Why were Americans so good in the 60s, 70s and early 80s?

disco music made everything better.

no heart rate monitors,better shoes,no apearence fees,way way more speed work,way less tempo running hell everyday was a tempo run.

Ok, dumb guy. There were fewer people in the sport all around in those days. Travel was more prohibitive and lots of the Africans who did run didn't run as much as Americans and Europeans. If you look at Olympic medallists from the 50's onward, there were Africans. There were quite a few of them running for US colleges in the 70s, so many that the NCAA changed its regulations for who can and can't get a DI scholarship as a way to try to make American collegiate championships more attainable for US runners.

Yes, the numbers are different now. Loads of Africans believe they can be the best in the world and few Americans do. When Americans in the 60's-80's believed they could be the best in the world and approached the sport accordingly, some of them managed to do that. Most didn't, but that's true of any group.

How would you know what would happen if large numbers of Americans slogged out 180 miles a week these days? No one does it so what you've got at best is an uninformed opinion.

I'm glad that in your mind the current group of US runners is the best ever, but if I were one of those runners, I wouldn't consider that much of an endorsement.

I like our new group of young guys, I think they're committed to excellence. Lincoln and Goucher showed me something at the Pre meet; and Lincoln is really on fire here.

Acosta is certainly one of many bright young guys.

If this board is representative of the American running mind-set, it has to change.

People bash Lincoln, Rupp, Acosta, Symmonds, etc., more than they praise them. Lots of jealousy.

From watching Kenyans run for several years -- and if you saw the movie Endurance -- you'll see that for the Africans, it's team support, not backbiting and jealousy.

We have some great new runners out there, too bad so many are jealous.

I'm "dumb guy" now? That would be the pot calling the kettle black. Or more like a giant bucket of turds telling a pair of lightly worn socks that they stink.

Face this simple fact: no matter how you try to frame things, many more Africans have the opportunity and the financial incentive to run competitively nowadays, and they dominate the world scene. If they had had the same opportunities and incentives in the 60's and 70's, there is every reason to believe they would have dominated then, too.

If they had had to run against a world scene like that of today:

Bob Schul no gold medal

Billy Mills no gold medal

Bill Dellinger no medal

Lindgren still no medal

Prefontaine lucky to make it out of the heats

Shorter probably still a threat to medal

Can you really dispute that? Would Pre, no matter how ballsy he was and how much he believed he could be the best in the world, have been able to do anything about Africans who could destroy him in a sprint, and yet were also equally adept at running races hard from the front?

Agree Hajjmas ... I'm a huge Pre fan, but Rono came on the scene in 1978 and I've never (and still haven't) seen anything like it.

No way would Pre been able to hang with Rono, never, ever, ever. Pre had a faster mile time than Henry, that's it; but Henry could continue at a very fast clip for a long time.

Hajjmas wrote:

Bob Schul no gold medal

Billy Mills no gold medal

Bill Dellinger no medal

Lindgren still no medal

Prefontaine lucky to make it out of the heats

Shorter probably still a threat to medal

Whats your point? In 30 years Bekele, Tergat, Geb and El Guerrouj would not have a medal against those runners.

input wrote:

no heart rate monitors,better shoes,no apearence fees,way way more speed work,way less tempo running hell everyday was a tempo run.

no heart rate monitors [RIGHT]

better shoes [WRONG]

no apearence fees [WRONG]

way way more speed work [WRONG]

way less tempo running [WRONG]

One major contributing factor is that we didn't have broadband Internet connections, the Xbox, and 200 cable TV channels around to entice into staying indoors all the time.

When I was a teenager, our main recreational activity WAS sports!

You misunderstand me. Some guys from the past I think would be competitive in any era. Jim Ryun and Abebe Bikila come to mind. Their personal bests may not quite cut it these days (not far off though), but one gets the sense that they would have been able to match up with anyone they faced in any time period. Other runners I don't think have that quality. For instance, Paavo Nurmi was great and all that, but I have a hard time believing that if he came along today he would be able to run 26:30 for 10k. Granted, it's all conjecture when you talk about guys who were dominant champions, but when you talk about guys who weren't even unbeatable in their prime (most of the Americans of the 60's and 70's) it's not much of a leap to argue that they wouldn't be as competitive against a modern, larger elite field. For instance, if Pre couldn't finish top 3 against mostly Euros, you can't realistically argue that he would win a modern Olympic final, or even that he would still finish 4th.

Hajjmas wrote:

For instance, if Pre couldn't finish top 3 against mostly Euros, you can't realistically argue that he would win a modern Olympic final, or even that he would still finish 4th.

But then again, it has been statistically proven that the average age of a world-class 5,000m runner when they set their "permanent" PR is 27-years old. Now, please refresh my memory...how old was Prefontaine in Munich?

Do you really think Pre would have dropped his 13:2x down to 12:50 which would have been required to be competitive in today's era?

Fed on dreams of hope wrote:

Do you really think Pre would have dropped his 13:2x down to 12:50 which would have been required to be competitive in today's era?

Funny, I don't seem to recall saying that.

The fact of the matter is that you can't realistically compare runners from different generations. They must be measured against their peers from the same era. We have beaten this subject to death on these boards. For example, Wejo himself is faster than Nurmi and Zatopek, but would you consider him to be a "better runner" than those Olympic champions?

You make some good points; but, just compare the U.S. runners to the non-Africans and not that much has changed!

jersey joe wrote:

You make some good points; but, just compare the U.S. runners to the non-Africans and not that much has changed!

Ah, but that's not really the point, though. As the original topic creator implied, we need to compare our U.S. runners to ourselves.

To take the author's question and put it in a different perspective, why did we stop steadily improving? If you look at the all-time top 10 fastest athletes in the U.S. men's Olympic distance events (1,500m-and-up), you will see that the list is still heavily populated with pre-1990 performers. To be fair, you also need to remove the "naturalized" U.S. citizens from the list.

In stark contrast, within the same time period the Kenyans and Ethiopians have seen their entire all-time top 10 lists re-written...no Rono, no Yifter, nothing.

Americans spent several decades steadily improving, re-writing our distance records and all-time top 10 lists. What happened? Personally, I would tend to agree with the people who point the finger at so many additional "entertainment" options. I'm a SoCal runner from the HS class of '79, and I'm the first to admit that if I had been able to play Madden online with my friends on an HDTV when I was a teenager, I would have been spending a lot more of my free time indoors. The same goes for the advent of DVD movies and unlimited broadband Internet access.

The bottom line is that it's much more acceptable to be a high-tech coach potato in this day and age. Up until the mid-80s, there wasn't really that much around to entice us to stay indoors.

Well, if Hizbollah, Iran, the PRC, N. Korea and Israel have their way you may see all of us living the rugged life you speak of Gerry.

Out of necessity.

16th century anyone?

Racing won't be that important.

I'm gonna read up on some post-apocalypse film and book

summaries to get some ideas. Either that or stock up on bottles of codeine tablets and few bottles of Jack Daniels, just in case it gets REALLY off the charts.

Me? I like the 21st century, thank you.

Many of the people bashing our current runners for not running enough miles do so because it makes them feel better about themselves. They think,

"Man, if I could just stay healthy and had more talent and more time to train I would run 150 mpw instead of the 50 mpw I log right now. Yeah! Then I'd vault from 15:30 for 5000m right over Goucher, Broe, Webb and all these "lazy" Americans, straight to sub 13!"

This board (or the posters you are referring to) are not representative of the running mindset. It would be really great if all the negative poster's computers would just stop working. Or maybe they could grow up and get a life, lose the jealousy, whatever.

This discussion is great, minus the "runners back in the day couldn't run 12:50' morons.

Looking at the original topic of the post could lead to better runners NOW.

I seem to remember runners of all levels training more and harder and racing with abandon more often. Burnout was nonexistent (until Runners World convinced us that if we train too hard we would burn out).

The computer thing is a major contributor, too many distractions that are meaningless.

When I was getting born, Zatopek was taking the 10,000 WR to 28:54. About 13 years later, Clarke took it down by 75 seconds. At the time, if you'd told anyone who followed the sport that the WR in forty years or so would be another 75 seconds or so beyond what Clarke had done, none of us would have been surprised. If you'd told us that tracks would be at least a second per lap faster, that runers would be able to make a living from the sport and do nothing but train, that pacemaking would not only be legal but professionalized and that at least some people would take checmicals that can improve performances by 10% or so, we might have expected the record to be two or three minutes better by now.

The fact that Africans hold all the records now is as much because westerners have pretty much given up on the quest to be at the top at a time when Africans have picked it up.

I see no reason why non-Africans shouldn't have been able to match the times that today's Africans are posting.

Yes, there are tons of them. But if you look at the Boston Marathon, a good race for comparison because it's run on the same course as ever and has never used pacemakers, you see that the times turned in are very comparable to what was turned in 20-30 years ago If guys like DeCastella and Steve Jones could run 2:07s other westerners can too, even today.

You guys who are big on pointing out that yesterday's runners didn't have to contend with TODAY'S Africans also forget that today's Africans didn't have to contend with yesterday's westerners. You always present this as "What would happen if you took (Shorter, Mills, Rodgers, Virgin, Clarke, etc) and brought them to a race today against the Africans. You never ask what would happen if you took today's Africans and had them born in 1950 or so. If you could do that, you wouldn't find them running sub 13:00-27:00. They might well be the best runners of their era, as some Africans were back then, but their times would not be what they're posting now. Times progress over the years.