El Keniano wrote:
What about Venuste Niyongabo winning that 5k?
He was a really good runner, although not a 5k specialist. Don't think I'd have him in anywhere near the top.
El Keniano wrote:
What about Venuste Niyongabo winning that 5k?
He was a really good runner, although not a 5k specialist. Don't think I'd have him in anywhere near the top.
I'm going with Ezekiel Kemboi. That guy is THE WORST!
Dieter Bauman, then. He was the worst and certainly didn't deserve to win.
Did someone mention Noah Ngeny? Seriously?
Wells won OG in the 100 meters with a time of 10.25 seconds for God's sake.
That is lame for 1980.
Some of you guys just throwing out names were obviously not around back then and/or obviously do not know your track and field history. Just because YOU have "barely heard of them" dosen't mean they weren't good. I haven't read through the entire thread to see if anyone has straitened you knuckleheads out yet, but for the record:
Stefano Baldini twice got bronze in the world championships and won the European championships (as well as world half marathon championships) before he won olympics and then another European gold afterwards.
Gezahegne Abera won the world championships the year after he won the olympics (and also won London and three times in Fukoaka).
Mizuki Noguchi got silver in the world championship the year before she won olympics and ran 2:19 the year after (still #6 all-time).
Naoko Takahashi twice won Berlin and was the first woman under 2:20.
Constantina Tomescu also won Chicago was third in London and has a gold, silver and bronze (plus a 5th place) from the world half marathon championships before she won olympic gold.
Valentina Yegorova won the world half marathon championships and got silver in the olypic marathon four years after she won olympic gold.
Dieter Baumann got silver in the 1988 olypics before he won gold (and finished forth in 1991 WC and 1996 OG). He's also still the fastest caucasian over 5k.
Fermin Cacho also has an olympic silver and two world championship silvers. he's also still #7 all time at 1500m.
Venuste Niyongabo certainly benefitted from Geb and Tergat running the 10k and Komen not making the team in 1996, but that only makes him one of the luckiest gold medalist not the worst. The year before he got bronze in the world championship 1500 behind Morceli and El Guerrouj and is till #6 all-time in the mile.
Million Wolde also benefitted from Geb and Tergat not running th 5k in 2000, but he won world junior cross-country in 1998(and was runner up in 1997) and got silver in the world championships 5k in 2001.
Noah Ngeny got silver in the world championships the year before he won the olympics and raced the El Guerrouj to the line when the latter set the WR. He aslo still holds the 1k WR (albeit it's rarely run). If he hadn't been injured in a car accident at age 22 we might be talking about Ngeny and not El Guerrouj as GOAT.
agip wrote:
Guestsafddsiofjdsi wrote:Ummm...no. Most of those names were competitive for years.
I'll grant you Thugwane and Hwang.
ok - I did 5 minutes of research on these oly marathon winners. Besides the OG, here is how many major marathons each won:
Baldini: 0
Thugwane: 0
Hwang: 0
Bordin: 1
Tomescu/Dita: 1
Yegorova: 1
Noguchi: 2
Takahashi: 2
I am excluding Fukuoka - that race has gone up and down in quality. I am excluding the european champs too - cause who cares - 3rd tier race.
so really - if your view is that an olympic champion should be a legend, long lasting, consistent champion...you don't have that proof here. three never won a major, 6 only won one other major.
point is that the OG marathon is a crapshoot and luck means more in that race than any other.
Good lord. Abera had one of the greatest marathon records in history, including victories in the Olympic Games, the World Championships, London, and three Fukuoka marathons. Even if you exclude his victories at Fukuoka, he was still the dominant championship marathoner of his time, as well as the winner of the top marathon time-trial in the world. What more do you want?
But if you're excluding Fukuoka, why don't you add Frank Shorter to that list? Only one Olympic gold, four Fukuoka golds, and a few wins in minor regional marathons (two at the U.S. Olympic trials and one at the Pam Am Games). And tons and tons of losses.
On the women's side, Noguchi and Takahashi were two of the all-time greats.
agip is really pretty amazing. No matter how many times he gets proven to be ignorant, he keeps at it waiting for the chance that someone as obtuse as him finally agrees with something he said.
Lasse Viren. Guy luck boxed into 4 olympic golds thanks to boycotts and murders and didn't nothing in between. Couldn't even break 2:13 in the maration when the world record was down at 208.
Avocado's Number wrote:
agip wrote:ok - I did 5 minutes of research on these oly marathon winners. Besides the OG, here is how many major marathons each won:
Baldini: 0
Thugwane: 0
Hwang: 0
Bordin: 1
Tomescu/Dita: 1
Yegorova: 1
Noguchi: 2
Takahashi: 2
I am excluding Fukuoka - that race has gone up and down in quality. I am excluding the european champs too - cause who cares - 3rd tier race.
so really - if your view is that an olympic champion should be a legend, long lasting, consistent champion...you don't have that proof here. three never won a major, 6 only won one other major.
point is that the OG marathon is a crapshoot and luck means more in that race than any other.
Good lord. Abera had one of the greatest marathon records in history, including victories in the Olympic Games, the World Championships, London, and three Fukuoka marathons. Even if you exclude his victories at Fukuoka, he was still the dominant championship marathoner of his time, as well as the winner of the top marathon time-trial in the world. What more do you want?
But if you're excluding Fukuoka, why don't you add Frank Shorter to that list? Only one Olympic gold, four Fukuoka golds, and a few wins in minor regional marathons (two at the U.S. Olympic trials and one at the Pam Am Games). And tons and tons of losses.
On the women's side, Noguchi and Takahashi were two of the all-time greats.
here's what I wrote - maybe you missed this part:
ok - I did 5 minutes of research on these oly marathon winners. Besides the OG, here is how many major marathons each won:
Baldini: 0
Thugwane: 0
Hwang: 0
Bordin: 1
Tomescu/Dita: 1
Yegorova: 1
Noguchi: 2
Takahashi: 2
and then in a separate post:
left out Abera - he won 2 other major marathons
two points: I don't consider WC marathons or the Euro Champs to be major marathons.to me, the marathon majors are the big races. It is harder to win a major than the OG. If you disagree with this, we'll have to agree to disagree.
fact is, many/most OG Marathon winners are of a lower tier than those who win on the track - several have won 0 majors. yes, there are exceptions. Abera. Noguchi and takahashi. But in general, these are lower-first tier runners.
do you disagree with this?
cnzs wrote:
agip is really pretty amazing. No matter how many times he gets proven to be ignorant, he keeps at it waiting for the chance that someone as obtuse as him finally agrees with something he said.
just spell my name right
I'll throw in Paraskevi "Voula" Patoulidou of Greece who won the 1992 100 hurdles after Gail Devers whacked the last hurdle and stumbled across the finish line.
Vasili Alexeyev:
He could run maybe 5m before collapsing of a massive coronary
Or maybe Serge Reding, silver 1968:
Usain Bolt. He's not even fast, it's just that he's so tall and his legs are so long that it makes him look fast.
1980 Olympic 100 meter champ. With the boycott the winning time was 10.2 or 10.3.
bulldog35 wrote:
1980 Olympic 100 meter champ. With the boycott the winning time was 10.2 or 10.3.
He still beat all 3 of the US selected athletes 2 weeks after the Olympics in Cologne!
How about 1972 Olympic gold medalist in the 1500M, Pekka Vasalla?
agip wrote:
Avocado's Number wrote:Good lord. Abera had one of the greatest marathon records in history, including victories in the Olympic Games, the World Championships, London, and three Fukuoka marathons. Even if you exclude his victories at Fukuoka, he was still the dominant championship marathoner of his time, as well as the winner of the top marathon time-trial in the world. What more do you want?
But if you're excluding Fukuoka, why don't you add Frank Shorter to that list? Only one Olympic gold, four Fukuoka golds, and a few wins in minor regional marathons (two at the U.S. Olympic trials and one at the Pam Am Games). And tons and tons of losses.
On the women's side, Noguchi and Takahashi were two of the all-time greats.
here's what I wrote - maybe you missed this part:
ok - I did 5 minutes of research on these oly marathon winners. Besides the OG, here is how many major marathons each won:
Baldini: 0
Thugwane: 0
Hwang: 0
Bordin: 1
Tomescu/Dita: 1
Yegorova: 1
Noguchi: 2
Takahashi: 2
and then in a separate post:
left out Abera - he won 2 other major marathons
two points: I don't consider WC marathons or the Euro Champs to be major marathons.to me, the marathon majors are the big races. It is harder to win a major than the OG. If you disagree with this, we'll have to agree to disagree.
fact is, many/most OG Marathon winners are of a lower tier than those who win on the track - several have won 0 majors. yes, there are exceptions. Abera. Noguchi and takahashi. But in general, these are lower-first tier runners.
do you disagree with this?
I didn't miss what you said. But I do disagree with you.
The so-called "marathon majors" are simply a collection of races that, in 2006, declared themselves to be "World Marathon Majors" and began to share advertising and prize money incentives. With the addition of the Tokyo Marathon, there are now six so-called "World Marathon Majors." But those races vary greatly in quality of competition, historical significance, and international prestige. The Tokyo Marathon has nowhere near the significance of the Fukuoka Marathon, which was long regarded as the de facto world marathon championship. The Berlin Marathon is essentially a mass-participation event coupled with a time trial for a very small number of runners, typically including one or two preselected runners who follow a phalanx of human windbreaks in pursuit of a fast time under near-laboratory conditions. The Boston marathon is an old local event that does not remotely resemble a record-quality marathon and has a history of extremely uneven competition. The NYC marathon was, at the elite level, almost entirely limited to U.S. runners on the men's side until the mid-1980s. The quality of the Chicago marathon has depended largely upon its sponsorship, sometimes having superb fields, and sometimes without any world-class competitors at all.
If you've "barely heard of" runners like Abera, Bordin, Noguchi, and Takahashi, that's not because they were lower-tier runners or one-hit wonders. And I certainly don't put winners of "majors" ahead of world and Olympic champions like Shorter, Kirui, Bikila, Cierpinski, Kiprotich, and Lopes. I do agree, however, that the winners of Olympic marathons are generally more difficult to predict than the winners of Olympic track races, at least for those of us who are on the outside looking in.