corraleyejoe wrote:
NZ and Scotland each have a pop of 5 million.
Tennessee alone is 7 million.
Kerr is right. They're much tougher racers.
There is plenty of talent over here. You are just too precious of your reputation to race.
Except for Athing Mu.
She doesn't care what you think of her, as long as her situation is getting better.
It would be interesting to have a more detailed measurement of things like this, i.e. the proportion of people in a given country participating in different sports, or any sports at all.
It might also be interesting to compare places and their historical/current running prowess based only on their populations. Hong Kong with 7,496,981, Laos with 7,275,560, Paraguay with 7,132,538, Bulgaria with 6,948,445, Libya with 6,871,292 , Tennessee with 6,975,218. All very different places.
How do the demographics line up? I imagine you'd only get a half-decent chance at guessing if you include enough variables - wealth, health, lifestyle, sport choice, climate, geography, international sports involvement/diplomacy, and who knows what else.
Most important to me is that we still have somebody like Kerr in the sport, willing to make playful jabs and keep from being too serious about how we talk about running (versus being serious about the training, which I'm all in favor of).
That said, it could be that I'm backing the billy pot just because I have the same last name.