There's been a ton of distance track records broken this year. A lot of people have chocked this up to rampant doping since there aren't tests going on anymore. I think this is wrong for a couple reasons.
1. There has been plenty of random testing going on this year. We've seen several athletes at the very top of their events get suspended for 3 whereabouts failures, like Coleman and Manangoi. Obviously, there is still testing going on and it is crazy to think otherwise.
2. Athletes this year aren't choosing their peak races to be a championship where 3/4 of the race is a jog, and the final 400-800 is a sprint. I think it's not really fun to see who the fastest 400m runner in a 10000m race is. Everyone is essentially running a tempo pace or slower for most of their race, drafting off the people ahead of them until the final sprint. The last lap can be exciting, but the rest of the race is just boring.
When athletes can instead get a chance to focus on a time trial race to peak, they can focus more on building the strength to run a really fast time, as opposed to building the speed to be able to sprint at the end of a race. I think that's the biggest factor as to why we've seen so many fast times this year: people are actually peaking to run a fast time.
For the past decade, there are probably a number of people who could have run world records in mid distance/distance events but never got a chance to run a really fast time, and never particularly trained for a fast time.
Mo Farah is a great example of this; He had the longevity to be at the forefront of the 5000m and 10000m for 7 years, (maybe more depending on how 2021 goes) but his PRs are atrocious for an athlete of his caliber. Anyone who thinks he couldn't have run 12:44/26:30 or lower is kidding themselves. As soon as the slow, tactical championship races are taken out of the equation, a slew of fast times pop up because people finally have a reason to try to run fast. We know people could have been running that fast because for 10 years, there have been occasional incredibly fast races. Paris 2012, or Bruxxeles 2018 for example.
Think about all the fast times that got run this season:
WRs: 5000m, 10000m, one hour for the men, and 5000m, one hour, HM by women.
NR/ARs:
5000m NA record by Mo Ahmed
1500, 3000m ER by Jakob Ingebritsen
1500 NR, 3000m, 10000m AR Stewart McSweyn
5 sub 3:31 in one season!
4 under 12:50
3 under 7:30
5000m AR Shelby Houlihan (and Karissa Schweizer 3 seconds back)
3000m NR Laura Weightman
1000m, 1500m NR Laura Muir
10 people 14:45 or under
7 under 8:30
7 under 4:01
A high schooler broke 4 in the mile, a sophomore ran 4:01, and a senior ran 13:50.
Multiple girls ran under 10, and a few under 9:50 2 miles.
And that's just some of the fast times that got run this year. All of the people who broke records were drug tested, and they were clean, on top of the random tests that are getting done as stated earlier.
So all of this really proves that we should get rid of the Olympics and World Championships so that we can have faster times more often.