If you had brought back the average track fan from 2005 and showed him last night's races, he would probably assume that most of the population of Africa had been wiped out by a virus or something in the intervening years.
Maybe I'm doing the average track fan of 2005 an injustice, and he would simply correctly guess that testing for EPO had greatly improved.
The older Morceli was the more talented of the two, but he didn't have EPO
I think it him that coached Morceli.
If you want really to know authentic talents you have just to see what they were doing after their track retreats.
Aouita was coaching at the peak of carrer and pursued his work until his 60th.
Right now I see Khaled Sakah (end 80s and beginning 90s) is still coaching ... he is particularly the coach of Meriem Azrour. (an Amazigh girl who unfortunately was not well supported).
Africa performed poorly during the boycotts era for obvious reasons. Then the agents came in and started bringing more runners on the road circuit. That was also the EPO era. African athletes were tremendous at championships on the track beginning in 1987-88, and the best Brits, Cram, Coe, Ovett, faded as they were getting old after 1988. The young and promising Brits did not rise as expected at that point and then Western nations, as Renato said, did a lot worse than in the 1980s with harmful training fads, low mileage, and discouragement with the impossibility of competing with huge drops in time from what seemed to be physically superior East African runners (who were doped up in a high proportion all the way up to the present times with the 300+ Kenyan doping positives after 2015 in an era when testing actually reached to Kenya and results were not always suppressed like they have been in Spain and as they were suppressed under Lamine Diack, who extorted athletes with positive tests and suppressed others.
The American successes in 2016-17 and especially those of the Ingebrigtsens showed Westerners that they were the only ones in their way, that they could anything on the track that anyone else could do, and it didn't hurt that all the doping cases, including the Russians who had mopped up so many medals through doping cases that continue to come up from 2009 on, were suggesting that the clean runners would have a shot. Now you have Western prodigies rising all over the place to compete for medals. Africans still absolutely dominate the marathon, where there is a lot of money and probably lousy doping control, and still have tremendous depth and competition, but this is a real sea change and hence involves more than a few factors (for example, the American resurgence started with the success of three high schoolers, Hall, Ritz, and Webb, in 2000-2001, which led to much greater depth on the high school scene and eventually the medals of the 2010s (Centro and Simpson in 2011, Symmonds, Centro, and I think Simpson in 2013, Centro and Coburn and Jager and numerous others in 2016-17). You had the rise of professional groups in the United States, especially the gray area NOP and BTC.
Coevett, African athletes dominated the distance during the EPO era because european and American disappeared. In 1991 UK had 9 athletes under 3'32" , and 3 WR holders around 3'30" (Ovett 3'30"77, Cram 3'29"67, Coe 3'29"77), while the best athletes in 2011 was James Shane in 3'36"22. UK had a great tradition in Marathon, with Ron Hill at 2:09 already in 1969, Ian Thompson in 2:09 and European Champion in 1974, and Steve Jones at 2:07:13 in 1985 with a crazy race without pacers that there are today. With all this tradition, in 2003 the best British specialist was a woman, since no men were able to run faster than 2:15:25 !
Blame European that were no longer interested for the African dominance. The reality is that for almost 30 years European disappeared from the scene because THEIR FAULTS, and step by step, since in athletics there is no historical memory, NORMAL performances became something of supernatural, needing doping for reaching them.
When you see in Kenya a Cross Country like Sirikwa, with more than 3000 runners starting from competitions 400m long for children under 5 years, and you compare this to what happen in Europe / America, you understand the real SECRET. It's the ambience, everybody wants to try to run and the best look for a professional career.
Maybe this can push somebody to use shortcuts for emerging, but if you are thousands of fishes and you use a net, many good fish remain in the net. In Europe, we still use the fishing pole, and are not able to find big talents not interested.
The old post about the talent is a real stupidity. Talent is everywhere, the problem is to find it and to create interest about running at top level. In every discipline there is not the prevalence of one people under the potential point of view, but the possibility to find the talent depending of ambience, interest, organization.
We don't have in athletics the category black or white, young or old. We have two categories only : strong and weak, always was like this, and always will be in the future.
Well barega and tsegay just lost to Non Africans and they weren’t even skinny like everyone says you need to be for distance running
Look at the Mens 1500 just showed us that the African are done for, but the 5000m just even nailed the head in the coffin when two Caucasian won with ease 😭, this whole time it was skinny legs springy legs and better altitude adaptation but it’s just drugs 💊
Well barega and tsegay just lost to Non Africans and they weren’t even skinny like everyone says you need to be for distance running
Look at the Mens 1500 just showed us that the African are done for, but the 5000m just even nailed the head in the coffin when two Caucasian won with ease 😭, this whole time it was skinny legs springy legs and better altitude adaptation but it’s just drugs 💊
Fisher and Cole just elevated the game, Andreas almgren also keeping that 10k record for a long time
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