Is the Men's 800 Meters the most stagnent track event and why?

This is epic

Do you even know who Sammy Tangui is? I guess no without you checking it!!!
David Rudisha would never been who he was without Sam period!
How many top runners do you that have same personal pacemaker in training and competitions all career long?
Sam sacrificed his career to help David be on the top and that was brilliant from Brother Colm!

One thing is consistent tho your hatred is almost laughable 😉

1. Super shoes seem to have to have no impact on the 800. Much of the improvement in the 1500 and up can be attributed to improvements in tech.

2. Training methods (namely, high volume and high volume of threshold) have improved for the 1500 and up. 800 training has not advanced since the Coe era. In the 800, moderate volume and high intensity hard/easy really are the keys to improvement. No new insight since the 80s.
3. Drugs? I'd bet my life that all the womens records are juiced. No insight into whether the mens greats (Rudisha, Kipketer, Coe, Cruz) were on the level.

4. I think the fact that athletes race less these days (at least compared to the old days) hurts in the 800. You gotta know that pain the get through that pain. I think racing the 800 often is the best training for the 800, much more so than the longer distances, where there is more of a tension between high-volume aerobic training to prepare and tapering before the race so that you are ready to race. The fact that Athing Mu only raced a handful of times definitely limits her ceiling.

100% right on all points.

Top components for the 800 are as follows: speed --> pain tolerance --> form --> endurance --> race tactics

Speed: You have to be naturally fast and then harness training your with foot speed drills and neuromuscular coordination. Basically, you have to actually train like an athlete and not just a runner. Besides that, at least in the American system, anybody with good speed is running the shorter sprints or playing a different sport. There are plenty of WR or wiry SG types that would make great 800 meter runners, but they play other sports. For drug users, steroids can help speed a little bit through power, but the raw foot speed cannot be drug-aided as far as I know.

Pain Tolerance: The 800 plain and simple hurts more than anything except maybe your body shutting down during the end of a marathon. Most talented athletes will shy away from an event with so much pain. This can be trained through speed endurance workouts and drugs can, in fact, help reduce the feeling of pain.

Form: You can increase your form to a certain extent through drill-work, power, and neuromuscular coordination workouts; however, the best running form (i.e. David Rudisha) is still god-given. Drugs only help with the power component.

Endurance: Probably the easiest component of the 800 to train. There are plenty of solid 800 runners with great endurance that are lacking in the speed or form department. Drugs can obviously help here.

Race Tactics: Drugs can't teach you how to use your brain correctly. The 800 is basically a math test. How do I exhaust my energy at 800 meters exactly and not 750 meters or 850 meters? That takes practice. And racing. Lots of racing. And not being an idiot. There is a reason why Bryce Hoppel's and Clayton Murphy's best seasons were the ones where they were competing in the summer coming off of lots of races in a college season.

One of the best ways to train for racing is....racing. I think about guys like Steve Scott, who raced every weekend compared to people now who may race 5 times in a season. Might he have run slightly faster if he hadn't raced so much? Maybe, but his record for total career sub 4 miles (137) will never be touched.

The point about American runners being cross country kids for 1/2 of the year also carries a lot of water, IMO. I'm thinking of my guy who is running D1 right now and spend the fall doing stuff that was a little more 800 specific. He's already seeing benefits.

In addition to other posts, 800m (and 400m tbh) have no media or fan prestige at all associated with them partly due to how stagnant it's been. Nobody wants to do the distance because nothing ever happens besides the same 1:43 times. If nothing ever happens, the media doesn't care about the race and then there is no money.

Without the best guys competing because they've moved to other distances, it's harder for the field to run faster without great pacers (who once again are probably getting picked to help out the more important 1500m races).

It's a bunch of factors that all compound and make the situation worse and make it harder to justify someone trying to put in the time to be an 800 guy.

You're either a 100/200 sprinter or you're a 1500 middle distance guy. Better to just move up if you're an 800 guy or move down if you're a 400 guy.

Yes, if there was a man-eating predator that subscribed to ground rules like WA C4.2.5: “no munching competitors until race is complete”.

Where is brassiere? Ahem, I mean brazier

IMO this is one of the reasons why. In the USA promising 800 runners are pushed down in events and in Kenya promising 800 runners are pushed up in events.

At least in the US, it has to do with the characterization of the 800 as a pure distance event. It sounds crazy on this board but go ask any sprinter at any HS or college program what they think of the 800. They will scoff at the idea of running anything longer than 400m in race, something reserved for the distance runners. Many quarter milers who could be phenomenal 800 runners are either discouraged from trying the event or never allowed to.

I'm willing to bet at least a few of the huge number of 44.5-44.9 guys that show up in the collegiate scene every year could have been 1:42-1:43 guys had they been developed that way.

The 800 and the long jump are very stagnant events.

PED Testing

i don't buy the argument -- entirely. you look at the all time men's 800 top 10 and it's a record from 2012, several 20th century times, yes, but 4 guys from the 2010s. it is a battle between the 80s and the 2010s. this suggests they were doing something ahem "more effective" in the 80s. training, effort, drugs, something. at least the women's 400/800 that looks like eastern bloc drugs. is it the same with the men?

in terms of is it presently "off," the last top 10 time was 4 years ago, pre-covid. there was a blip around london. there was a blip around 18/19. i think track tends to work in blips like that, either a single stud or set of unusually gifted runners/throwers/jumpers. we don't seem to be in that now. a chunk of good 2010s guys seems to have run its course. arop is good, but that good? nah.

the folks making "american" arguments neglect if we had a specific talent ID, selection, or training issue, the "rest of the world" could still be setting records in our absence. they aren't. that suggests a more "global" explanation or accumulation of factors.

i do think records will be rarer 800m vs. the short sprints and sprint hurdles which are usually run full gas or close to it except some world event heats where one backs off with advancement secured. so you get routine high effort times other events. how often is an 800 run to chase a time? as opposed to, to advance a heat, or merely win the contest. to me the 800 more than many events if you're winning -- and not just in a world event heat -- you bank the W and back off. so you need either a competitive race you can't back off from, or you need something like monaco DL with a serious cast of characters, a rabbit, and a full gas mentality. how many of those do we have a year? not many. world events are often run like match races. and most people running an open 8 with a lead will ease through the line.

i think the women's 4/8 are more touched by drugs. like no one gets close. you can bring in an intersex. nope. you can bring in a bumper crop of mu and the others lately. nope. that's pretty clearly the doping talking. even if you wanted to say that about the men, there are 4 recent top ten times. so for a period we had caught up to whatever the 80s half mile scene was doing. that isn't stagnant, it just needs a new generation to chase it.

Perhaps it could be because the 800 is a deeper event now. Hear me out, it’s deeper so races are harder and more tactical. Pacing is poor because everyone is going out fast gunning for the win. With the old guys they didn’t have to waste energy fighting for position and could just sit behind one pacer or run solo.

re tending to push athletes up or down, it's worth noting that while world event teams are selected by nation, they are rarely trained that way. it's very decentralized. in the US you have training groups and colleges. in europe, clubs and training groups. so even when you have a 4/8 mediocre showing like last worlds there aren't really dictatorial national entities seeing that and manifesting runners to respond. like, in soccer, if you need a center back, the national team calls a half dozen to camp and tries some out. if they don't pass muster, they call a few more next camp.

in track the national teams are kind of stuck with the developmental pipelines beneath them. they can throw some coaching and money at an event but how often would it even be used? people are training where they are. if that coach wants to turn them up into a miler or down into a 400, if that bias is extensive, then the NT can't fix it.

i say this, there should be a response to last year of folks shifting to the 4/8 to get away from lyles and into the space left by the 2010s leaders ageing out. the times last year were soft and the usual suspects seemed to be falling off. but there is no one centrally to direct that response. it's just does a new generation emerge or does someone individually sniff it out. maybe a particular college or training group coach sees it.

but then to me for records you need a handful of guys who are fast and whose competition gets you more full gas times.

It's a mixture of things. In 2022, nobody went with the pacers and even the circuit races were cat-and-mouse. It led to really slow times. Last year, the circuit races were faster as somebody usually committed to the pace and pushed from 400-600. 6 guys under 1:43.5 is not that bad at all, and these were close races at the front. But a 1:41 guy it has been made clear is just gonna be an outlier guy without some breakthrough in spikes (not for 800) or training (hasn't happened). So right now, maybe Wanyonyi can be that guy, but Arop slots more into a really good and seasoned racer (a la Konchellah/Rodal/Bungei/Aman/Yego) then one of the generational 1:41 guys. The two big prospects were Brazier and Korir, and both have succumbed to injuries. Other big prospects in the mix are Noah Kibet, Will Sumner, Niels Laros and Ermias Girma. Maybe we see them take a big step forward? Not seeing a ton else in the pipeline for now.

The 400 has similar stagnation. The uber-talented guys who would be running serious times (Norman, James, Van Niekerk, Gardiner) were all old/hurt in 2023. Maybe there's a little bit of event shunning there in Kerley, Norman, Lyles and Knighton (this might change). Norman can rebound and there are young US guys/Watson (world champ) who have a chance to at least get us to the respectable sub-43.7 range.

Ummmmm...ever heard of Olaf Beyer?

Oops sorry didn't follow the thread properly - anyways - a shocking race proving the PEDS (at least in the 70's) can greatly help the 800.

Many Americans and others run all out for 700m and hang on for the last 100m. most WR are set on negative splits. Even Rudisha without a pace setter/rabbit in the Olympics.

Also can't forget Michael Cherry basically abandoning the 400 to go chase sprints