Where Your Dreams Become
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Where Your Dreams Become
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The Week That Was October 6 - October 12, 2008 Our weekly recap known as "The Week That Was" is back. We originally planned on having the recap take a brief Olympic Trials/Olympic Games-induced hiatus, but it extended a little longer than anticipated. Now don't call us lazy. Just as it's vitally important that all distance runners make themselves take some down time every year, the same is true for running a kick-butt distance-oriented web site. The Chicago Marathon was highlighted by an absolutely insane race on the men's side. The guys ignored the warmer-than-ideal conditions and ran fast from the start - so fast that the rabbits couldn't keep up for much more than 10 miles. In the end, you had a thrilling duel between Evans Cheruiyot and David Mandago which saw a lead change in the 22nd mile before Cheruiyot got the win in 2:06:25 and emerged as a new marathon star just as we predicted he would. We don't need to go into too many details of the race here. For our recap of the men's race, please click here. For a recap of the women's race, which was won by Lidiya Grigoryeva, please click here. To see our photo gallery, click here Now we'll dole out some awards from Chicago: Thumbs Up
Thumbs Up
To Wesley Korir for being a badass. The ex-Louisville runner didn't get to start with the elites. He had to start five minutes back. What did he do? He went out and ran a smart race to end up with the 4th-fastest time of the day, 2:13:53. What a stud. Even though technically he wasn't eligible for 4th place overall prize money (as he actually was the 10th guy to cross the finish line), we're pleased to report that it appears that Bank of America Chicago race director Carey Pinkowski is going to go above the call of dutry and pay Korir the $15,000 4th-place money.while also paying the original 4th placer). So thumbs up to Pinkowski. Hopefully, this will put an end to the huge amount of discussion this topic created on our message boards. This seems like a very unique situation. We don't think there should be separate starts for the pros (see below), but it really takes a lot of people rigging big time for someone to finish in the top 5 in a World Marathon Major. Plus, Korir had to separately have entered and got his own number (and registration closes months in advance) to start in the second wave. A lot of 2:15 non-Americans try and get into the pro fields of Chicago and NY and they are turned away. Chicago this year had cut its men's and women's prize money $60,000 each this year (the race is owned by Bank of America), so wer're glad Korir is getting his hard-earned dollars.
Thumbs Down
 LetsRun.com for absolutely blowing it with our Chicago women's predictions. As good as our predictions were for the men's race at Chicago and for the men's race in Berlin, where we picked the winner correctly (admittedly, we didn't have to go out on a limb with that pick), as well the top three (but not in perfect order) and the women's race in Berlin (we got the top two correct in order), our predictions for the women's race in Chicago were completely off the mark. We didn't even have the race winner, Lidiya
Grigoryeva, or the runner-up, Alevtina Bikitimirova, listed among our top 5 pre-race
favorites. Not good. We totally discounted Grigoryeva and Bikitimirova, as their PRs are over 2:25. We originally were going to put Biktimirova at #4, but her pre-Chicago results were so bad (she was only 15th in the Russian nationals in 34:22 for 10k before following that up 11 days later with an equally
dismal 19th place in the half marathon in New York on July 28th in 1:17:17) that we kicked her off the list entirely.The Russians definitely ran well and deserve to be recognized. At the same time, the women we picked to finish in the top 3, two-time defending champion Berhane Adere, Olympic champion Tomescu-Dita and Bezunesh Bekele, absolutely laid goose eggs as none of the three came within 9 minutes of their PRs.
Thumbs Up Every week they will write each other an open letter. You will get insight into the lives of professional athletes with a different culture, background and lives, but with a shared passion and a common goal - to succeed over 26.2 miles." Check it out at Limo-Lauret: Road To Chicago. The results from the World Half Marathon Championships certainly weren't really shocking as Kenya won the men's team title, Ethiopian women won their team title and Zerseney Tadese and Lornah Kiplagat won their third straight individual titles. What was shocking was the way that Tadese and Kiplagat absolutely destroyed the fields. How it's possible in this day and age of truly world-wide competition on the men's side for someone to destroy a field of the world's top half marathoners by almost two minutes (1:58), we do not know but that's exactly what Tadese did. On a day when the mean temperature was 74 degrees in Rio de Janeiro, Tadese ran 59:56 while the Patrick Musyoki only managed a 1:01:54. Kiplagat won by 1:20 in 1:08:37. Pretty impressive unless you compare it to Tadese's unbelievable performance. *Photos *Results *Full Race Video*Men's Race Report *Women's Race Report *Tadese Talks About Future Plans *Profile Of Women's Champ Lornah Kiplagat First Ever Sub-26:00 10k & Nearly Our 1st Ever Sub-29:00 For A Woman Brooks Johnson Resigns As Olympic Coach It seems with Brooks Johnson, the former Stanford and Cal Poly coach as well as the 1984 Olympic women's head coach, there is no middle ground. He's either viewed as a very good coach or a very bad one. Thus when it came out this week that last month Johnson resigned his position as head of USA Track and Field's high performance division, quite a few people were celebrating on our message boards. One person went so far as to suggest to us that we give him a thumbs up for getting out of the sport. We don't really know enough about Mr. Johnson's legacy to comment on that (in our uniformed minds, he might have been a good track coach). We'll just point out two interesting points. One, he claims that even though he was in charge of the US's relay teams in Beijing, that his resignation had nothing to do with that. Two, he was paid $105,000 for his role with USATF. $105,000 is chicken **** in other major sports, but in the world of track and field coaching, it's in the upper, upper echelons. You've got guys coaching all three seasons of major powerhouse college teams who make way less than that. How can we sign up for the USATF relay gig? More: *USA Today: Brooks Johnson Resigns *Message Board: Brooks Johnson Has QUIT!!!
High School Action
There were two big stories in the HS ranks. One on the girls side and one on the boys. On the girls side, in the first-ever matchup between two Footlocker XC champs, 2007 Footlocker XC champ Ashley Brasovan used a kick in the last 800m to pull away from 2006 Footlocker champ Kathy Kroeger 17:17 to 17:25 at the Great American race in North Carolina. It's great to see both girls running well, as women's running is full of too many child prodigies who flame out.
In the boys ranks, or maybe we should say men's ranks, the 2.5 mile Van Cortlandt Park course record went down as Solomon Haile ran 12:06. Very impressive ... unless he's really a 20-year-old, which is what many are claiming.
*2007 Footlocker Champ Ashley Brasovan Defeats 2006 Champ Kathy Kroeger at Great American *Is The New Van Cortlandt Park HS Record Holder Solomon Haile Really A 20-Year-Old Professional Runner? If you are someone who closely follows the anti-doping movement in the world, the one thing you would have picked up on over the years is that the best cheats generally dope using drugs the testers do not have a test for. There are many such drugs out there and new ones are being invented all the time, and it always seems that the athletes are one or two steps ahead of the testers. The athletes go from one undetectable drug to another just as the testers develop a test for the new drug. Remember the BALCO drug scandal? Marion Jones, Tim Montgomery, Regina Jacobs and likely Barry Bonds were all using an undetectable designer steroid, "The Clear." If coach Trevor Graham had not gotten upset at the athletes who left him and had not mailed in a syringe of The Clear, it's likely America would still be viewing these athletes as our heroes. That is why we were pleased to see that the USOC announced that it will retest its Beijing urine samples for the blood-bootsing drug CERA. Simplifying things, CERA is basically a new version of the blood-boosting drug EPO. Athletes figured they were in the clear taking CERA because it was a new drug. This summer we received an urgent email from a source who told us to forget about EPO, CERA was the new drug of choice (our source said it lasted longer and was viewed as undetectable) and we should notify our contacts at USADA and the IAAF. We immediately passed on the information, but fortunately, the drug authorities (at least within cycling) were already aware of CERA and working on a test. A few athletes tested positive for CERA at the Tour de France (the manufacturer of the drug worked with authorities to help come up with a test) but that test hadn't yet been ratified by WADA. The WADA testers appear to have been slower ramping up to test for CERA, but this week they announced they will retest the Olympic samples for CERA. That is great news. We suspect smart athletes may have tried to get off of it after the Tour de France news was announced, but we're glad to see the drug testing authorities trying to catch people using new drugs.
In the future, our urgent plea is for the drug authorities to announce nothing before the major events. Let the cheats show up to the Olympics and nail them there so we can get them out of the sport. The leaked news of a new drug test shouldn't be the impetus for a cheat to switch drugs. Rather, a new test should be the thing that catches the cheats completely unaware and gets them out of the sport.
More:
*Olympics To Retest Blood Samples For CERA *Shock (or not): Double 2008 Tour De France Time Trial Winner Busted For EPO Stefan Schumacher and Leonardo Piepoli both come up positive for CERA EPO in post-tour tests. Piepoli won a mountain stage and Schumacher won 2 individual time trials. *Message board thread *At least he never tested positive: Head Of Le Tour Calls Lance Armstrong An Embarrassment Things Worth Reading If You Missed Them: *To those of you who already think California judges are crazy, this will only reinforce that belief:
BALCO Perjurer Tammy Thomas Gets 6 Months of
Home Confinement And Many View It As Good News For Barry Bonds The prosecution asked for 2.5 years in jail but the judge went light on her as the BALCO ringleader Victor Conte only served 4 months himself. That may be true, but Conte cooperated with prosecutors and she did not. If you lie to a federal grand jury, you should go to prison. Period. The judge is practically encouraging people like Barry Bonds to lie. When Bonds' trainer refused to testify, he spent 15 months in the slammer. So should she. Additionally, she blew her lid and had a "verbal and physical" altercation with a law clerk
after being convicted in April.
LetsRun.com NCAA Super Polls Our LRC NCAA Super Polls are back, where we let you tell us who the best teams in the country and in each conference are. Voting now open.
Comments, suggestions? Email us at letsrun@letsrun.com
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