Blood doping in athletics 1

The famously leaked IAAF blood testing database (I own one copy with anonymized records for my doctoral research) offers some interesting insights into the otherwise hiddenpart of sport, into blood doping. It covers period from 2001 to 2012and contains data on 12 360 blood tests. In this short lab note I will show you some descriptive statistics and highlight the most interesting and extreme blood values.

Highest OFF-score = 170,03  Average OFF-score = 86,79 Lowest OFF-score = -6,76

Highest Hematocrit = 62,8 Average Hematocrit = 43,16 Lowest Hematocrit = 28,00

Highest Hemoglobin = 22,20 Average Hemoglobin = 14,60 Lowest Hemoglobin = 9,6

Highest Ret% = 5,12 Average Ret% = 1,02 Lowest Ret% = 0,01

Share of extreme (unusual) values of reticulocytes in all the years covered by the database can be seen in the following graph (only PRE-competition tests and endurance disciplines are included).

 

For comparison I am adding a similar graph made from values measured in professional cycling (taken from Zorzoli & Rossi, 2010).

 

I leave any conclusions or thoughts about how to interpret the values on reader. If you have an idea of what else would you like to see, don't hesitate to ask me and I will try to put it into another lab note.

Would you consider a small gift that will enable me to conduct my doping related research? Anyone who will donate $20 or more to my behavioral doping experiment will be acknowledged in the final research paper! If I don't reach the limit of $1000 your donation will be automatically transferred back to your account. There is just 1 day left and I still miss little bit to make it. Hopefully with your help I will not miss the opportunity to discover more about athletes' decision making. If you are interested, click on this sentence and you will be redirected to my crowdfunding page. Thank you. 

Jakub Sindelar - Ph.D. candidate, University of Turin, Italy

Another reading for those of you interested in the economics of doping:

1.  Economics of Doping 101 - The standard game theory view of doping.
2.  Economics of Doping 201 - On the recovery effect and doping.
3.  Do customers cause ineffective anti-doping?! 
4.  World Cup of Blood Doping - My doping ranking of nations