"The Boston Marathon Was Fixed" thread.

Oldmanstillrunnng wrote:

Don't overthink what we all observed yesterday. Does anyone remember an LA Marathon in the 80's when Paul Pilkington ran away with the race? Probably not. Those expected to win that race thought, "just let him go, he'll come back to us, or drop out. He's a non-factor". Later, the crybabies said, "but we didn't know a rabbit could also be a legitimate entrant!" I'm sure the Africans expecting to win yesterday thought something similar: "There's no way that washed up 39 year old American can keep it up, he'll come back to us. We can just run fairly easy, catch up when he fades, and enjoy a good sprint at the end for one of us to get the win." But, the 39 year old washed up American didn't fade and actually runs a PR! That's what's laughable! Chebut finally realized Meb wasn't coming back quick enough and tried to pick it up to catch that old guy and even got within 6 seconds of him, but by then it was just too late. Meb was much stronger than they supposed he'd be from start to finish! Simply a bad race strategy for the Africans. Look at the past several years finish time results at Boston and it should be clear to you. 2:08:36 has always been a great finish time at Boston, with the exception of just two remarkable years.

Oldmanstillrunnng wrote:

Don't overthink what we all observed yesterday. Does anyone remember an LA Marathon in the 80's when Paul Pilkington ran away with the race?

Average_Joe wrote:

Don Kardong's account of the 1985 Chicago Marathon from The Runner, January, 1985

Before the start, few would have argued with Rob de Castella's prediction about how the men's race would develop. "You'll see a big group,' said Deek, "eight to ten runners, in front for 15-20 miles. In the last three or four miles, the pack will fragment. Then we will see who's on form"

Steve Jones, though, wasted no time in destroying that scenario. Running 4:46 and 4:42 for the first two miles, Jones seemed impatient with the pace of Carl Thackery of Sheffield, England, who had been hired to lead the men through a 1:03:30 half-marathon. By two miles, Jones began moving to the lead, then passed three miles in 14:16, with only Simeon Kigen of Kenya as company. It's not uncommon to see someone open a marathon at breakneck speed, only to collapse shortly after. Top runners, used to that, are generally unperturbed.

But Steve Jones? Did the former world record holder know something that no one else did, or was he simply plunging into the kind of drastic and soon-to-be-regretted experiment that Geoff Smith had suffered last Spring at Boston? Faced with Jones' challenge, what should a 2:08 or 2:09 marathoner do?

While the rest of the men mulled that over, Jones accelerated to 4:39 for the fourth mile, slowed to 4:59 on the hilly fifth mile, then turned in miles of 4:34, 4:39, 4:37, 4:39 and 4:38 through ten, which he passed in 47:01, nearly two minutes faster than he had in 1984. No one had run five straight sub-4:40 miles in a marathon before. His split converted to a 2:03:16 marathon!

By that point though, nearly everyone in the next pace--de Castella, Djama, Curp--must have felt they knew what was up. Jones' splits were suicidal. Just stick to one's own pace, right?

"I was pretty surprised he was able to keep going," de CAstella said later. "In the clinic yesterday Steve was telling everybody how he hadn't been doing as much mileage this year, hadn't been doing his long runs, and I thought, 'Oh, good, he'll really struggle over those last few miles.' "

And how was the wild one himself reacting to his superhuman splits?

"I wasn't really taking too much notice of them," Jones would comment. "I felt comfortable. I knew it would hit me at some stage in the race, and it was just a matter of carrying on until it did."

Having cast the die, Jones held on, passing the first of the two marathon halves in 1:01:42 (in his world record, Lopes' split was 1:03:24) and thinking to himself as he said after the race, "Let's try and run another one."

...

"Nor had Steve Jones the luxury of late-race respite. By 14 miles, his eyes had begin to reflect, ever so slightly, that despair that marathon runners know when the body begins to balk at the pace. Jones finally began to "slow down," running just above 4:50 per mile from 14 through 20. At that mark, passed in 1:35:22, he was looking at a projected, and still scary, 2:05:01.

Finally though, the lender came to collect on the overdue debt. Jones ran his 21st mile in 5:02, the next in 5:07, then 5:06. It wasn't exactly a wall; maybe a few bricks.

"About 21 miles," Jones admitted, "I really started to feel quite tired and my legs tightened. I had to concentrate really hard to maintain form and pace."

The question now was whether the accumulation of fatigue and overall slowdown would end up devouring the time cushion that Jones had created for himself. AT 25 miles he was still under 2:07 pace, but his pace continued to slip.

...

Jones, meanwhile, had many things to think about, including his early pace and to what extent it deterred a record. Given his remarkable talent, what time did he have in him?

"A minute, maybe a minute and a half faster," Jones mused. "It's hard to say until you actually run it."

In other words, 2:05, 2:06. In '84, after he'd run a low 2:08 his first marathon, he said you could hardly call him a marathon runner. And now, after a low 2:07? "I'm just a runner, " he said.

KudzuRunner wrote:

I hate to say this, but I'm starting to think that the whack-job nutty loony conspiracy-heads might just have a point.

BUT: here's the problem.

Imagine for the sake of argument that the fix was in. Imagine that the BAA (or their black ops spokesman) had a private conversation with the dozen-odd top Kenyans and Ethiopians, the gist of which was, "Let an American win."

We know, now, that Meb had a career day and ran a PR, with no wind aid, that nobody could possibly have anticipated. He ran a hard, solid, daring, impeccable race, given the hand he was dealt. Nobody can possibly imagine that HE was part of the conspiracy. So he went out there and did something that he wasn't expected to do. He might have run exactly the same hard, daring race, for example, and then seriously died in the final mile or two. Or, more likely, he might have not run nearly as well. Or, still another option, Ryan Hall might have NOT gone out hard but have merely been part of the lead group for the first twenty miles, even as Meb struggled.

All of those options were the LIKELY options. Nobody could go into a "fixer" scenario--the BAA, I mean--anticipating that Meb would ran as he actually ran. His terrific day helps spawn conspiracy theories, but it also contains enough Cinderella story to COVER for a conspiracy.

But again: what Meb did (the PR, the very early breakaway) was, in essence, entirely unlikely and unforseeable.

So what happens, you conspiracy theorists, in the case of the other much more likely scenarios that I've laid out? What sort of conversation does the fixer have with the East Africans? How does it work? It's easy to suggest that they were told "Let an American win!," but it's much harder to imagine how that scenario works out in a satisfying way, with no CLEAR evidence of East African runners throwing it.

In other words, imagine the likely scenario: Meb and Ryan both hanging with the pack until 20 miles with neither of them making a decisive move. Imagine that one or the other of them is having the sort of day that Hall actually had yesterday, and falls off the pace. What are the "fixed" runners supposed to do? Just....lag?

Come on. That's silly. The problem with the conspiracy theory is that it can't stand up to reasonable counterfactual analysis. In ANY scenario but the one that actually took place this year--Meb having an amazing, unexpected breakaway PR--the fix would have been painfully evident. You'd have a bunch of East Africans at 20 miles, with Meb gone and Hall right there, and they're all waiting, waiting...nobody making a move. Suppose Hall falls off, or threatens to, at THAT point? Are they ALL supposed to slow?

But that is what would have had to happen, and it is what the fixer would have had to anticipate as a likely outcome and explain to those he "fixed."

That just seems unlikely to me. The likelihood of the race seeming to have been thrown would be too high.

ConspiracyTheorist wrote:

KudzuRunner wrote:

I hate to say this, but I'm starting to think that the whack-job nutty loony conspiracy-heads might just have a point.

BUT: here's the problem.

Imagine for the sake of argument that the fix was in. Imagine that the BAA (or their black ops spokesman) had a private conversation with the dozen-odd top Kenyans and Ethiopians, the gist of which was, "Let an American win."

We know, now, that Meb had a career day and ran a PR, with no wind aid, that nobody could possibly have anticipated. He ran a hard, solid, daring, impeccable race, given the hand he was dealt. Nobody can possibly imagine that HE was part of the conspiracy. So he went out there and did something that he wasn't expected to do. He might have run exactly the same hard, daring race, for example, and then seriously died in the final mile or two. Or, more likely, he might have not run nearly as well. Or, still another option, Ryan Hall might have NOT gone out hard but have merely been part of the lead group for the first twenty miles, even as Meb struggled.

All of those options were the LIKELY options. Nobody could go into a "fixer" scenario--the BAA, I mean--anticipating that Meb would ran as he actually ran. His terrific day helps spawn conspiracy theories, but it also contains enough Cinderella story to COVER for a conspiracy.

But again: what Meb did (the PR, the very early breakaway) was, in essence, entirely unlikely and unforseeable.

So what happens, you conspiracy theorists, in the case of the other much more likely scenarios that I've laid out? What sort of conversation does the fixer have with the East Africans? How does it work? It's easy to suggest that they were told "Let an American win!," but it's much harder to imagine how that scenario works out in a satisfying way, with no CLEAR evidence of East African runners throwing it.

In other words, imagine the likely scenario: Meb and Ryan both hanging with the pack until 20 miles with neither of them making a decisive move. Imagine that one or the other of them is having the sort of day that Hall actually had yesterday, and falls off the pace. What are the "fixed" runners supposed to do? Just....lag?

Come on. That's silly. The problem with the conspiracy theory is that it can't stand up to reasonable counterfactual analysis. In ANY scenario but the one that actually took place this year--Meb having an amazing, unexpected breakaway PR--the fix would have been painfully evident. You'd have a bunch of East Africans at 20 miles, with Meb gone and Hall right there, and they're all waiting, waiting...nobody making a move. Suppose Hall falls off, or threatens to, at THAT point? Are they ALL supposed to slow?

But that is what would have had to happen, and it is what the fixer would have had to anticipate as a likely outcome and explain to those he "fixed."

That just seems unlikely to me. The likelihood of the race seeming to have been thrown would be too high.

I think this is why you saw the pack of 2:04-2:05 Africans running with slow Americans. A good deal of those Americans PR'd...so they were running lights out. Of course that's what we'd expect, the conditions were awesome. The Kenyan woman set the course record. Yet the only group that sucked were foreign elite of the elite men? What?

They were probably told, here's a small fee to just hang with the Americans and let one win but make it look fast (like a rabbit). Because when Meb "took off" he wasn't dropping some ridiculous 5k in the middle of the first half. The pace was pedestrian. He "blazed away" from 2:04-2:05 marathoners at a blistering 2:10-2:11 pace!!

Are we seriously to believe that was a challenge? That no African could hang on that pace or wanted to so early? That they'd let him with a rabbit gap them by a minute just so they could trod along at some slow pace with the other Americans that were having career days? That all these usual front runners decided to not be front runners when someone went a bit faster (which is far slower than their PR's)?

Trollie McSockpuppet wrote:

Wait...so now the problem is that Chebet did not slow down enough? One consistently amusing characteristic of you Boston-Marathon-Truthers is that you all constantly adjust your "theory" when someone points out that an aspect of it does not make sense. Eventually, your conspiracy theory takes a form that is logically inconsistent with what you argued a few posts earlier. But that doesn't seem to bother you. All that matters is that somehow, someway, you justify the conclusion that the race was fixed. It really is like conversing with someone who suffers from mental illness.

Trollie McSockpuppet wrote:

In any event, you apparently believe that the only plausible outcomes for Chebet were either to (a) maintain 4:30 per mile pace or (b) collapse to 6-minute or 7-minute miles. Yet again, you make strange assumptions that belie a lack of familiarity with elite racing. You're projecting your own (surely non-elite) racing performances onto elite athletes.

Trollie McSockpuppet wrote:

Look at the results of every elite marathon race--the Olympics, Boston, New York, etc. There are always a bunch of contenders who either finish way back or drop out. This is not a 5,000 meter race on the track.

Trollie McSockpuppet wrote:

You're just making shit up. "All of the US runners were having an excellent race except Ryan Hall"? Brett Gotcher ran 2:17, nearly seven minutes slower than in his debut marathon. Olympian Abdi Abdirahman ran 2:16. And, of course, Hall ran 13 minutes slower than his Boston PR.

Trollie McSockpuppet wrote:

So, how do Gotcher and Abdirahman factor into the conspiracy? I'm confident you can revise your theory accordingly.