在伦敦奥运会400米混合泳和200米混合泳的比赛中夺冠后，国外媒体曾质疑其服从兴奋剂，今天国际奥委会正式宣布叶诗文赛后的尿检也没有检测出任何兴奋剂成分，而同时英国最有名望的杂志《自然》的编辑也对之前发表的文章进行了公开道歉。为叶诗文加油！

以下为原文翻译：

“原本我们只是想用科学帮助解决关于叶诗文的争议，但我们没有很好地解读那些数据。之前，很多外界提供的数据分析都让我们认为叶诗文的表现非常地‘不寻常’——这里是指数据的不寻常。但我们很后悔以上的这些错误以及文章缺乏更加详细的数据让很多读者都误以为我们支持外界对叶诗文服用兴奋剂的指控，而这并不是我们的本意。就此，我们郑重向叶诗文和读者们道歉！”

此外，《自然》还张贴了一封来自宾夕法尼亚大学学生江莱（音译）的信件。

在信中江莱表达了对权威杂志《自然》最近发表诽谤性文章的失望，他说；“作为最有名望、最有影响力的自然科学杂志，《自然》却发表了扭曲事情真相的文章，这让人非常失望。”然后江莱就叶诗文事件提出了6点看法（摘选）：

“一、《自然》的编辑Callaway提出叶诗文在伦敦奥运会的成绩比2011年上海世锦赛的成绩快了7秒，因此总结出这样的进步是“匪夷所思”的。而事实上，叶诗文的个人最好成绩是10年亚运会创造的4分33秒79，伦敦奥运会上的成绩只比这块了5秒38。

二、叶诗文只有16岁，可能提高5秒的成绩对成年人来说很难，但作为一个正在发育的少年，在两年的时间内进步5秒这完全可以做到。而Callaway仅凭主观臆测就认定这样的提高是“异常”的，这样的结论是毫无根据的。

三、将罗切特和叶诗文最后50米的速度进行比较更是Callaway的文章没有经过科学验证的依据。是的，罗切特在最后50米确实比叶诗文慢，但他前300多米一直处于领先位置，已经耗用了很多的体力，所以在最后50米基本已经筋疲力尽。然而叶诗文在前300多米一直落后，最后的100米的自由泳又是她所擅长的，从这样的角度来说，叶诗文完全有可能在最后50米拥有那样的速度。Callaway却从“女人怎么可能跑得比男人快”的角度切入，我们暂且不从性别歧视的角度考虑，这也以一种先入为主的形式向读者暗示这是完全不可能发生的事。

四、再举一个将罗切特与叶诗文进行比较不合理的依据。事实上，在男子400米混合泳比赛的最后50米，有4个男游泳运动员游得比罗切特（29.10秒）和叶诗文（28.93秒）要快，他们分别是：日本的萩野公介（28.52秒）、美国的菲尔普斯（28.44秒）、日本的堀畑裕也（27.87秒）和澳大利亚的福尔摩斯（28.35秒）。没错，罗切特是冠军，但这不能证明他任何时候的速度都是最快的，Callaway在这里引用罗切特完全没有一点科学严谨性，用这样一种糟糕的方式向大家展示什么是科学这真的是一种悲哀。

五、第五点也是我最反对的！Callaway引用了罗斯塔克的话，暗示读者药检通过也不能排除服用兴奋剂的可能。《自然》是想通过这样的方式告诉我们药检的不可信吗？如果是这样的话，我想在《自然》上刊登的学术论文有很多都应该撤回。看完Callaway写的文章，我很容易地理解成他认为所有的运动员都可能服用兴奋剂，而权威机关也没有足够的能力抓到服从兴奋剂的选手。我们都知道叶诗文的尿样将会被储存八年，这期间如果有新研发的技术证明她服从了兴奋剂，那么她的金牌她的成绩同样可以被取消。从始至终Callaway都没有拿出叶诗文服用兴奋剂的证据，那他又凭什么质疑叶诗文呢？

六、最后，正如世界反兴奋剂机构的主席所说，本届参加奥运会的运动员早在开幕式前六个月就已经进行药检，其中共107名运动员被查出使用兴奋剂。我想这是对Callaway所说的‘几乎没有人未通过奥运会药检’这句话最好的反击。”

（编译 Keller）
Nature | News: Explainer
Why great Olympic feats raise suspicions
'Performance profiling' could help to dispel doubts.

Ewen Callaway 01 August 2012 Corrected:
03 August 2012
 
Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen broke the world record for the women's 400-metre individual medley event at the Olympic Games on 28 July.

L. Neal /AFP / Getty Images
Article toolsPrint
 
See also Editors’ note | Letter from Lai Jiang | Editors’ note (continued)

At the Olympics, how fast is too fast? That question has dogged Chinese swimmer Ye Shiwen after the 16-year-old shattered the world record in the women's 400-metre individual medley (400 IM) on Saturday. In the wake of that race, some swimming experts wondered whether Ye’s win was aided by performance-enhancing drugs. She has never tested positive for a banned substance and the International Olympic Committee on Tuesday declared that her post-race test was clean. The resulting debate has been tinged with racial and political undertones, but little science. Nature examines whether and how an athlete's performance history and the limits of human physiology could be used to catch dopers.

Was Ye’s performance anomalous?
Yes. Her time in the 400 IM was more than 7 seconds faster than her time in the same event at a major meet in July 2011. But what really raised eyebrows was her showing in the last 50 metres, which she swam faster than US swimmer Ryan Lochte did when he won gold in the men’s 400 IM on Saturday, with the second-fastest time ever for that event.

Doesn't a clean drug test during competition rule out the possibility of doping?
No, says Ross Tucker, an exercise physiologist at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. Athletes are much more likely to dope while in training, when drug testing tends to be less rigorous. “Everyone will pass at the Olympic games. Hardly anyone fails in competition testing,” Tucker says.

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Out-of-competition tests are more likely to catch dopers, he says, but it is not feasible to test every elite athlete regularly year-round. Tracking an athlete over time and flagging anomalous performances would help anti-doping authorities to make better use of resources, says Yorck Olaf Schumacher, an exercise physiologist at the Medical University of Freiburg in Germany, who co-authored a 2009 paper proposing that performance profiling be used as an anti-doping tool1. “I think it’s a good way and a cheap way to narrow down a large group of athletes to suspicious ones, because after all, the result of any doping is higher performance,” Schumacher says.

The ‘biological passport’, which measures characteristics of an athlete’s blood to look for physiological evidence of doping, works in a similar way to performance profiling (see 'Racing just to keep up'). After it was introduced in 2008, cycling authorities flagged irregularities in the blood characteristics of Antonio Colom, a Spanish cyclist, and targeted drug tests turned up evidence of the banned blood-boosting hormone erythropoietin (EPO) in 2009.

How would performance be used to nab dopers?
Anti-doping authorities need a better way of flagging anomalous performances or patterns of results, says Schumacher. To do this, sports scientists need to create databases that — sport by sport and event by event — record how athletes improve with age and experience. Longitudinal records of athletes’ performances would then be fed into statistical models to determine the likelihood that they ran or swam too fast, given their past results and the limits of human physiology.

The Olympic biathlon, a winter sport that combines cross-country skiing and target shooting, has dabbled in performance profiling. In a pilot project, scientists at the International Biathlon Union in Salzburg, Austria, and the University of Ferrara in Italy, developed a software program that retroactively analysed blood and performance data from 180 biathletes over six years to identify those most likely to have doped2. The biathlon federation now uses the software to target its athletes for drug testing.

Could an athlete then be disciplined simply for performing too well?
“That would be unfair,” says Tucker. “The final verdict is only ever going to be reached by testing. It has to be.” In recent years, cycling authorities have successfully prosecuted athletes for having anomalous blood profiles, even when banned substances such as EPO could not be found. But performance is too far removed from taking a banned substance and influenced by too many outside factors to convict someone of doping, Tucker says. “When we look at this young swimmer from China who breaks a world record, that’s not proof of anything. It asks a question or two.”

EDITORS’ NOTE (updated 6 August 2012)
This article has drawn an extraordinary level of outraged response. The volume of comments has been so great that our online commenting system is unable to cope: it deletes earlier posts as new ones arrive. We much regret this ongoing problem. The disappearance of some cogent responses to the story has fuelled suspicions that Nature is deliberately censoring the strongest criticisms. This is absolutely not the case: Nature welcomes critically minded discussion of our content. (We intentionally removed only a few comments that violated our Community Guidelines by being abusive or defamatory, including several that offensively stereotyped the many Chinese readers who commented on the story.)

Many of the commenters have questioned why we changed the original subtitle of the story from “‘Performance profiling’ could help catch sports cheats” to “‘Performance profiling’ could help dispel doubts”. The original version of the title was unfair to the swimmer Ye Shiwen and did not reflect the substance of the story. We regret that the original appeared in the first place. We also regret that the original story included an error about the improvement in Ye’s time for the 400-metre individual medley: she improved by 7 seconds since July 2011, not July 2012. We have corrected the error.

We apologize to our readers for these errors, and for the unintended removal of comments because of technical issues with our commenting system. Below we reproduce one of the most thorough and thoughtful of the hundreds of responses we received. Beneath it, we continue with our response.

FROM LAI JIANG, Department of Chemistry, University of Pennsylvania
It is a shame to see Nature — which nearly all scientists, including myself, regard as one of the most prestigious and influential physical-science magazines — publish a thinly veiled biased article like this. Granted, this is not a peer-reviewed scientific article and did not go through the scrutiny of picking referees. But to serve as a channel for the general populace to be in touch with and appreciate science, the authors and editors should at least present the readers with facts within the proper context, which they blatantly failed to do.

First, to identify Ye’s performance increase, Ewen Callaway compared her Olympic 400-metre IM time with her performance at the World Championships in 2011 (4:28.43 and 4:35.15, respectively) and concluded that she had an “anomalous” improvement of around 7 seconds (6.72 s). In fact, her previous personal best was 4:33.79 at the Asian Games in 2010. This leads to an improvement of 5.38 seconds. In a sporting event in which 0.1 s can be the difference between the gold and silver medal, I see no reason for 5.38 s to be treated as 7 s.

Second, as previously pointed out, Ye is only 16 years old and her body is still developing. Bettering oneself by 5 seconds over two years may seem impossible for an adult swimmer, but it certainly happens among youngsters. An interview with Australian gold medallist Ian Thorpe revealed that his 400-metre freestyle time improved by 5 seconds between the ages of 15 and 16. For regular people, including Callaway, it may be hard to imagine what an elite swimmer can achieve as he or she matures and undergoes scientific and persistent training. But jumping to the conclusion that it is “anomalous” based on ‘Oh that’s so tough I cannot imagine it is real’ is hardly sound.

Third, to compare Ryan Lochte’s last 50 metres to Ye’s is a textbook example of ‘cherry-picking’ your data. Yes, Lochte was slower than Ye in the last 50 metres, but Lochte had a huge lead in the first 300 metres, so he chose not to push himself too hard and to conserve his energy for later events (whether this conforms to the Olympic spirit and the ‘use one’s best efforts to win a match’ requirement that the Badminton World Federation recently invoked to disqualify four badminton pairs is another topic worth discussing, though probably not in Nature). Ye, on the other hand, was trailing behind after the first 300 metres and relied on freestyle, in which she has an edge, to win the race. Failing to mention this strategic difference, as well as the fact that Lochte is 23.25 seconds faster (4:05.18) than Ye overall, creates the illusion that a woman swam faster than the best man in the same sport, which sounds impossible. Putting aside the gender argument, I believe this is still a leading question that implies to the reader that there is something fishy going on.

Fourth is another example of cherry-picking. In the same event, there are four male swimmers who swam faster than both Lochter (29.10 s) and Ye (28.93 s) in the final 50 metres: Kosuke Hagino (28.52 s), Michael Phelps (28.44 s), Yuya Horihata (27.87 s) and Thomas Fraser-Holmes (28.35 s). As it turns out, if we are just talking about the last 50 metres in a 400-metre IM, Lochter is not the example I would have used if I were the author. What kind of scientific rigorousness is Callaway trying to demonstrate here? Is it logical that if Lochter is the champion, we should assume that he leads in every split? That would be a terrible way to teach the public how science works.

Fifth is the issue I oppose the most. Callaway quotes Ross Tucker and implies that a drug test cannot rule out the possibility of doping. Is this kind of agnosticism what Nature really wants to teach its readers? By that standard, I estimate that at least half of the peer-reviewed scientific papers in Nature should be retracted. How can one convince the editors and reviewers that their proposed theory works for every possible case? One cannot. One chooses to apply the theory to typical examples and to demonstrate that in (hopefully) all scenarios considered, the theory works to a degree, and that that should warrant publication until a counterexample is found. I could imagine that Callaway has a sceptical mind, which is crucial to scientific thinking, but that would be put to better use if he wrote a peer-reviewed paper that discussed the odds of Ye doping on a highly advanced, non-detectable drug that the Chinese have come up with in the past 4 years (they obviously did not have it in Beijing, otherwise why not use it and woo the audience at home?), based on data and rational derivation. This article, however, can be interpreted as saying that all athletes are doping and the authorities are just not good enough to catch them. That may be true, logically, but definitely will not make the case if there is ever a hearing by the governing body for water sports, FINA, to determine if Ye has doped. To ask whether it is possible to obtain a false negative in a drug test looks like a rigged question to me. Of course it is possible: other than the athlete taking a drug that the test is not designed to detect, anyone who has taken quantum 101 will tell you that everything is probabilistic in nature, and so there is a probability that the drug in an athlete’s system could tunnel out right at the moment of the test. A slight chance it may be, but should we disregard all test results because of it? Let’s be practical and reasonable, and accept that the World Anti-Doping agency (WADA) is competent at its job. Ye’s urine sample will be stored for eight years after the contest for future testing as technology advances. Innocent until proven guilty, shouldn’t it be?

Sixth, and the last point I would like to make, is that the out-of-competition drug test is already in effect, which Callaway failed to mention. As noted in the president of WADA’s press release, drug testing for Olympians began at least six months before the opening of the London Olympics. Furthermore, 107 athletes have been banned from this Olympics for doping. That may be the reason that “everyone will pass at the Olympic games. Hardly anyone fails in competition testing” —  those who did dope have already been caught and sanctioned. Callaway is free to suggest that a player could have doped beforehand and fooled the test at the game, but this possibility is certainly ruled out for Ye.

Over all, even though Callaway did not falsify any data, he did (intentionally or not) cherry-pick data that, in my view, are far too suggestive to be fair and unbiased. If you want to cover a story of a suspected doping from a scientific point of view, be impartial and provide all the facts for the reader to judge. You are entitled to your interpretation of the facts, and the expression thereof in your piece, explicitly or otherwise, but showing only evidence that favours your argument is hardly good science or journalism. Such an article in a journal such as Nature is not an appropriate example of how scientific research or reporting should be done.

EDITORS’ NOTE (continued)
The news story was triggered by a debate that was already active, concerning the scale of Ye Shiwen’s victory. Such debates have arisen over many outstanding feats in the past, by athletes from many countries, and it is wrong to suggest, as many of the critics do, that we singled her out because of her nationality.

The story’s intention as an Explainer was to examine how science can help resolve debates over extraordinary performances, not to examine those performance statistics in detail. Several analyses done by others convinced us that it was fair to characterize Ye’s performance as ‘anomalous’ — in the sense that it was statistically unusual. But we acknowledge that the combination of errors discussed above and the absence of a more detailed discussion of the statistics (which with hindsight we regret) gave the impression that we were supporting accusations against her, even though this was emphatically not our intention. For that, we apologize to our readers and to Ye Shiwen.
Tim Appenzeller Chief Magazine Editor, Nature
Philip Campbell Editor-in-Chief, Nature