Can't win wrote:
Agree on the trolling observation. Here's what I love to hate on letsrun:
1. Doesnt matter what race you won or didnt win. It wasnt good enough. If it was a championship race, then you got lucky because of the tactical nature of it, e.g. Centro. If it was a time trial, rabbitted race, well then it was not a championship race, e.g. any Alan Webb good performance.
2. Too fast - you were on drugs OR "you got dragged" to your performance - as if anybody could have run 26:48 merely by drafting off the rabbits. Last I checked, I cant keep up with Bekele merely by running behind him.
3. Too slow - you stink, youre tactics are terrible, you should have taken it out and run like a man like "I would have."
Well put. My guess? The element at LR that is prone to do that is emblematic of a culture of defeat that pervaded American distance running--a kind of troll-culture of self-hatred that was an understandable outgrowth of the overwhelming dominance of East African runners for much of the last several decades. This culture has plenty of evidence to chew on--or did until the last few years--but now that American runners on many fronts are showing signs of being able to compete with EA runners, that culture of defeat is slightly out of step.
It's so used to explaining away ANY momentary triumph by a (white) American runner, however large or small, as a meaningless blip, or as somehow otherwise lacking, that it can't deal with the truth: that American runners, as a group, have made amazing and consistent progress over the past few years.
The culture of defeat is a lagging indicator but doesn't realize, or won't admit, that it is. It still thinks that it's preaching truth. So, for example, the fact that in the race under consideration, Rupp beat five Kenyans (if memory serves), four of whom ran PBs and one of who ran a SB, would, as we know, be explained away within the paradigm of the culture of defeat as him having beating "a bunch of second-tier Kenyans." But of course five years ago it would have been said, if he'd lost to those same runners, "white guys just can't compete with the Kenyans."
One sure sign of the culture of defeat at work is this sliding-scale effect. It shows up here as the OPs series of diminishing qualifiers for Rupp's AR. Please remember that the talk of this forum only a few years ago was that Rupp was a weird, coddled g-y boy, a denizen of silly things like altitude tents, who had done well enough in HS but wouldn't possibly be able to compete on the world stage. Anybody who claimed at that point that he'd run a reasonably close third to an in-shape Bekele, destroy the AR, and vanquish so many decent Kenyan runners would have been laughed off the forum--or, more likely, called an idiot fan-boy.
If Rupp had listened to that crap and taken it to heart, he would gone down in flames. To his credit, he's kept on doing the work.
Beware the sliding scale.