Mu has won The Olympics and Worlds and also had the best time in the World the last 2 years, will this be a case of If it is not broke don't fix it? or will she Improve after already being clearly #1 in the World her first 2 years out of Highschool? Will be interesting.
McLaughlin definitely wasn’t broken when she moved from Coach Joanna Hayes to Kersee after her first pro season. An Olympic and World Championship and 4 World Records later kinda answers the type of risk Mu is taking.
Mu has won The Olympics and Worlds and also had the best time in the World the last 2 years, will this be a case of If it is not broke don't fix it?
or will she Improve after already being clearly #1 in the World her first 2 years out of Highschool? Will be interesting.
It wasn't a problem with the training at Texas A&M that caused Mu and Miller to leave.
This summer I was told by someone else on their team that there has been some drama going on in their middle distance group, but they wouldn't tell me what the drama was exactly.
But whatever it was, it must have been pretty serious, because Mu's best friend and former roommate left Texas A&M in August to go to run for the University of Georgia. Mu's main training partner last year doesn't want to have anything to do with the Texas A&M track team anymore and she has stopped running altogether. And Mu and Miller just announced they are moving to another state.
How in the world did "800m University" go from being a top 800 training group to everyone wanting to leave?
Right. If one included the start, is that about the differential you'd expect? Maybe this year's is objectively better accounting for the start but probably not a lot. On the other hand, we see the USA again winning in spite of the boat anchor on leg 2.
I feel like I missed something. Did Kersee coach an athlete who was doping? Who was it?
Check this out - Jackie Joyner Kersee in the heptathlon:
1984 - 6579
1985 - 6718
1986 - 7158 (world record! ) - Not even the heavily drugged East Germans could break 7000
1987 - 7128 (3rd best in history! )
1988 - 7291 (world record! ) - At this point she had the only 5 scores in history above 7000!
Out of Competition Drug Testing Starts
1989 - She doesn't do even one heptathlon.
1990 - 6783, more than 500 points below her previous heptathlon in 1988. (It sucks being off drugs.)
1991 - 6878 (Not much better than the year before. It still sucks being off drugs.)
Well there you go. She got injured and couldn't regain world-beating form. Doping is the only possible explanation. Case closed.
By your reasoning, Sebastian Coe, Steve Ovett, David Rudisha and anybody else who tried to come back after injury but didn't quite regain their best form is . . . obviously a doper?
7044 was JJK off drugs. 7291 was JJK on drugs. Those scores are not close at all.
7291 was JJK at age 26 (prime). 7044 was JJK at age 30.
Out of competition testing did not dent use of GH, L-Dopa, testosterone or modified steroids. General anabolic steroids could still be used if you had some understanding of mass spectrometry and clearance times. If it was night and day, as you suggest, there would be no biological passport or whereabouts testing today - an era of ultra sensitive tests and out of competition testing.
Yes, that. 80s was the era of basically unlimited doping (but pre EPO), and it was partially viewed as patriotic duty to fight the state doping of the East Bloc. In the 90s, you had to curb it a bit, and we pretended to be opposed to doping. Yet USATF was still covering up for our positive tests.
This is why we shouldn't use the athletes or coaches of those dark times still as coaches and functionaries.
She did compete in 1989, over 400mh. Did that make her exempt from out of competition testing? Hardly. if you're going to throw dirt, at least make sure you include all of the relevant facts (as the other poster re 1992 has noted). Note also that she jumped 7.49 - twice - in 1994.