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

Maybe I am misunderstanding but negative split means getting faster on the second lap. Rudisha certainly slowed down by about +2 seconds and most world records have followed a similar trend. I think Coe's 1:41 was an even more aggressive positive split. Fiasconaro similar and I think also Juantorena, though don't know the splits off the top of my head. If I see a negative split referenced in the 800, such as Will Sumner's win at NCAAs, it is usually meant that the person had more time to squeeze because they didn't get out aggressively enough.

Nick Symmonds said his strategy for running a fast 800 was to aim for about +2 second differential because that seemed to be a physiological sweet spot based on prior top-end performers and it worked for him personally. You see in most of his races this means he's closer to the back at the start as others get out more aggressively and then he appears to kick everyone down, even though he himself has slowed relative to the first lap but relative to everyone else tying up he is flying.

Butch Reynolds ran 43.29 35 years ago.

No one has run that fast in the last 7 years. Last year, a 400 hurdler who couldn't even make the US team medaled in the 400m at Worlds.

You do realize an event is more than just its WR right? Like... the quality of entire fields contesting the distance.

Brazier had 4th surgery on foot last summer

This

The most talented of the current era has not been Brazier! Korir and Amos are both faster at 800 (and especially 400). ...further, Brazier is/was nowhere close to Rudisha to have a "Rudisha effect". LOL!!! Brazier's fastest time doesn't even scratch at the 14 times Rudisha ran faster and now Brazier is only one year younger than Rudisha's retirement age. Was never going to happen!

Also interesting that the OP singles out the 800 as not progressing. Two "premier" events, the 1500 and 100, have gone longer without WR progression.

Also worth noting, WR progression doesn't necessarily mean the event is currently entertaining. The Pole Vault and Shot Put WRs get broken by a singular dominant athlete practically every other meet and have so for four years running. ... again, not necessarily entertaining.

I'm surprised that the drugs wouldn't be effective for middle distance, it seems like sprinters and distance runners have been getting busted for the same exact drugs. You'd associate EPO with distance runners, and peptides with sprinters but we've seen plenty of sprinters get busted for EPO and distance runners with IGF-1 LR3 and the like. You'd expect it to work really well for the stuff in the middle, no?

I'd agree that the new shoes are not that impressive at 800. AZV is no better than previous shoes, dragonflys are not aggressive enough.

Wavelights... Do they set them at at an even pace to reach the target time? Nobody runs the 800 like that. The wavelight in top pro 800s should always be set to 49s/400 for the first lap

David Rudisha ran 1:40.91 in the 2012 Olympics.

I read all of the other posts and I was the FIRST to say this. Give credit where credit is due!

Despite its long tradition the 800 is athletically a kind of outlier, in the way that the 3000m is. The best over that latter distance aren't necessarily the best over the 1500 or the best over 5000 - the event seems to require its own specialist. So we also see with the 800. The speedsters over 400 generally lack the endurance to master the 800 - you have to go back to Juantorena in '76 for the last prominent exception - and the best 1500 runners often lack the necessary speed. Coe was an exception amongst middle distance exponents - and possibly so because he had much more speed than his peers over the 1500. That was over 40 years ago. (So it also was with Snell a generation earlier). The "perfect" 800 runners were likely Rudisha and Kipketer, neither of whom was competitive at any other distance. They were true 800 specialists, with exactly the right balance of speed and endurance for the event. It is a rare athlete who can combine those qualities to the degree they did. That is a significant reason why we are seeing little progress in the event - notwithstanding innovations in shoes and the inevitable presence of doping. Indeed doping may now have a limited effect on this event because the sprinter types can generally only enhance their speed - fast-twitch athletes don't have much natural stamina - and the middle distance exponents can increase their stamina but not their speed because they aren't fast-twitch athletes.

The times in today's 800 might not match the massive leaps in performance made in the 1500 and up (superspikes have no effect on 800 runners), but the Wanyonyi and Arop rivalry established last year gives us the potential for some great matchups going into an Olympic year. I think for the 800 to become a marquee event, there needs to be dominant figures and rivalries that prevent the event from being viewed as a crapshoot.

Because I think the 800m is right in the sweet spot of distances that a) doping has the least impact on and b) the current "portfolio" of other performance enhancing factors (primarily wavelight and secondarily footwear) also has the least impact on. It's the event where athletic talent is the most important and the reality is that in terms of our evolution as a species athletically, we started approaching a plateau around the beginning of the 1980's.

As we know the 800m is neither predominantly aerobic or anaerobic - it's a fine balance of excellence in both. The gains to be made from requisite PED's are limited compared to the impact they have on the pure anaerobic events (100-400m) and the same on the aerobic side (1500m-marathon). That's just a hypothesis but I don't think the ceilings you can reach with doping are has high/that far removed from the best physiological talents we have and have had on the planet.

What is an easier hypothesis to make is the effect of footwear/wavelight. Footwear is simple - the primary benefit on the track is fatigue reduction due to vastly increased cushioning at weights that don't detract from performance. These effects aren't really amplified until we get into events above the 1500m, let alone an event that lasts only 101-105 seconds at an elite level. The spikes worn by Coe in the 80's are really no worse for the event than the spikes worn by Rudisha in 2012 (which also weren't "super" because they had about 3mm of EVA in the forefoot). Wavelight also has little to no impact. The event is two laps long - it's being run right at the maximum threshold pace for as long as possible (the best guys can go 650-700m). Where it is/would be most beneficial is the first 300m because it should stop guys running way too hard which compromises how far they can go without flipping anaerobic and swimming in a sea of lactic acid, except the reality is that getting off the line fast and finding a position on the track seems to take precedence and overrides that. When you watch Rudisha in London he actually doesn't get that fast off the line, nor does he run overly quick in the first lap compared to some races we have seen - he runs the perfect opening lap but that's because the field lets him. Would wavelight have mattered there? Doubt it. What we do know is how huge a benefit it is over 1500m up. Look at the splits of Jakobs best races. Look at the WR splits of Cheptegei which are simply absurd in their uniformity. It's so much harder to run even lap splits on your own when you need to run 12.5-26 of them - not so much when you only have run 1.5 of them in an 800m.

Summary, the 800m was always more evolved in terms of peak performance than almost every other event but especially the ones we most associate/lump it in with (distance races). When you look at the 400m and it's evolution we see a similar pattern - we aren't really running faster as a species than we were in the 80's either (Reynolds 43.29 in 1988). With respect to the longer events, we just didn't realize how truly important even paced running just below the anaerobic threshold was and even when we did, it was so hard to put it into practice.

So yeah, it's doubtful we really see much more evolution in this event and certainly not to the degree we will see (are seeing) in other events.

re 1500, it's true the top time is old but 80% of the top 10 times are this century, and the general mass of top few dozen times trends heavily recent. plus the top 10 has 3 guys, katir, cheruiyot, and ingebrigtsen, who did it last couple years and are ready to chase something.

i generally agree "stagnant" is exaggerated for the 800, the record is this century as are about half the top 10 times, but it is not as "present" tense as other events. 100m the whole top 10 is this century. 200m is mike johnson and after. 5k and 10k are recent records and mostly 21st century top 10 times. 110H top 8 are this century.

400 and 400H are then somewhat like 800, recent record but several 90s in the top 10. fwiw this cluster of events is an interesting group, 400, 800, 400H, friend of mine whose kid isn't a burner loves to run and is looking for a TF event. i pointed him that direction. not a pure speed drag race, nor is it distance pace. 800 splits are like a solid HS/D3 quarter time, just done twice which is the trick.

Yes of course the greatest 800M run ever. There are a lot of great responses in this thread, however no responses on why Coe and Cruz were able to run those times so long ago and today they are very rarely run.

I realize the 800M the athletes are on a razors edge, too fast for the first 400m or 600M and a fast time comes to a crashing halt.

Wrong.

There is no rule that supertalents emerge every X years.

Coe, Cruz, Kipketer, Rudisha are the biggest talents the event has ever seen. We’re waiting on the next guy who also isn’t beset by injuries like the top prospects of late have been.

I reckon if Jakob wasn't there I'm pretty sure the 1500 would also be stagnant. He's the one bringing the best in all the others.

No there isn't a rule - but it does seem that when the supertalents have emerged - even on a totally random schedule, that they not managed to really lift the bar of performance in the same ways we have seen over other distance events and this is the point the OP is making I believe.

Let's say Wanyoni is the next great supertalent and stays healthy - do we really think we are seeing him run 1.40.5? Because if we looked at say the 5000/10000m and the progression from the mid 80's to now, that type of progression should see an 800m WR in the 1.38.5 range.

Let's take Moorcrofts 13.00.41 in 1982 and Coe's 1.41.73 in 1981 as comparable "point in time marks". The 5000m record in 2004 was set by Bekele 23.06 seconds faster - or 2.95% faster. The 800m record in 2004 was 1.41.11 - only 0.6% better. And looking as of today we are 3.2% faster over the 5000m and only 0.8% better. Even the relative improvement from 2004 to 2024 favors the 5000m - even if slightly.

Excellent point, Brazier is obviously an amazing talent that definitely could have climbed into these ranks were it not for the injuries. Really to bad, clock is ticking, I am rooting for him to come back, but all of these surgeries are going to make that tough.