Nobody is stupid enough to obliterate the field in such a manner, if they were on some sort of drugs.
If she was on drugs, she would have held back a little, and not made it so questionable.
Brilliant - I guess we can shut down all the testing labs.
In any case your argument is blown out of the water as she DID hold back during the first three quarters of the race :
http://www.guardian.co.uk/sport/2012/jul/30/ye-shiwen-record-olympic-swim?INTCMP=ILCNETTXT3487But Leonard, who has decades worth of knowledge and experience and has been lauded for his firm anti-doping stance in the past, believes it is certainly a question that needs to be asked. These are not the sour grapes of a sore rival, but the concerns of an expert who has enormous integrity on anti-doping within the swimming community. He made a point of praising Ye's teammate Sun Yang, who won three freestyle gold medals in the 2011 World Championships, and has already won the 400m freestyle title here in London. Sun's curve of improvement, Leonard reckons, "is well within the trajectory of the sport".
"If you look at the woman in question, and her biomechanics in the heats, she has a steady, moderately slow, six-beat kick," Leonard said, referring to the number of kicks Ye takes with each arm stroke. "All of a sudden in the Olympic final she turned it up to an eight-beat kick, which any coach will tell you is very difficult to maintain for 25m, much less 100m."
Ross Tucker, a sport scientist who based a large part of his PhD on pacing strategies in sport – or how athletes reserve enough energy to finish an event strongly – has also voiced his discomfort, while stressing that nothing had been proven against Ye. "Don't shy away from the question just because it's politically incorrect," Tucker writes his blog the Science of Sport. "Look where that got sport before."
Tucker points out that, on average, female medley swimmers finish the 400m IM in a freestyle time that is between "18% and 23% slower" than that of a top 100m freestyler. But Ye's leg was about 10% off the times set by the best 100m freestyle swimmers. "The conclusion that I would draw from this," Tucker writes, "is that her 100m freestyle leg is disproportionately fast not only by comparison to Lochte, but also to her peers, and to the best 100m freestyle swimmers." That, Tucker says, is too big a gap. "Based on everything we know about performance and pacing. I suspect that Shiwen would probably be two or more seconds faster if she went out harder and pushed to the point of fatigue."
It would make more sense, Tucker suggests, for Ye to swim faster over the first three legs and trade that improvement off for a slight loss of time in the final 100m. As Leonard said, "to swim three other splits at the rate that she did, which was quite ordinary for elite competition, and then unleash a historic anomaly, it is just not right".
"Her first 300m was an extremely conservative effort," concluded Tucker. "The simple question is: 'Under what circumstances does a female have the capacity to finish a race as fast as a male?'" It is the same question that is being asked by Leonard, only in a different way. "If it is a truly clean swim it is probably one of the most magnificent swims in history," Leonard said. "But at this point, I would call it unbelievable." This time, there was no doubt how he meant it.
