Earlier today, marathon world record holder Paula Radcliffe likened the pressure she feels she is under regarding her blood data to being "almost abused".
It follows a lengthy statement that she published on Tuesday when she vehemently denied cheating during her athletics career.
We were joined by The Guardian's chief sports correspondent Owen Gibson on Off The Ball tonight to try and make sense of the scrutiny around Radcliffe.
"It is a complicated subject and I can understand her reticence up to a point. All sides of this debate have faced that problem from Dr Mike Ashenden, who's the Sunday Times expert to the IAAF themselves to WADA to Paula. This isn't a hard and fast science so you need to look at these values across many years. You need to compare these values to one another. You need to consider the context in which these tests were taken and so on," said Gibson.
"It's a mixture of subjectivity and science and that's why it's very difficult to say why, 'Bang! Here's three blood values, this proves that I'm innocent because it doesn't necessarily prove that without lots of other contexts. I can understand why there's a reticence to try and explain it away because it's so complicated. But on the other hand, throughout her career she has been very vocal against dopers, quite rightly, but she's also sort of said that people should be open and transparent about their own blood values and test scores. So for her to turn around when it applies to her and say 'that's what I believe for everyone else but it shouldn't apply to me', I think does leave a slightly sour taste for some people."
Listen to the full interview via the podcast player.
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