> you'd have to throw out the slower finishers who maybe weren't trying hard. But if there's a significant correlation then it ought to show up.
Poor performers and no shows are exactly the population you’re looking for. To be clear the argument isn’t about a 10% decline across the board among people with long COVID as there’s non cardio pulmonary symptoms like brain fog, loss of smell, and difficulty sleeping.
If 80% of the fit population had COVID, 20% of them had long COVID, and half the people with long COVID had a 10% decline in race performance. That’s something like an overall 0.8% drop of performance assuming nobody dropped out or joined, but again you’re loosing people on both sides who were most impacted. Thus I’d be highly skeptical of finding an actual connection here rather than something else that impacts more people.
A more useful approach is to take a cohort of people who raced in 2019 and track what happened to every single one of them specifically.
