Molly Huddle-GOAT wrote:
Five years ago, everyone said Ethiopians were genetically superior. Now everyone says every Ethiopian is a doper.
I guess it must be that Americans are genetically superior, so anyone who runs faster than them is cheating.
I guess if Molly Huddle had grown up poor in East Africa, running on dirt at altitude, with the example of many Olympic champions before her, she would have run exactly the same time she did today.
I guess Molly Huddle has reached the absolute pinnacle of human performance. No woman ever will be able to run faster than what she did today without doping. I also hope that someone gets her to a doctor, she must be near her deathbed given that no human being ever has run this sort of effort before and never will again.
All hail Molly Huddle.
This takes the cake as silliest POD. But you're not the only poster who is (intentionally) missing the point.
The current state of elite running is such that ANY performance that falls far outside expected norms is automatically suspect. I don't blame anybody who questions Ayana's performance. (I certainly won't blame Vivian Cheriot if she chooses to question it.) It was unworldly. Nor to I blame anybody who questions Katie Ledecky's recent performances--in the 800 freestyle, for example. Both performances are equivalent, in some sense: freaky, crazy, admirable--but they also force us to ask, these days, whether we're watching drugs at work.
The next stage, after manifesting reasonable suspicion, is to behave like an adult. That means actually assembling the evidence. Does the athlete have ANY precedent for such performances? Do they, for example, have a known, or discoverable, association with known dopers, known coaches who dope athletes?
Nobody I know says that every Ethiopian runner is a doper. But some of them are.
Nobody I know says that every (white) American cyclist is a doper. But we, ah, had a little problem there.
It's not an either/or thing, ever. We've been through this already with the genetics vs. culture thing in discussions of East African runners. Some of us have figured out that when you put genetics and culture together, great things happen.
It's not racist to question whether specific outlier performances were made possible by PEDs. In this particular case, the existing record was dirty. So of course the runner who breaks it, in a wild outlier performance, is going to take some heat.
The stuff about Molly Huddle is a wonderful example of reductio ad absurdum--which is to say, it's absurd. Nobody is making that sort of claim about Molly Huddle. Great race for her, BTW. She wasn't going to beat Ayana--even without the drugs; only joking--but Ayana's crazy performance clearly helped drag her along to the AR. Nice.