Doper duper

There are many myths in sports. One of the enduring ones is that the best athletes win on their talent; the dopers are the lesser ones who can't rely completely on their natural ability.This myth persists despite Lance Armstrong, Jose Canseco and numerous other cases. News has emerged that the Tokyo marathon gold medalist & 2025 world champion has been provisionally suspended for doping (link). Oops. The process has begun, and we'll soon learn if he has an "explanation" for the abnormality.This story gives me a reason to review the key conclusions of Chapter 4 of Numbers Rule Your World (link).This book came out before Lance Armstrong confessed after being ratted out by a former teammate. At the time, the establishment, including the statistics experts, was worried about false positive results in anti-doping tests. This line of thinking borrows heavily from analyses of other types of diagnostic tests, such as mammograms. The only problem is that the analytical result was not…