LONDON • Women's marathon world record holder Paula Radcliffe insists blood test results released on Thursday prove she is not guilty of doping.
The Briton, who retired after this year's London Marathon, allowed the tests to be made public after she felt implicated by a British parliamentary hearing into blood doping.
The hearing came after media revelations last month that the International Association of Athletics Federations did not follow up on suspicious blood test results in more than 800 athletes. The IAAF has vehemently denied those allegations.
After claiming the pressure being put on her to release her test data was "bordering on abuse", Radcliffe changed her mind in a bid to clear her name. The results were made public by Sky News.
The 41-year-old Englishwoman's "off-scores", the measures used to gauge an athlete's blood values, in the three tests were 114.86, 109.86 and 109.3. Anything above 103 for a female can be a trigger for investigation, but the threshold can rise for a number of reasons, including altitude training and tests taken immediately after extreme exertion.
Radcliffe has admitted to fluctuations in her blood test scores, but said they were down to entirely innocent reasons and she had been cleared by the World Anti-Doping Agency (Wada).
"This data needed to be looked at in context by the right experts so I requested Wada (to) go back and go over the data again," she said. "UK Anti-Doping can do that as well. I know the IAAF has done that (so) I have requested independent experts do that and I have the reports.
"I had to wait to get those in place but I'm very glad I have them.
"They can tell me you don't have three values that crossed any threshold, not when you apply the context of whether the test followed a period of altitude training or was carried out at altitude.
"Not when you apply whether the two-hour rule - that it cannot be used within two hours of hard competition or hard training - is not valid. That rules out two of the tests they are referring to, and the other is not above the threshold."
New IAAF president Sebastian Coe said: "I think everybody knows Paula is a clean athlete. I don't believe (anyone) should be forced to put private information in the public domain like that."
AGENCE FRANCE-PRESSE
