Are we yet at the point where no one cares about WR’s?

Road racing is the only racing with any kudos now

Track is a joke. Peds, cheat shoes, cheat tracks, wavelights...

Track is basically like skateboarding now, just a gimmick for kids. Irrelevant

I feel like WRs are going down now closer to the rate they were in the 60s/70s/80s/90s/early 2000s. Were people not excited back then? People talk with reverence about Geb and Komen trading records, or Coe and Ovett breaking the mile record 3x in a few days. Why is it any different now? Or were you guys in the 80s still saying "Jim Ryun totally would've beaten Coe and Ovett with today's technology and training"?

God yes I totally agree and Ruth C is such. b*tch!!!!!

Not true at all, where did you get an idea like that?

In some ways I think that would be for the best in the sport. People who run love to talk about records because they have a concept of what it means. You want to bring casual fans back to the sport? Focus on the races. If a record falls in a great race then all the better but I want to see the top guys race each other with some regularity and see different strategies play out.

Winning gold medals has always been the most meaningful goal of athletics.

We invented sporting events like the Olympics / WC's for the sole purpose of determining who is the best in the world.

Jesse Owens won 4 golds in 1932, nobody else in the world could beat him when it mattered.

WR's are icing on the cake.

Running tech is the new PED.

There are a lot more people running at a real high level, which perhaps we can attribute to improved training and also maybe just more people taking running more seriously from a younger age and at least at the highest levels there is wayyyy more money for runners than 20 years ago (Webb got offered $250k to go pro after HS, and probably took that amount after freshman year in college, and that was an unimaginably large offer at the time, today the big young stars get at least several multiples of that). With much more money floating around there is more reason to find the best young runner and get them to the best coaches and whatnot.

Then there is the I guess triplet tech improvements combo of springy tracks, springy shoes, and bicarb. Those three things together might improve a race performance by several percent, which is a ton at the highest levels where even 1-2% makes a big difference, ie. 2% of WR 5k pace is 15 seconds. Also it makes the second tier highest class athletes be able to run times that the top guys used to run.

So I'd say it is a bit gradual improvement in training and whatnot, a bit of higher economic market creating a push to better cultivate top talent, and then of course the elephant in the room is the tech which is simply allowing people to run a couple percent faster than they otherwise would have.

I mean you put Webb on bicarb, give him springy modern tracks, and let him race and train in super spikes for a couple years, he probably goes <1.46.5 and <3:50 in HS. You do that for Ritz, he probably goes <13:30 in HS.

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and you do that for Bekele, he probably goes sub 12:30 and 26-flat.

Winning champs is more impressive. Wave lights and pacemakers (including cars now it seems) take the excitement out of time trials. You don’t have to use your own judgement or tactics.

I don't know what to make of these WRs. Personally, I'm waiting for regulations based on better and clearer understanding of shoe and track technology. Fix these variables to improve comparability of performances.

Running matters a lot. Swimming records are pretty cool, too. People are breaking records from the supersuit era in swimming, which is amazing

stop denigrating world records for no good reason. If it were just the shoes, we wouldn't have this many fast athletes, the widespread improvements across many events

The shoes came out four years ago for track, 9 years ago for roads, yet every year times are getting faster. Is it the shoes or are people just getting faster like they always have? In the 90’s and 2000’s the Kenyans and Ethiopians were setting world records nearly every year. Then finally Mo Farrah became the guy to beat but never actually tried to run fast, and seemed no one did. Then Cheptegei and kipchoge was changing the changing of the guard back to world record attempts somewhat regularly

I don't recall records falling in the 80s with the frequency they are now and is many cases by the kinds of margins. It was a pretty dig deal when Grete Waitz took the women's marathon record under 2:30. But that was a time that even slightly better than average men, hundreds of them and quite possibly thousands of them, could better. How many men today, full professionals, can run that fast? You maybe had the occasional mind boggling performance but not anywhere near as frequently as we're seeing now.

And the suspicion of the effect of drugs was really just beginning. It was nowhere near as widespread as now. This whole record orgy began when competition resumed after Covid, after there'd been essentially no out of competition for a year. Yes, shoes and tracks were much faster when racing began again but those improvements also provide great cover for drug related performances. I don't know if anyone was saying Ryun would have beaten Ovett and Coe if he'd had the same training and technology. Mostly he did. Now we have some form of that question pretty much all the time. Some things were different in the 80s.

If shoes and tracks make such a difference then how come there are so many records still on the books, especially the shorter events? I know an 800 is only two laps around the track, but surely if shoes and tracks were such game changers then these guys should be able to dip under this old record? Same with the 400, 1500, mile. I'm talking mens here.

Another weird thing today compared to historically is so many records set by "the next guy". Used to be that if someone set a distance WR, they were highly dominant or had maybe one rival. Geb/Tergat, El G/Ngeny, Bekele/nobody. Now you have tons of world recordholders competing at the same time and none of them are dominant. Ingebrigtsen, Cheptegai, Kiplimo, Kejelcha, Fisher, Nuguse, Kerr. You could add Girma. Who else? And there is Gebrhiwet being 1s off the WR, Aregawi and Barega being very close, probably others.

The shoes don't make you faster, they lower the energy cost to run the same speed.

Also, we've been over this, but look at the number of sub 3:30 1500s before 2020 vs after 2020.

Indoors is as irrelevant as short course in swimming

The skeptic in me says that history repeats. Listen to Tyler Hamilton's interviews on YouTube. It's not that most young athletes want to dope, they really just want to race. But they get into the system and find out the truth.
I think the pro endurance athletes and doctors have figured out that HIF stabilizers do more than just getting the kidneys to produce more EPO. They likely increase capillary density in the muscles which is a big deal. And AICAR may indeed increase mitochondria because a major cycling publication mentioned rumors around 2019 I think.