El G's level of dominance remains unsurpassed

As always you are a true scholar, the World Athletics list didn't have his Zurich run posted yet. Six it is!

Morceli absolutely had a great career and is likely second greatest behind El G. There's an interesting parallel how he whiffed big in Barcelona '92 before redeeming himself in '96, like El G did. It's unfortunate his career overlapped some with El G's as this leads to his getting overlooked a bit nowadays... El G also benefits greatly from still holding the records

Yeah, it's lucky for El G that Morceli decided to come off the EPO immediately after he finally won his Olympic gold. Wise decision though after he had already been hospitalized with anemia.

Most consecutive 1500m/mile races without a loss belongs to N. Morceli (over 40). Was number one miler in the world (per TFN) for 7 straight years (1990-96). Broke the mile world record by nearly 2 full seconds. Lowered the 1500m WR by over 2 seconds. Won one OG gold in the 1500m and three consecutive world championship 1500m golds. And one world indoor 1500m title. Also broke world records in the 2000m, 3000m, and indoor 1000m.
I think Morceli's resume in the 1500m/mile is on par with El G.

This the full 12 best times recorded during the season 1996:

Open image

You can guess from it who was dominant in 1996.

Add to that El G. was the winner of IAAF Meetings Final.

3 times IAAF athlete of the year.

El G. and Usain Bolt are the unique runners in history that got the title of Athlete of the Year in three consecutive times.

en.wikipedia.org

World Athlete of the Year

The World Athlete of the Year award is a prize that can be won by athletes participating in events within the sport of athletics organised by World Athletics (formerly named IAAF), including track and field, cross country run...

Open link

For sure El G already was the best 1500m runner in 1996.
Morceli was extremely lucky that he won in Atlanta, but he clearly is the 2nd best over 1500m in history.

Why does Jakob need "multible Olympic wins"? El-G won 2 Olympic golds (late in his career). Jakob might surpass that in Paris in 2024 if it is possible to double the 1500m and the 5000m.

And Jakob already has 1 WC gold. El-G had 4. So in best case for Jakob he might have surpassed that in 2025.

As hinted by others: When El-G was 21 he was behind Jakob at 21 in most aspects of the sport.

Both Morceli and EL G set all those times during an era when there was an endurance drug that couldn't even be detected until late 2000, and even then the test the IOC chose to use was one where it only picked up EPO use for a couple of days before hand. An effective test was not produced until 2005, the year EL retired!

The benefit of EPO is its use through training, as it enables you to train harder, for longer and with greater rates of recovery. Even had EL G stopped using EPO in 2000, when the test came out, which might explain his surprise loss in Sydney, I believe there are long term benefits of EPO! I would be happy to hear otherwise.

I would also suspect that there was little out of season testing for athletes training in remote alttitude areas in Africa at that time; and which we know was the case until quite recently, due to a lack of a testing lab in Africa and the short length of time at which samples deteriorate.

EL G (and indeed others during that particular period) was able to run so many sub 3:30's in a season because his powers of recovery were superhuman. Even the likes of Ingebrigtsen, with faster tracks, more energy returning spikes, light pacing, etc, manages 2 or 3 spread out over a season. With EL G, it was practically every week.

The 2000m is just insane. 3:49.6 for 1600m (that's a 3:50.8 mile) and then speeds up for a 55.1 last lap!! Impossible.

Pathetic. This will never end.

Sadly, 90% of the posters here don't care about that. Oddly though, if you look back at posts here 20 years ago when we were in the height of it, most of the posters were calling out b*******t.

I guess it's survivorship bias - most of the running fans left are those that didn't lose their interest during the EPO era.

Hopefully we will have a new generation of track fans who appreciate clean running, rather than times and performances that were as fake as the WWE.

Suspected drug use aside, I think he lost in Sydney because Ngeny was in ~3:27 shape with superior 800 speed, and was able to draft off of El G until 70m to run. El G’s personal pacemaker slowed to 60.6 on the 2nd lap (after a 54.x opener) and El G took it on from there, running 56.x for the 3rd lap and 54.x for the final circuit. Not his best race, but still very much in line with his typical performances.

Having been a running since the 1960's, I just appreciate the sport and don't worry much about doping as there is nothing at all I can do about it. If everyone is doped then the race is still a race.

There's a difference between saying 'everybody in the xxxx 1500m final was doped', and 'everybody was doping back then'. While it's true that most or all of the medalists were doping, the fact that in an era of much better doping controls, Morocco is nowhere to be seen, and Kenya is far less dominant than it was, suggests that EPO did skew the history of middle-distance running, and not just in terms of the crazy times.

Or put it another way - if there was still no testing for EPO, no doubt there would be some Morrocan and a couple of Kenyans running sub 3:24 today, Jakob may not have even won a global medal, and the likes of Jake Wightman and Josh Kerr might have given up or gone into other sports. (and people like you wouldn't care because 'everybody dopes'.)

You agree with me that this site is full of Brits?
Just look at the long threads dedicated to British runners.
You are in your biased land.

This is really one of the most stupid comments I have seen this year.
Hitchcock may rise from his tomb to hire you as scenario writer in Hell/Heaven (or whatever place he is).

El G is the same age as Lagat. Puts in perspective how impressive it was that Lagat ran at a very high level until he retired 12 years after El G. Also, El G accomplished everything he did and retired when he was 30!

does the number of times a runner runs sub 3:30 actually matter? doesn't it ultimately come down to the pace that the race was decided to run in? i'm pretty sure El G could've ran sub 3:30 almost every time he ran the 1500m as long as he had good pacers.

with that said, you can't compare him to jakob. El G was more likely to be doping and jakob had superior spikes