swims faster than man thing, again, you can not just use the one number you picked to back your point!
I see nothing inherently wrong with performance profiling. This seems like a application of six sigma techniques. No amount of doping can substitute for hours of training and technique. i.e. no matter how much dope you give me, I'll never swim an Olympic time since I don't train!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisEach swim has some natural variance in it. Obviously, a professional in their prime should have small variance and a trend toward improving their mean over time. A +2 to +3 sigma might be just that....random variance. Or it could indicate something else.
The problem with statistics is on average it is hard to be anything other than average.
But the fact is that Ye is NOT "radically and suddenly better than" herself. As comment 11 points out that since 2010, Ye has already had very good performance:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this2010 Oct 4'33.79" in Asian Games (age 14)
2011 Jul 4'35.15" in World Championships (age 15)
2012 Jul 4'28.43" in London Olympics (age 16).
Besides, as a 16-year-old girl, Ye's body is developing fast. She has grown from 160cm in 2010 to 172cm in 2012. Australian Ian Thorpe, improved his personal best in the 400m freestyle by five seconds from the age of 15 to 16. (http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health-19061026)
And let's not forget the fact that in the final 50m, Phelps (28'44), Horihata (27'87), and Fraser-Holmes (28'35) were all faster than Ye (28'93). (http://www.london2012.com/swimming/event=swimming-men-400m-individual-medley/) That means, the fact that Ye swam faster than Lochte should NOT "really raised eyebrows", because it was Lochte who has slowed down in the final 50m, facing a comfortable lead.
Finally, after censoring by Nature online editors, I hope that the editors of Scientific American would not delete my comment which is purely based on facts and unbiased data.
I will show you "ranking list" of drug test failure.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAmerican:127 Brazil:17
German:36 Denmark:16
British：30 Indian:14
Russia：25 China:8
Italian:28 Norway:7
Astralian:22 Janpan:4
Obviously, American have great advantage over other countries. So, let's check out why Michael Phelps could won 8 golds in 2008 beijing olympic games.
Why chinese athletes only? In fact, America is champion in "ranking list" of doping. So, is it necessary for us to check out how Michael Phelps won 8 golds in 2008 beijing olympic games?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWell put!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI'm glad you stand at our side(I'm chinese).
Here is a comment which make us angry.
Some guys said even Ye is clean, she is "gold machine",who gives up everything and only wins match.
In fact, she has many hobbies like other girls. Besides, she practises hard mainly for her dream. Is someone running after his/dream wrong?
Now, a more rediculous suspect: recent technologies fail in testing Ye's drug.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI will say:" recent technologies fail in testing whether you guys are normal".
“I don’t ever recall anybody this quickly rising from an average good gymnast to a fantastic one,” marvelled U.S. women’s national team coordinator Martha Karolyi.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is Karolyi's comment on 16 year old US gold medalist Gabby Douglas. So what are we to conclude?
If you repeat the lie thousands of times, then you hope it becomes truth. Stop spreading unfounded accusations, Scientific American should not be set itself up with such a low standards.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI swam 100 meters in 10mins when I was five. One year later, I finished 100 meters in 5mins. I took loads of drugs to half the time!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisRead this garbage on SA again. Why didn't this racist simply send this garbage to NYT, Sun and other mass media? Why is this guy keeping humiliating our science community? Here I just copy a comment posted, yet deleted later, in Nature after this article, for you reader to judge, if you don't mind using your own brain:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisLai Jiang said:
It is a shame to see Nature, which nearly all scientists, including myself, regard as the one of the most prestigious and influential physical science magazines to publish a thinly-veiled biased article like this. Granted, this is not a peer-reviewed scientific article and did not go through the scrutiny of picking referees. But to serve as a channel for the general populous to be in touch with and appreciate sciences, the authors and editors should at least present the readers with facts within proper context, which they failed to do blatantly.
First, to compare a player's performance increase, the author used Ye's 400m IM time and her performance at the World championship 2011, which are 4:28.43 and 4:35.15 respectively, and reached the conclusion that she has got an "anomalous" increase by ~7 sec (6.72 sec). In fact she's previous personal best was 4:33.79 at Asian Games 2010 1. This leads to a 5.38 sec increase. In a sport event that 0.1 sec can be the difference between the gold and silver medal, I see no reason that 5.38 sec can be treated as 7 sec.
Second, as previously pointed out, Ye is only 16 years old and her body is still developing. Bettering oneself by 5 sec over two years may seem impossible for an adult swimmer, but certainly happens among youngsters. Ian Thorpe's interview revealed that his 400m freestyle time increased 5 sec between the age of 15 and 16 2. For regular people including the author it may be hard to imagine what an elite swimmer can achieve as he or she matures, combined with scientific and persistent training. But jumping to a conclusion that it is "anomalous" based on "Oh that's so tough I can not imagine it is real" is hardly sound.
Third, to compare Ryan Lochte's last 50m to Ye's is a textbook example of what we call to cherry pick your data. Yes, Lochte is slower than Ye in the last 50m, but (as pointed out by Zhenxi) Lochte has a huge lead in the first 300m so that he chose to not push himself too hard to conserve energy for latter events (whether this conforms to the Olympic spirit and the "use one's best efforts to win a match" requirement that the BWF has recently invoked
to disqualify four badminton pairs is another topic worth discussing,
On the contrary, Ye is trailing behind after the first 300m and relies on freestyle, which she has an edge, to win the game. Failing to mention this strategic difference, as well as the fact that Lochte is 23.25 sec faster (4:05.18) over all than Ye creates the illusion that a woman swam faster than the best man in the same sport, which sounds impossible. Put aside the gender argument, I believe this is still a leading question that implies the reader that something fishy is going on.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFourth, another example of cherry picking. In the same event there are four male swimmers that swam faster than both Lochter (29.10 sec) 3 and Ye (28.93 sec) 4: Hagino (28.52 sec), Phelps (28.44 sec), Horihata (27.87 sec) and Fraser-Holmes (28.35 sec). As it turns out if we are just talking about the last 50m in a 400m IM, Lochter would not have been the example to use if I were the author. What kind of scientific rigorousness that author is trying
to demonstrate here? Is it logical that if Lochter is the champion, we should assume he leads in every split? That would be a terrible way to teach the public how science works.
Fifth, which is the one I oppose the most. The author quotes Tucks and implies that a drug test can not rule out the possibility of doping. Is this kind of agnosticism what Nature really wants to educate its readers? By that standard I estimate that at least half of the peer-reviewed scientific papers in Nature should be retracted. How can one convince the editors and reviewers that their proposed theory works for every possible case? One cannot. One chooses to apply the theory to typical examples and demonstrate that in (hopefully) all scenarios considered the theory works to a degree, and that should warrant a publication, until a counterexample is found. I could imagine that the author has a skeptical mind which is critical to scientific thinking, but that would be put into better use if he can write a
real peer-reviewed paper that discusses the odds of Ye doping on a highly advanced non-detectable drug that the Chinese has come up within the last 4 years (they obviously did not have it in Beijing, otherwise why not to use it and woo the audience at home?), based on data and rational derivation. This paper, however, can be interpreted as saying that all athletes are doping, and the authorities are just not good enough to catch them. That may
That may
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisbe true, logically, but definitely will not make the case if there is ever a hearing by FINA to determine if Ye has doped. To ask the question that if it is possible to false negative in a drug test looks like a rigged question to me. Of course it is, other than the drug that the test is not designed to detect, anyone who has taken Quantum 101 will tell you that everything is
probabilistic in nature, and there is a probability for the drug in an athlete's system to tunnel out right at the moment of the test. A slight change as it may be, should we disregard all test results because of it? Let's be practical and reasonable. And accept WADA is competent at its job. Her urine sample is stored for 8 years following the contest for future testing as technology advances. Innocent until proven guilty, shouldn't it be?
Sixth, and the last point I would like to make, is that the out-of-competition drug test is already in effect, which the author failed to mention. Per WADA president's press release 5, drug testing for olympians began at least 6 months prior to the opening of the London Olympic. Furthermore, there are 107 athletes who are banned from this Olympic for doping. That maybe the reason that everyone will pass at the Olympic games. Hardly anyone fails in competition testing? Because those who did dope are already sanctioned? The author is free to suggest that a player could have doped beforehand and fool the test at the game, but this possibility certainly is ruled out for Ye.
Over all, even though the author did not falsify any data, he did (intentionally or not) cherry pick data that is far too suggestive to be fairand unbiased, in my view. If you want to cover a story of a suspected doping from a scientific point of view, be impartial and provide all the
facts for the reader to judge. You are entitled to your interpretation of the facts, and the expression thereof in your piece, explicitly or otherwise, but only showing evidences which favor your argument is hardly good science or journalism. Such an article in a journal like Nature is not an appropriate example of how scientific research or report should be done.
1 http://www.fina.org/H2O/index.php?option=com_wrapper&view=wrapper&Itemid=1241
2 http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8ETPUKlOwV4
3 http://www.london2012.com/swimming/event/men-400m-individual-medley/phase=swm054100/index.html
4 http://www.london2012.com/swimming/event/women-400m-individual-medley/phase=sww054100/index.html
and the final reference:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this5 http://playtrue.wada-ama.org/news/wada-presidents-addresses-london-2012-press-conference/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=wada-presidents-addresses-london-2012-press-conference
To the author and the editor:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI seriously suggest you guys to find other career path, science is not the right one for you. Rupert Murdoch may give you higher salaries.
I agree that sudden or improbable improvement should raise suspicions. My problem with the Nature article is that the author did not define what is sudden, improbable improvement, and suggested that Ye's improvement was such a case without giving us any supporting evidence. As people have pointed out, Ye's improvement is not unique in either the time frame (1-2 years) or the magnitude (5-7 seconds). Other players have achieved similar or more substantial improvement. I would think that if you want to make a point, you should pick as example a player that either achieved the same magnitude of improvement within the shortest time frame (sudden), or the biggest improvement in the same time frame(improbable). And that is why I think the original author either lacks scientific training, or is a little biased.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI agree that past drug usage by players from the same country adds some justification to the suspicion, but then to be scientifically minded, shouldn't you start with the country that has the most prior drug use cases.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt is sad to see the western propaganda apparatus resorts to false science to spew venom on the 16-year old swimmer.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSA's sole basis for its attacks against Ye was that Ye was faster than Lochte in his final 50 meters during one particular game.
However, to compare Ye to others, the proper question is not what Lochte did in one particular game, but what top male or female swimmers have been capable of achieving.
Let's compare Ye's last 50 meters to other female swimmers.
A quick round of Google reveals the following: according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federica_Pellegrini, that female athlete did 200 meters in 1:52.98 in 2009. Her average for each 50m leg is thus 28.245 seconds. In comparison, Ye Shiwen did 50 meters in 28.93 seconds.
You can and you should dig deeper and look at the comparative data for the final 50 meters only, and make a close comparison. But just by looking at Pellegrini's average, it is obvious that there is nothing suspicious about Ye's 28.93, because it's substantially slower.
If you want to compare Ye Shiwen's to men, you also need to use the top numbers of men. You can't pick Lochte's number in that particular game, because he was almost the slowest in the last 50 meters of that competition. Another round of googling reveals that male swimmers can swim much faster than Ye Shiwen in the last 50 meters...
You can be jealous and spew venom on Chinese athletes all day long as they still have control of the English language media.
But such petty mentality is not the mind of a great people.
When you makes accusation without a thread of evidence, that's defamation, and is unlawful. You should respect the law, even if you can't respect a young girl's hard work.
Olympics is to promote the mutual respect and understanding of nations. You are trying to smear the Chinese people by sheer slander. This is no good.
In the years to come, there might be a war between the West and China. And it won't help if both people see the other as evil.
Compete and win, don't slander. AND, don't ruin SA's good name.
I agree performance profiling is not a problem, as long as we apply the right profile, i.e. using the profile from world champions on a new world champion, or profile from the record breakers on a new record breaker. And when you want to apply this method, you want test on the furthest outlier first. The original Nature article has done none of these. Instead of presenting a profile for the world champions/record breakers, such as average improvement between the age of 14-16 for female and the sigma, he just quoted someone (and apparently selectively). Instead of using as an example someone who has improved the most during a fixed time frame, or improved the same in the shortest time frame, he picked an example that is neither. If you cannot apply your theory to the furthest outlier, then what is the validity of your method on someone less of an outlier?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNATURE shows how low the British Empire has fallen. I hope Americans won't follow suit and become so petty minded and scientifically brain dead.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisJust answer the question honestly to yourself, why did you single out Chinese athletes? Why?
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this“Finally, after censoring by Nature online editors, I hope that the editors of Scientific American would not delete my comment which is purely based on facts and unbiased data.”
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisWhy are you afraid of editors? Even if they can delete your words, they CANNOT change your mind.
Here are an extra questions for you.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou said"Here in the United States such slander would be subject to legal recourse - perhaps that's an unfamiliar concept in China, for example."
Why do you guess that? Why "perhaps" and "for example" can be used together?
Nothing more than two answers
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this1.Chinese are ignorant in slander and they always slander others.
2.Chinese should not be serious about slander because USA law will deal with it.
Or give me another reason to prove you are not racism?
If you want to see the truth how Nature and its subsidy Scientific American cherry-picked/manipulated the data for this tabloid writing, and silently changed its subtitle, just compare this article with the one at Nature.com.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.nature.com/news/why-great-olympic-feats-raise-suspicions-1.11109
Pure shamelessness in this world never stops amazing me!
I don't think mentioning East Germany bears any relevance to the discussion. The current crop of Chinese swimmers are trained with Australian coaches.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisHow could these so called experts or scientists know the records Ye kept in her training? Are they detectors or spies? Why there was no one doubt Michael Phelps when he made that legend in 2008? Is that impossible for an athlete, who didn't dope, break the limit of herself? Isn't that breaking the limit of human body one of the essential spirit of Olympics? Shame on those people who bring politics and racial opinions to Olympics.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisI admit that everyone has the right to doubt, but interrogate an athlete who deserve respects is really rude. Why don't you ask her if she is a virgin? That would be more polite.
Oooooooh!!! I like this kind of RACISM articles!!!! WELL DONE "NATURE"!!!
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis is "scientific" American, and yet the article and many commentators make so many scientific mistakes.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisFirst of all: swimming is about fluid mechanics - the speed you swim depends on the forward propulsion you can generate and the drag. These in turn depend on both technique and physical characteristics of the athletes. All this can be analysed.
The athletes in the olympic swimming are (in the nicest sense possible) genetic anomalies. Some traits are very evident (many are very tall, with disproportionately large hands and feet), but other traits are less obvious, like the build that gives a little more buoyancy or slightly less resistance in the water - average-sized swimmers like Janet Evans, whose performance against much taller opponents at first seemed impossible (although thankfully no drug-allegations were made!) were usually found to have physiques and swimming styles that enabled them, for example, to be higher up in the water and experience less drag force - and so to propel themselves faster through the water despite exerting less force than taller swimmers.
Swim training enables athletes to dramatically increase the propulsive force they can generate (by technique, by increase strength), to improve their endurance (how long they can deliver maximum propulsion without tiring), and to reduce their drag resistance by stroke optimisation and elimination of any unnecessary motions. But they are stuck with the genes they were born with.
To imagine that someone at 15 would already have optimised all these parameters is absurd, while even her body is still developing. So of course she can improve. Or maybe she could get worse, depending on how her body develops.
If you want to do performance profiling and make it work, you need to be a lot more scientific - analyse a swimmer's stroke and detect if there are dramatic increases in some aspect (e.g. power delivered by each armstroke, aerobic endurance) which are consistent with known drugs, or whether the improvement seems to result from better technique combined with reasonable physical changes consistent with an intense training regime.
Considering the above, it's clearly pointless to compare men with women. It makes sense on the average, but any specific swimmer can be an exception - to say that an average sized male should necessarily be ever able to swim backstroke faster than 6'1 Missy Franklin is probably wrong, no matter how hard or how well he trains. He (on average) may be able to build more muscle, but that doesn't mean he can necessarily swim faster
In Ireland we had the case of a swimmer who was widely suspected of drug-cheating when she won several gold medals in swimming - Michelle Smith. Since then, while she hasn't officially been convicted, there is enough evidence to convince most people that she was indeed cheating. My belief is that a more sophisticated version of performance profiling would have caught her - because she showed a dramatic improvement which was very clearly due to enhanced physique (stronger arms and shoulders) at quite a late age (28 or so).
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIt sounds like a lot of work to do such a detailed stroke analysis - but you don't need to do it for every athlete. You start by doing the simplistic performance profiling where you just look at times improvement. If that looks suspicious, and if the swimmer is successful, then you do an in-depth analysis of his/her stroke.
It is true that our computer models are not yet good enough to predict the speed of a given swimmer based on a video analysis of his/her stroke, because there are so many variable involved. But if you're doing comparative analysis of the same swimmer, you don't need to do this - you can just look at what has changed. If the swimmer is going X% faster, or maintaining top speed for X% longer or whatever, something has changed. Comparing two videos of the stroke should tell you what that is.
This is not rocket-science. Take three PhD's, one in fluid mechanics, one in physiology and one in computer simulation, and they will knock out a program to do this with 90% accuracy in 6 months.
And then, if you discover no anomaly, you can give the athlete a clean bill of health with strong confidence - of course maybe they are using some drugs, but you can say that there's nothing in their performance improvement which suggests it. And if you discover an anomaly, you can interview the athlete and give him/her an opportunity to explain where the improvement came from before resorting to drug accusations. You can also do medical analyses (already existing) which analyse a person's ability to benefit/improve with training in specific ways.
And the net result should be: instead of today where you have shadows cast of some clean swimmers, and cheats winning some races, you'd have a much stronger apparatus to say "this swimmer shows no evidence of cheating" or "that swimmer, even if we haven't caught her taking drugs, has shown a dramatic increase in strength that we have never seen before and that we find hard to explain based on the training program she described to us".
The scandalous East German team of the 1970s and 1980s is relevant because it epitomizes the systematic organizational misconduct of sports teams and other organizations when moral behavior, human rights, etc., are subjugated in order to achieve the primary objectives of the organization. Similar corruption can occur in any organization, including many businesses (especially recently - global financial companies) and governments, as is well known.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisMy simple web searches regarding Chinese Olympic team drug testing violations was intended to determine whether the national team might have put winning above sportsmanship, as the East German team had done in the past. I never commented about the behavior of any individuals of either the German or Chinese "races" - which would be absurd since there is only one human race!
I am far more concerned about the actions of governments that would violate individual human rights. IMO, this includes the now defunct East German government and (as evidenced in recent decades), the Chinese government.
An article posted today in "China Digital Times", "China’s Olympic Fetish for First",
http://chinadigitaltimes.net/2012/08/obsessed-with-gold-china-leads-in-london/
discusses some cultural issues involved with China's Olympic objectives.
But technology of drug test still makes a difference. Compared with the period when the scandalous East German team existed, now testing skills have makes great progress. Not a country will put winning above sportsmanship at a high-risk.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisInstead of cheating, why not relate China's Olympic objectives with hard work?
" Mr. Callaway fabricated “7 seconds” improvement of Ye’s performance, while in reality it is 5 second. He cited “a major meet in July” without giving its year, leaving a false impression that Ye improved in just one month, while in reality it is one year. He ignored the fact that such improvement is nothing anomalous among young elite swimmers, Thorpe, Phelps, and Beisel have all done that at comparable age, to name a few, and the only thing “anomalous” here is that Ye is a Chinese. He also chose to single out the last 50 meters to compare Ye’s time with Lochte’s, ignoring the fact that Lochte’s overall time was almost 24 seconds faster than Ye’s, his last 50 meter is anything but elite, and quite a few female swimmers were faster. "
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this---------repost from a previous comment
Probably, if no humans possessed exceptional abilities, if young women were not physiologically strong in general, we would not have survived the turbulences of the last million years (not to mention having colonized the Pacific from Asia a few thousand years ago, for example). So these Olympic Games would not be there to test those unknown abilities.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisSuppose you are losing at a chess tournament. You either have a proof that someone else is a better expert than you and will be unlikely to share his expertise with you, or you can suspect others of secretly using computer aids. In the latter case you'd better remain silent or throw suspicion on them at once, before they gain even more credibility by winning more tournaments.
But you'd better present strong arguments, lest the other person present strong counterarguments. And if he does, then even if he is caught some time later, many people will not believe it, accusing yourself of manipulation. Some others will believe it, but will say that you had thought your computer was stronger.
just one addition to my posts above: anyone who doubts that we have the capability today to analyse a swimmer's stroke in detail and figure out how it has changed, read this article from Sci Am about the development of the new Speedo suits. If we put 1% of this much technical thinking into figuring out of people were cheating or not, we would need all this political debate ..
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=how-speedo-created-swimsuit&WT.mc_id=SA_WR_20120801
I have been reading 50 comments. Let me tell you that I am a lonely BELGIUM citizan. Generaly we don't winn medals anywhere Olympics or not so if I was Mister JTDyer and if I was not what is called a Scientist I could say "They (all the ones who winn medals)are off course using some wonder products, but not We" I looked up all the references mentionned in the comments and the result is that I think Mr.JT.Dyer is meaby not racist but surely not a scientist.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisProf. Dr.Roger Hertens
Now you are talking about an entirely different topic, which is not related to the original Nature article, nor related to science, and I am not interested in insinuation based discussion.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThat's the only topic I've been discussing - my original comment began with the statement:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this"This is a hot topic generating many news articles, but here's a few that may justify some skepticism about the Chinese swim team in general, if not Ye Shiwen in particular..."
It was always the characteristics of the team that I was questioning (read the quotations I referenced in my original comment). This is all I've discussed in any of my comments. I never commented on the Nature performance profiling proposal. For this I was accused of being a racist!
Thank you at least for referring to the news articles I referenced. I've never been accused of being a racist before, in nearly 60 years of relations with many people of very mixed heritage, including my current friends and neighbors, and there is certainly no reasonable basis for any such accusations by any anonymous commentators posting here. Thanks again for your consideration, since I am apparently being judged here...
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf you think that this article by Nature is inappropriate and it needs to be retracted. please join:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.facebook.com/retractWhyGreatOlympicFeatsRaiseSuspicions
Ye was FABULOUS!!! China can be proud of her accomplishment. In fact, since it was in the Olympics -- the whole world can celebrate her remarkable achievement.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisYou go girl.
BTW, I freely admit that I am not a scientist and have never claimed otherwise. I am merely a retired information systems analyst with >30 years experience.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThis Nature/Scientific American article states:
"... Tracking an athlete over time and flagging anomalous performances would help anti-doping authorities to make better use of resources, says Yorck Olaf Schumacher, an exercise physiologist at the Medical University of Freiburg in Germany, who co-authored a 2009 paper proposing that performance profiling be used as an anti-doping tool."
s
Shumacher & Pottgiesser, (2009), "Performance profiling: a role for sport science in the fight against doping?", http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/19417234
I wasn't able to access the full report, but the abstract states:
"In recent years, antidoping strategies underwent a significant development, from purely biochemical analyses and the detection of substances in urine samples to a biological approach, using blood samples, longitudinal monitoring, and probabilistic techniques. Nowadays, the appropriate timing of testing and the targeting of the athletes to be tested with antidoping tests is a major issue. A new strategy to improve the targeting of suspicious athletes might be the longitudinal monitoring of individual performances. By these means, suspect athletes might be identified, as doping will not only alter their blood or steroid profiles, but ultimately boost their performance, as well. Through the proposed approach, the effectiveness in the fight against doping might be improved considerably."
In a related research report, not mentioned here, Pinot & Grappe, (2011), "The Record Power Profile to Assess Performance inElite Cyclists", http://www.fredericgrappe.com/CV/bibliographie/D30.pdf, a somewhat similar method specifically intended to characterize athletic performance characteristics exhibited during bicycle races is described.
In both cases, the suggested profiling methods described are specific to the sport of bicycle racing and that specific population of athletes. I could find no mention of swimming or swimmers in these proposed methods for statistically profiling the race performance of bicyclists. I could not find any research suggesting that race performance characteristics profiling could be successfully used to identify potential use of banned substances in swimmers.
(continued...)
(cont.)
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisAt any rate, the current Athlete Blood Passport method of profiling the characteristics of athletes' blood to identify anomalous conditions could encounter specific difficulties in characterizing (especially hormonal) changes in developing young athletes.
While I could find no published studies of potential performance profiling methods especially for young athletes, it would seem that building up a statistically representative sample of past performances necessary for proper profiling would similarly be problematic for developing young athletes.
It seems that all of the reactions to seeming 'anomalous' Olympic athletic performances and suggestions that some kind of unspecified 'performance profiling' methodology could be applied to identify cheaters at the Olympics must be characterized as highly speculative hyperbole.
Yao Ming , China's famous former men's basketball sports athletes，As Yao said，We can understand the mood of the American. If one item that you have dominated for many years, emitting a person suddenly snatched from your hands which you think is your own stuff, you are sure to generate a reverse psychology. This problem is in the body of the Ye Shiwen，also appeared in Bolt body. This is consistent with the rule mentality of American's big country.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf someone defeat of the Chinese people in the table tennis aspect, we also have such suspicious, but we should have a big country of the mind to embrace. I think Americans is beneath a gentleman on the Ye Shiwen event .We should withstand such doubts. The final results of the test also confirmed the "last word", we should put it as a solo. I disdain to argue with you, we have evidence to prove this gold medal belongs to us.
Everyone interested in this topic should go to the Nature site to read the Editor's note, just to get a balanced, more scientific view.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisNature officially apologized for this article.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.nature.com/news/why-great-olympic-feats-raise-suspicions-1.11109#/Ed_note
You can also find comprehensive swimming data on http://www.ittc.ku.edu/huanlab/swimData/ for your own analysis
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisBig Data Analysis of Swimming Athletes' Performance Records
To doubt a 16-year-old young Chinese girl who had been practising swimming from an early childhood, in my view, to some extent is just Pride and Prejudice. If you can not prove one`s guiltiness, then the person should be deemed as innocent. Is`t this the basic spirit of western law? Of course everybody has the right to put forward their opinion. But the precondition is that any comment, or say accusation should be evidence-supported. Otherwise such accusation just turn into slander.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisIf somebody says that this 16-year-old Chinese girl has doped. Just show me convincible evidence. Anyone can?
If you say even a clean drug test can not rule out the possibility of doping, maybe it`s true. But this is not our problem. This is the problem of Olympic Committee. They need to improve the drug testing method and testing system. Before that, we just follow the existing so-called scientific examing system, which were actually created by highly intelligent western people.
Actually what we need to think over is the origin of Olympic Spirit, to be faster, higher and further. When the olympic spirit was created, it was not for gold medal or honour of a specific country. It was for the whold mankind, to challenge the potential of human being, to struggle with oneself, to keep energetic and always challenge the next peak. But now what`s is olympic games? We have an olympic committee, running and operating olypmic games, commercialize the games as much as possible. And the atheletes are fighting for gold medal for himself or for his/her country. This is just against the original spirit of Olympics.
Can we restore the purity and essence of original Olympic Spirit??
Nature site is not accepting comments on this article, so I'm posting my question here:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisQuot from Nature's so-called apology:
=============================================
"The story’s intention as an Explainer was to examine how science can help resolve debates over extraordinary performances, not to examine those performance statistics in detail. Several analyses done by others convinced us that it was fair to characterize Ye’s performance as ‘anomalous’ — in the sense that it was statistically unusual. But we acknowledge that the combination of errors discussed above and the absence of a more detailed discussion of the statistics (which with hindsight we regret) gave the impression that we were supporting accusations against her, even though this was emphatically not our intention. For that, we apologize to our readers and to Ye Shiwen.
Tim Appenzeller Chief Magazine Editor, Nature
Philip Campbell Editor-in-Chief, Nature"
===============================================
Please, please share with us the "Several analyses..."
and its related data, methods, and results.
In reply to jtdwyer,
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisDear jtdwyer,
Of course you are not a racist, because a racist would never point the finger at their own. However, based on the fact that you and some other fine people keep smearing on Ye, but never had a word about Katie Ledecky, even though she performed much more unbelievable, these people should be called a hypocrite. This is fancy scientific alternative for the word "liar".
There is a saying-when you point one finger, there are three fingers pointing back to you. Let me specify what the three fingers are pointing:
1. The whole western media who jumped into the mess will be labeled as hypocrisy with double standards.
2. A great athlete, Ryan Lochte, will be remembered in the history as the guy "slower than a girl" by some feminists thanks to your cherry-picking fabrication of number.
3. Another great athlete Katie Ledecky will never escape the doubt from any average IQ people.
Thanks you.
Some people are blind, deaf, or dead when Katie Ledecky won.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thisThank you Mr. Carob0412, Thank you for showing us the fact with scientific data.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to this----------------------
I will show you "ranking list" of drug test failure.
American:127 Brazil:17
German:36 Denmark:16
British：30 Indian:14
Russia：25 China:8
Italian:28 Norway:7
Astralian:22 Janpan:4
Obviously, American have great advantage over other countries. So, let's check out why Michael Phelps could won 8 golds in 2008 beijing olympic games.
-----------------------------------------
If you say our young swimmer is doping. Maybe. But you are unable to detect it. It can only prove that, either IOC drug examination department (I don`t know whether it`s leaded by Americans, Britishman or not) is incompetent for their job, or the drug-making technology in China is highly sophisticated. From these datas, we can see how far the America`s drug-making technology is lagging behind China!
If you have interest, we can consider export this technology to America or England.
To be caught so many times in the drug test is something shameful. You need to improve your technology in drug-detection and drug-making at least.
And I understand that to import technology is the shortcut to catch up with China in this respect.
Just for Great Empire`s referrence.
Please read one of the most representative reasonable responses by Jiang Lai on Nature's website before you believe in what is fair and what is unfair. Thanks.
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.nature.com/news/why-great-olympic-feats-raise-suspicions-1.11109
Big data analysis revealed that Ye's performance was not anomalous at all:
Reply | Report Abuse | Link to thishttp://www.ittc.ku.edu/huanlab/sensorData/