this post is long enough already so I am not going to spend any time convincing you that Americans do suck at distance running; if you think everything in the garden is rosy then there's nothing here for you and you can move along, thank you. I'll just give you a quote from a well known and popular running book published nine years ago:
"By the early 80's, the Greater Boston Track Club had half a dozen guys who could run a 2:12 marathon. That's six guys in one amateur club, in one city. Twenty years later, you couldn't find a single 2:12 marathoner anywhere in the country."
Christopher McDougall Born to Run (2009) p.94
when that book was written the world record for the marathon was 2:03:59 and it has since improved to 2:01:39, so we should probably be looking at 2:10 as our bench mark rather than 2:12, in which case, in those nine years just five US men went under 2:10 for the marathon (Galen Rupp 2:06:07, Dathan Ritzenhein 2:07:47, Ryan Hall 2:08:04, Meb Keflezighi 2:09:21, Abdi Abdirahman 2:09:47), and in each of the last two years only one man has done it.
there are a number of factors that contribute to the overall answer but, in my opinion, they all come down to the same thing: the organisation of track and field athletics in the United States is set up for the benefit of the NCAA and USATF. there is not one aspect of the organisation of track and field in the United States that is set up for the benefit of the athletes. not one.
point 1.
there is no outlet for adults to participate in track and field outside of college. this has a number of adverse consequences, starting with, if a kid is not athletically or educationally qualified to go to college by the time he is ready to graduate high school, then his track and field career is over. the system has no process for identifying interest in or talent for track and field past the age of 17. any youngster who has not shown potential by that point, disappears. for ever.
some examples to illustrate this point:
example 1. in 1965 a 17-year-old boy left his Grammar school in the north of England and went to the University of Sussex where he discovered competitive running. that year he ran a mile in 4:11.9. in the United States this boy would not have had a track career. he was bright enough that he would have gone to college (he eventually became a chemistry teacher), but he would not have got on the track team with no training or times to impress the coach. whereas in England that boy decided he liked it, trained over the winter and the following year he ran 4:10.2, 8:58.6 for 2 miles and had a go at the steeplechase, running 9:22.0. seven years later that boy, called Brendan Foster, broke the world record for 2 miles at Crystal Palace running 8:13.68. this could not happen in the United States under your current system where he would have had no opportunity to compete.
example 2. Steve Jones left school at 16 and started working in a factory as a sewing machine mechanic. in the United States, that would be the end of his athletic career, barely begun, with a couple of schools x-country races and a couple of track races with the Air Training Corps to his credit. he joined the Royal Air Force, where he was able to keep up his running and, eight years later, broke the world record for the marathon in Chicago. in the United States he would not have had a running career and his potential would have gone unrealised.
example 3. Ian Thompson was a fairly ordinary middle distance runner who did 14:05 for 5000m in college (University College Cardiff) the 40th fastest 5000m in the UK that year. after leaving college he got worse, to start with, and in 1972 ran only 14:17, slow enough to be lapped by Dave Bedford. but then his club asked him to make up the numbers for a club team in the AAA marathon, so he agreed, won the race, won the Commonwealth Games marathon, won the European championships marathon, and then retired. in the United States none of that would have been possible because there are no clubs and therefore no club races and therefore nothing to train for. no incentive. no ambition.
further consequences of point 1. because adults cannot participate in track and field, their children do not grow up in households where it is normal for adults to participate in sport, where twice a week they go out to the club and join in organised training sessions under the guidance of a coach. where they get advice on progressing their career, choosing appropriate targets, entering races, and just having races to enter. for these children, generations of them, sport is seen as something kids do, and professionals do, but adults sit and watch with a bucket of popcorn on their lap. your entire sporting culture is built on the ridiculous notion that sport exists as a commercial enterprise that adults interface with as paying spectators. whereas sport should be seen as something that EVERYONE can do because it's a fun thing to do. marginalising sport into a product for consumers to get charged for produces generations of folk who see athletes as paid performers.
this partly explains why Shalane Flanagan (to quote a recent thread) is not more widely known among the general population. to your average American Shalane Flanagan is an entertainer, no more meaningful or significant than any other soap actress or tv personality. to your average American who has no abiltiy to or opportunity to participate in sport, it's just a show, if her "show" is not sufficiently entertaining they'll flip over to any of the other 87 channels available. Ellen is funny, let's watch that.
further consequences of point 1. because there are no clubs, there is nowhere, outside of high school or college, for coaches to learn their craft, or develop their skills. which means that, unless you are a professional coach, there is literally nowhere for you to learn how to do it, be mentored by a more experienced coach, gain experience of coaching athletes of different levels of ability. all (sub-elite) coaching in the United States is provided by an educational establishment of one kind or another. and, importantly, the coach's tenure depends on how successfull the team becomes. which in turn means that coaching is focused on team results rather than on developing the athlete. in this setup, the athlete is merely a product to be used by the team, whereas in a setup geared to the development of athletes it is important for the team to exist as an outlet through which the individual athlete can explore his personal potential. when the coach is getting high schoolers to double up or triple up at meets on a regular basis, "for the good of the team," it should be obvious that the needs of the athlete are being ignored and their potential is being squandered for the benefit of the school. this is not designed to produce great champions six years down the line. it is designed to burn them out, abuse their potential, and put them off the idea of training harder to get better just so they can be abused even more.
the development of distance runners takes time. and if the United States is serious about producing great distance runners then it needs to move away from the idea that high school track and field is a team competition, and move towards a model in which high school sport is viewed as a development program for turning kids into adult sportsmen. high school should be a springboard from which EVERYONE can progress into a lifetime of sport, not merely a screening program to weed out the few who impress the NCAA coaches. the current programme fails the vast majority of the students it is meant to serve.
relevant fact: the age at which male athletes earn their first medal in international competition increases as race distance increases. all ages in the below table are in years. the top row says that of 177 athletes earning their first medal at 400m, the average age was 23.44 years and the standard deviation was 1.84 years.
event / mean / values
400m 23.44 (n = 177, sd = 1.84)
800m 23.78 (n = 166, sd = 2.33)
1500m 24.42 (n = 153, sd = 2.23)
5000m 25.01 (n = 116, sd = 2.73)
10,000m 25.83 (n = 145, sd = 3.02)
you will note that both age and sd increase as race distance increases. this says that it takes, on average, 8 - 9 years to produce a world class 10,000m runner. any system that cuts these boys off at the age of 17 with no hope of exploring their potential is going to lose a great many potential stars. and, since marathon runners do not come out of the mist, but are, predominantly, 5000m and 10,000m runners moving up, a huge number of your potential marathon stars are the guys sitting on the sofa watching the olympics with a bucket of popcorn on their lap precisely because there was nowhere for them to develop their talent.
point 2.
the selection of athletes for sponsorship so that they can pursue a career after college has been handed over to commercial interests who, not unreasonably, select athletes who are going to represent their brand. for shoe companies and athletic apparel companies, sponsorship is a marketing exercise intended to promote them and put their brand before the paying public in a positive way. to this end, an athlete's personality, public engagement and social media profile might be equally as important as his pr's or his athletic potential. it would be invidious to name athletes who are sponsored on this basis but if you follow the sport you will be able to name a couple.
the promotion of and development of American distance running is not a priority for these companies, and it would be unreasonable to expect it to be so. in many other countries, athletes are sponsored by the governing body and pursue their athletic career free of commercial concerns. in the UK, for example, profits from the National Lottery are donated to various charities and other good causes and England Athletics select athletes to receive this funding based on their potential to medal in the next Olympic cycle. as well as money they receive access to training facilities, physiological test facilities, medical assistance, dietary advice and coaching. they are not required to have a social media profile. In Australia, the sport's national governing body makes a recommendation to Sport Australia for grants to athletes based on their potential to medal in the next Olympic or Commonwealth cycle. they also receive similar support to athletes in the UK.
USATF, by contrast, operate what they call "Team USA Career Program" which does not sponsor athletes at all. it is merely a clearing house through which eligible athletes can get a job (at $14 per hour) with a sponsoring company. to be eligible for this, an athlete must already be a member of the US team. so it is not a development program and it costs USATF nothing. the sponsoring companies get cheap labour but it is not obvious how this helps an athlete become a world beater. another programme, the "Athlete Support" programme offered by USATF is explained in full on their website. it reads: 2018 Athlete Support Information will be available for viewing soon.
obviously not a priority, then.
when it launched, the Nike Oregon Project was advertised as designed to, "promote American long-distance running." seventeen years later, they have, to my knowledge, produced exactly one world class US distance runner. we could spend the next six months debating whether the methodology, morality and ethics of the program are aligned with the rules for the sport but the fact remains that the programme must be viewed as a massively expensive flop. all it has demonstrated is that you cannot just throw money at a programme and expect results. the promotion of American distance running requires careful thought and a thorough overhaul of the way the sport is organised and run from bottom to top. from a change in the way we think about the purpose and rationale for high school sport in the first place, the education and training of high school coaches, the provision of opportunities for track and field outside the closed circle of school and college, and the development of a mentoring and sponsoring arrangement for talent that is absent commercial concerns but designed to further the individual needs of the athlete. all of this should be predicated on the plain and simple idea that all decisions should be made with the athlete being the sole beneficiary.
the recent kerfuffle over a "meet of champions" in Maryland that was cancelled because of petty administrative reasons clearly indicates that athletes are not even second in line for consideration.
put athletes back in the centre of the programme.
cheers.