Why only me?
At least he didn't make up a story.
The doping story won't stop.
A past winner of the New York Marathon has recently failed doping tests, and is being banned from competing for five years (link). He tested positive for a new version of EPO, which was an emerging drug at the time I wrote Numbers Rule Your World (link). In Chapter 4, I discussed what it really meant when Lance Armstrong, at the time the GOAT cyclist, said he passed hundreds of doping tests in his career. Embarrassingly, statistics instructors at the time were comparing doping tests to mammograms, which are notorious for the amount of false positives they generate. I showed why false negatives are the real problem – this all happened before Armstrong's downfall.
Albert Korir, from Kenya, is a star. In addition to winning the New York Marathon in 2021, he placed second in 2019 and 2023, and third in 2024 and 2025.
Given that he passed all tests (a la Lance Armstrong) in those past years, he is only stripped of honors since October 2025. Sadly, his third-place finish in 2025 is no longer.
The only surprise is that he admitted the offence, and received a one-year reduction in penalty. He didn't say he ate any contaminated beef, or used his sick father's spoon, or drank from someone else's water bottle.
Of drug testing, for every athlete caught doping, there are many more who elude detection. Indeed, for every athlete caught doping, plenty of prior tests of the same athlete had came back negative.
Or, you can be the person who believe that the first time these athletes crossed the doping line, they got caught red-handed.
