Kipchoge, Rupp, & Flanagan Are All Guilty of Mechanical Doping in 2016 - Will Anything Be Done About It?

uu.uuuuu.u wrote:

PeanutButterJelly wrote:

So this is the hill you're gonna die on. ...alrighty then

Seriously. Love the website, but I'm sick of the website putting all their focus into this single issue. And the borderline false reporting (Vaporflys will be banned!) every other day doesn't help.

Rojo wants athletes have their medals taken away, including Kipchoge who would have won anyway, for running in shoes that are still legal and which the athletes wearing them probably didn't realize gave any real significant advantage.

And yet he employs moderators that routinely delete threads highlighting doping information about former stars relevant to evaluating their legacy - such as a thread I made recently about Miruts Yifter and his training in East Germany with confirmed state sponsored dopers such as Olaf Beyer.

While I am a frequent reader of the site I have rarely posted. Hope this works.

I’m disappointed how this post started. Please correct me if I am wrong. Didn’t Rojo or his brother WeJo graduate from a college that is known for intelligence? Not that even going to college means you are intelligent as is the case here. What happened?

Can’t figure out how it took you over three years to denounce Olympic medals based on shoes? I get it that if the shoes were banned before the race but I don’t think that is the case here. So please don’t waste any of your readers intelligences regardless of our education with your lack of intelligence.

Evolution and innovation of the sport is inevitable and necessary for advancement. There wouldn’t be a let’s run.com without sports companies putting money and innovations in the sport (disclaimer, I don’t work for a shoe company. I have spent 30 years at a fortune 100 insurance company).

I have enjoyed the comments about cinder tracks and golf clubs. Is there any LPGA or PGA golfer on the tour today that can out drive someone using a number 1 wood (made out of a tree) vs using a metal driver (I don’t golf either)?

One last comment since I don’t post much. I almost never read posts by unregistered users. While I don’t always agree with a registered user I agree with most of them here on Rojo’s post. I hold so muchmore credibility with registered users. Thanks Dell for your post.

-Jon Hansen

lkglkgkc wrote:

bladerunner wrote:

Too funny. Let's go after Nike but Semenya and the 2 other podium finishers didn't have unfair advantages? Men racing women is ok but lets go after a shoe? I would guess Sifan Hassan is next. She had an unfair spike or something. Goodbye to this idiotic website.

The Brojos are to some extent infected with political correctness or the ridiculous zeitgeist and refer to Caitlyn Jenner, father of six or so children, with feminine pronouns.

But my sentence above may draw charges of misgendering and transphobia, though I hate nobody.

What next?

The drinks at the water stations? If one drinks something different, that's drinks doping? If one misses his drink and the other doesn't? Also doping? Please stop.

I’m not even going to read any of this article or subsequent comments, I just want to say that the phrase “mechanical doping” sounds ridiculous. I do believe the shoes provide an advantage, making up stupid jingoistic words and phrases is just silly... “Hey, look at me, I made up a cool word!”

Rojo, I think you're really conflating ought with is here. If you VF-series shoes are a bridge too far, I'm not going to argue with you. If you think it's problematic that only some athletes have access to superior tech, that's totally fair. But what you're saying is that the current IAAF rules prohibited what happened in Rio, and that's just very wrong, for a number of reasons.

Rules have read in context. So keep in mind the rule that the current rule replaced--which banned springs. That was a rule written by people who didn't understand the biomechanics of running. The rule was untenable because all rules are springs. What they did instead was replace it with something vague and aspirational.

Also, the rule should be read against the background of existing practice. Athletes have been wearing custom shoes and prototypes since athletics began. At one point, shoes were not even mass produced, so you had to have a cobbler make them. Bannister had an ultralight custom pair of spikes for his 4-minute mile. Nike has been putting spike plates in its Streak shoes--just on the request of specific elite athletes--for decades! Considering that the use of prototypes, experimental shoes, and custom shoes was standard practice before the new rule was put in place, it's absurd to think that the practice was outlawed by such a vague rule. If the IAAF had intended to ban the practice, it would have just written, "all shoes must be commercially available."

Also, despite the effectiveness of the VF-series shoes, the difference is of degree, not of kind, from current shoes. It was pretty well understood by the time that the VF came out that racing flats are more economical than running barefoot because they passively store and return energy. Basically it's a trade off between cushioning (which increases economy) and weight (which decreases it). Nike didn't discover this, and it didn't create the first shoe that was faster than running barefoot. The Adios Boost, for instance, was also lab tested to improve economy, though the number was only around 1% rather than 4%. Still, before the VF, the Adios was the dominant shoe on the world scene, and every non-sponsored amateur was racing in it.

The bottom line is that by 2016 it was widely understood and accepted that shoes improved running economy and that better shoes improved it more. It had also been standard practice in track and field, for the entire history of the sport, for elites to use custom shoes and prototypes. The IAAF's vague rule, which was mostly intended as a placeholder for subsequent regulation, absolutely did nothing to change this state of affairs.

The only thing that was unexpected in 2016 was that one company made a shoe that was SO much better than all the others. That's arguably a problem, and it deserves to be addressed, but it doesn't mean that it's a problem that the current rules speak to. People are desperate to find a hook in the current rules for fixing the "VF problem," but every theory for how the rules potentially speak to the VF is a theory that would outlaw tons of stuff that was happening before the VF, which everybody thought was fine.

Sometimes things happen that we don't like. Things that should be illegal. The solution is to make them illegal, not to pretend that they already were.

"but every theory for how the rules potentially speak to the VF is a theory that would outlaw tons of stuff that was happening before the VF, which everybody thought was fine."

This^

It's amazing how things/times change, in 2003 when Paul Tergat set the world record and became the first man to go sub 2:05, it was his 6th marathon and he'd not won one of the previous 5. He rocks up in carbon plated Fila racers and takes 43 seconds off the previous record - nobody seems to bat an eyelid (they certainly didn't question, or put the performance down to the shoes). Strange why Fila really didn't push on from that point and become a dominate running brand? Anyway....

Miscellaneous wrote:

Rojo stupidity has reached new heights.

It's a semi-serious cynicism. It pays the bills.

LOL what is up with the thumbnail pic for this article.

People have to get over their hatred for Nike. It makes them look dumb.

I’m calling for the results of the 1996 Olympic 200 and 400 to be annulled. Michael Johnson wore custom-made prototype golden spikes that were not available to all competitors and gave him an unfair advantage. The shoes were made of Zytel, a high strength, abrasion and impact resistant thermoplastic polyamide developed by DuPont and weighing only 3 oz each. Without the shoes his best time was 19.66. Second place Frankie Fredericks ran 19.68. Would Johnson have won without his mechanically doped shoes? Maybe, but I’m not sure.

Miscellaneous wrote:

Rojo stupidity has reached new heights.

If you're a sports fan with any passion, it's easy to get worked up over this. F1, baseball, nascar, NFL etc all have rules and follow them. Or try to. Imagine if Lewis Hamilton showed up with an extra 30mm tire width at a Grand Prix, or people used corked bats in MLB.. there would be outrage. Or if Chris Froome had a 12.5lb bike at the TDF. Forget it.

World Athletics apparently makes no attempt to follow their own rules. And apparently no one in their offices knows anything about equipment either. I'm fairly certain Kipchoge could show up with actual springs on his shoes and they wouldn't do anything about it. London 2018 is the only time he has worn "readily available" shoes since Chicago 2014.

There’s a lot at play to get an accurate measure of his times relative to Geb and Kenenisa. If a healthy Bekele or Geb started ticking off marathons in flats when they were 28 it’s hard to believe they’re not at 2:02. And Kipchoge is right behind them.

Herpassa Negasa is better than Haile Gebrselassie. Go ahead folks, explain that to me. I'm fairly certain that Kipchoge is the best marathoner of all time but he is not over two minutes better than Haile. If you took the top 5 fastest men of 2019 and put them in a race with Haile no one would pick arguably the greatest distance runner of all time to win the race. A man that was competing only a few years ago. It's ridiculous that anyone on here is still attempting to argue that the shoes have barely any difference. I agree with the statement that we finally have faster shoes...it's the same thing with synthetic tracks. We simply can't compare times across eras anymore. Tergat in 2003 would barely make the top 20 last year. Is Sisay Lemma better than Tergat? Obviously not.

Get off this lame weak take already. Who is to say that shoe tech must stop to everything prior to the Nike innovations? Who gets to draw that line? Why that line? This pearl clutching by vultures needing attention and clicks is so pathetic.

Gratin' wrote:

Rojo you are big big big big big dumb

I'm sure his accountant will disagree.

UA Runner wrote:

Miscellaneous wrote:

Rojo stupidity has reached new heights.

If you're a sports fan with any passion, it's easy to get worked up over this. F1, baseball, nascar, NFL etc all have rules and follow them. Or try to. Imagine if Lewis Hamilton showed up with an extra 30mm tire width at a Grand Prix, or people used corked bats in MLB.. there would be outrage. Or if Chris Froome had a 12.5lb bike at the TDF. Forget it.

World Athletics apparently makes no attempt to follow their own rules. And apparently no one in their offices knows anything about equipment either. I'm fairly certain Kipchoge could show up with actual springs on his shoes and they wouldn't do anything about it. London 2018 is the only time he has worn "readily available" shoes since Chicago 2014.

I'm not sure if you're deliberately misquoting the IAAF rule or not, but it's written as "reasonably available to all in the spirit of the universality of athletics." Reasonably, not readily. That's a lot more vague, isn't it? Reasonably could be defined in a lot of different ways. You or Rojo would probably define it as being able to go to the local running store and be able to pull an identical model off the shelf. I think most people would not define it this way. The whole basis of this thread and the opinion piece was that all Nike athletes were getting an unfair advantage because they were the only ones with access to the shoes. But wouldn't it be "reasonable" if you were a young, aspiring runner to tell your agent to seek out a shoe contract with Nike instead of _____ company so that you could race in Vaporfly's?

ShilohDoesntCare wrote:

It's ridiculous that anyone on here is still attempting to argue that the shoes have barely any difference.

No one is arguing VF's aren't clearly superior to other shoes. We are arguing that nothing illegal took place, and no cheating took place, so the concept of stripping Olympic medals is absurd.