Statistics and Sports

Malcolm Gladwell writes on using statistics to judge the validity of sport records. He argues that trying to determine if someone is using performance enhancing drugs is sufficiently difficult at the chemical / biological level that we should just look at the statistics. For example, sprinters who have mediocre careers and then suddenly become world record holders are probably on the juice. There is a long history of using this type of technique to judge scientific theories (for example the way that the top quark was detected - it's less of an "aha moment" than you might think). I'm less sure that this would work in atheletics however - as people put more trust in the statistics, it's more likely everyone would just start using steroids and the average performance would just increase. People aren't subatomic particles and will conciously adapt to how they are being measure to avoid detection. The other problem is that statistics work well over a bunch of samples and aren't good at making judgements about any single event because a certain number of background rare events are expected.