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[justinlee999]

The closing did not have Coldplay.

[Heron TSG]

High-altitude training trains your existing systems to work more efficiently, and is perfectly safe. There's some hoopla about cyclists extracting their high-altitude blood and re-injecting it later, but that's uncommon and doesn't really happen elsewhere.

From what I understand though, the high altitude thing isn't exactly safe either. You're still making your blood thicker with more cells, thick blood + over exertion can lead to all sorts of bad things.

It generally isn't enough to matter. It's a lot easier to go from living in Tibet to moving to the coast than the reverse. You won't want to compete immediately after getting down to sea level, but in a day or so you'll be ready to go with almost all the benefits of the high altitude training. Take Katie Ledecky, for example. She trained almost every day in Colorado, which is about 2.1 km above sea level. At lower elevation competitions, the better respiratory system helps her out. At home meets, the other athletes don't do as well as normal, unless they're from a similar or higher elevation.

The Olympics are about representing each country in athletics. It stands to reason that Tibet, if it were its own country (legally speaking, of course), would have some really great distance runners and cyclists. It doesn't stand to reason that any country that can afford to dope its athletes at great risk to said people should win.

[RedKing]

Not necessarily. Neighboring Bhutan sends almost nothing but archers (who get smoked by the competition), and Nepal, while competing in a variety of events, seems to focus on martial arts (judo, taekwondo, shooting).

You'd think Peru could scrounge up some distance runners too, but not so much. They fielded a few for the marathon but didn't even break the top 20. High-tech training makes a *big* difference. Unfortunately, it's why you see the same handful of advanced nations near the top every time, and why countries like India and Nigeria are way down near the bottom despite having huge populations which should statistically give them a superior base of athletes to draw on.

[scriver]

It should be noted that East African people also have a huge cultural advantage to (most of) the rest of the world - there are peoples there who literally run everywhere. From childhood until oldhood, they run where we would walk or drive. They could have the worst genetic potential thinkable and still have the upper hand in finding champion-aptitude marathon and long distance runners.

[Leafsnail]

The majority of Kenya (one of the most successful East African nations at the marathon) is also around 2000m above sea level, meaning that many of them get "altitude training" for their whole lives.  The Ugandan winner did most of his training in Kenya.

[RedKing]

Okay, I'm going to declare this 2012 Olympic thread officially closed. Good thread, thanks to everyone for keeping it friendly and focused on the events. All in all, it was a good Olympics.