the 5 greatest mile runners of all time

I assume you are capable of looking it up.

El Guerrouj 7
Morceli 7
Kiprop 6
Cram 5
Coe 3
Ovett 3
Snell 3
Walker 3
Aouita 2
Bannister 2
Cheruiyot 2
Daniel Komen II 2
Elliott 2
Ingebrigtsen 2
Keino 2
Kiplagat 2
Ryun 2

El Guerrouj's 55th fastest 1500 is faster than Coe's 2nd fastest. El G is no. 1 and it'
s undisputed. Morceli is no. 2, also by big margin.

Didn't Ovett completely blow his knee apart in 1982 by running into one of those old Victorian iron British spiked park gates while doing an interval workout in the dark (they had no head torches for running in the 1980s)? I thought he had to have something like reconstructive knee surgery just to be able to walk and run again so it was one heck of a comeback to make to a championship final a year later ...

Agreed. Steve Scott would have likely won the 80 Olympics without the boycott so he is somewhere towards the top of the list and Alan Webb also beats most of the guys on there.

Agreed also note that Keino, Cacho, El G and Makhloufi were competing in non boycotted Olympics, Coe had no Walker, no Scott to contend with and no Straub, Russians etc in 1984.

How many times do you need to be told that Straib retired after Moscow. In any case, there is no way he could have been rocket fuelled in LA like he was in Moscow.

Elliot and Peter Snell have to be on this list.

Comparing different eras of Coe and EL G is no different to comparing Coe's times with those of Snell or Ryun. Snell broke 1:46 for 800m twice, Ryun 3 times. Coe ran under that barrier 46 times.

So surely that means Coe is undisputably a better 2 lap runner than Snell!?

There is a blatantly obvious reason why EL G ran so many fast times (and why the only 3:26/3:43 times were run in that late 90's period - with the exception of the convicted doper Kiprop years later), and I'll let you figure that out for yourself.

That's stretching credulity somewhat! Scott was soundly and repeatedly beaten by Ovett both before and after the Moscow Olympics in 80, and Coe also beat him comfortably in Zurich a week or two after Moscow. Scott didn't beat Ovett between 77 and 83 and first beat Coe in 83. As good as Scott was, and his best form was in 82/83, he wasn't "likely" to have won the 1500 in Moscow.

You haven't got a clue.

Walker never beat Coe again after 1976 - that's in the remaining 13 years of Coe's career.

Scott was beaten repeatedly by Coe between 79 and 83. Their head to head record was 11-2 to Coe. Scott's only defeats of Coe came in 83, when Coe was ill, and by 0.08secs in 86.

There is a very good reason Straub wasn't in LA 84, and that was because he retired immediately after Moscow in 80. So he'd been retired and had no form for 4 years prior to LA! Lol.

Who were these missing Russians in 84?

I agree with your gist. I do wish to clarify that Ovett's famous win streak (which ended with his Olympic bronze finish in Moscow in 1980) at 1500 m / mile began after his second-place behind Scott on 13 May 1977 in Jamaica with both recording 3:39.8 according to the article in Athletics Weekly below. Filbert Bayi, then the WR-holder, was third in 3:39.9.

athleticsweekly.com

Steve Ovett's race history - part one - AW

Steve Smythe charts the middle-distance runner's early years through the 1970s in the first part of an Ovett race history special

Open link

I could be wrong about this as 1977 seems earlier than I would have guessed for this remark, but I do recall Scott flattering Ovett, saying after this victory something along the lines of "It's a feather in your hat" any time you beat Ovett.

One word: Money.

The best US athletes go into the big 4 professional sports (American football, basketball, baseball, hockey) where they can make hundreds of millions of dollars. Even the worst athletes in those sports make life-altering salaries. Running, in comparison pays a pittance, for an American athlete. The difference in monetary reward, is staggering.

You credited Coe with an extra #1 ranking for some reason - he only received 2, in ‘79 & ‘81.

And who besides Keino was 8x top-2? Only El Guerrouj and Kiprop - that’s it.

This is curious? Ngeny was considerably faster and also won the OG against the greatest miler in history.

Yet soccer is probably far closer than those sports to matching with the talent of a middle-distance runner, and soccer is 100 x bigger in Europe and elsewhere than in the USA.

Also, I'm not sure about this, but isn't the money focused in the top level leagues in American sport? In the UK, there are over 5,000 professional soccer players. That's 5,000 soccer players, with the lowest paid probably earning more than Jake Wightman, let alone somebody like George Mills.

And of course compare with Kenya and Ethiopia, where there are no professional sports other than distance running, probably the only 2 countries on Earth where that is the case.

Steve Ovett had the talent to be a proffessional soccer player (probably anything he set his mind to) but decided that he didn't like team sports. Of course, there was a lot less money in soccer back then. I doubt if he would pursue athletics today. Steve Cram's uncle played professional soccer for Sunderland. Again, he would very likely be a soccer player today.

JWH - I don't know where to start pulling this apart

Yep, good catch on Coe.

El G also ran far more fast paced 1500m races than Coe. The year Coe set his pb in 86, he ran four 1500m races on the circuit compared to 9 from El G in his 98 3:26.00 season.

And of course El G miraculously never got injured, so could do the same year after year.

Not to mention his races were faster because half of the others in the field were out of their heads on EPO, including pacemakers. And we know he had training partners later busted for EPO, including Ramzi.

In other words, even if El G himself was clean, comparisons with Coe are still meaningless.

coevett talking sense as per