Jake Wightman interview

Does Wightman understand the difference between incremental improvement and the improvement which renders Bekele's - and probably, in the close future, Rudisha's - WR irrelevant?

Also: synthetic from cinder track was a big jump, indeed, but it was also an absolute necessity to avoid muddy/dusty surfaces.

Technological progress can't be stopped but it can (could) be regulated.

No one has ever stated Rudisha set his WR because if technology. He’s just the best we’ve ever seen.

Colorado kid wrote:

Also: synthetic from cinder track was a big jump, indeed, but it was also an absolute necessity to avoid muddy/dusty surfaces.

Technological progress can't be stopped but it can (could) be regulated.

Super shoes are needed to get rid of the full throttle EPO records.

Coevett wrote:

Colorado kid wrote:

Also: synthetic from cinder track was a big jump, indeed, but it was also an absolute necessity to avoid muddy/dusty surfaces.

Technological progress can't be stopped but it can (could) be regulated.

Super shoes are needed to get rid of the full throttle EPO records.

Which you actually have zero evidence for.

I see. Coe could run 1:41,7 clean but Rudisha, 30+ yrs later, on a better surface in better shoes, could run 0.8 faster only by doped to the gills. You might say Coe was a once in a century talent but others might say Rudisha was that talent for the following century.

Well, for me, they could have been both clean or both dirty but how can you be so sure the next 800 wr will be achieved by talent+training+super shoes only. Why are you so sure, for example, that people running incredible times in super shoes in the past 10 months had not also been on "Covid-regime"?

Doping makes it sometimes quite difficult to see who the better runner is ...and now we have the extra shoe-factor which makes comparisons almost impossible - and I'm not talking only about the elit. What about records and pbs in your local club or in your old HS?

I agree with Wightman. The sport is more interesting without as much shoe talk and more focus on the athletes. He ran 3:31 at the World Champs without super spikes. He didn't lose because he didn't have better shoes on. Now that every brand pretty much has something new out, I hope we can appreciate the racing a little more. Before carbon plated shoes, it's not like there weren't differences in spikes and flats. Technology has been improving in a number of areas. I don't think it's helpful to the sport to think people are only fast because of shoes when we know what the training is like to run fast in the first place.

Chris Thompson should get covered as a 39 year old dad who has had a ton of ups & downs in the sport & delivered an amazing performance instead of someone who painted a pair of Alphafly's black.

Arguing about shoes is for losers. Every sports advances technologically, why do you want oir sport to stay primal?

I would rather see athletes nowadays run on stilts but be faster than the athletes from the steroids or epo era.

Colorado kid wrote:

Does Wightman understand the difference between incremental improvement and the improvement which renders Bekele's - and probably, in the close future, Rudisha's - WR irrelevant?

Also: synthetic from cinder track was a big jump, indeed, but it was also an absolute necessity to avoid muddy/dusty surfaces.

Technological progress can't be stopped but it can (could) be regulated.

Don't care about Rudishas record. Would love to see Burgin break it with the shoes in 2022.

look in mirror wrote:

Colorado kid wrote:

Does Wightman understand the difference between incremental improvement and the improvement which renders Bekele's - and probably, in the close future, Rudisha's - WR irrelevant?

Also: synthetic from cinder track was a big jump, indeed, but it was also an absolute necessity to avoid muddy/dusty surfaces.

Technological progress can't be stopped but it can (could) be regulated.

Don't care about Rudishas record. Would love to see Burgin break it with the shoes in 2022.

LOL sure.

I also agree with Wightman. My main takeaway from the story was how competitive the trials will be, and now I'm looking forward to seeing how they go.

I, for one, don’t care at all about super shoes, so long as all the athletes have equal access to them. There is no reason this can’t be the case. Then, it’s simply a technological advancement that will help athletes run fast, which is what fans of this sport want to see.

As for world records, there is always the question whether they are clean at the moment. I, for one, think the world records through 800 meters are all clean or at least held by athletes operating in the grey area (Bolt, Van Niekirk, Rudisha). The blatant steroid cheats would benefit the most in these events, and it’s too easy to get popped on a positive test for steroids in this generation, so my belief is that the blatant cheaters are less rampant. All records from 1,000 meters to 3,000 meters are super dirty (Ngeny, El Guerrouj, and Komen are clearly EPO cheats). Cheryiout, Ingebrigtsen, Coe, Cram, Scott, Webb, and maybe a couple other Kenyans are all really similar at the top of the clean/grey area runners at these distances (3:28/3:46/7:25 are probably the real records). For 5K and 10k, I actually think Cheptegei is clean or at worst in the grey area. Same with Kipchoge in the marathon. I think there are new training methods that continue to be implemented that are unlocking aerobic potential, and the shoes help with injury prevention so the athletes can train more. That is leading to faster times in the highly aerobic events, and, you know what, that’s great!

That's fair enough, but I'm just really pointing out why Coe and World Athletics approved super shoes. It was because they failed in their attempt to 'reset' the world records and scrub the EPO era. That was largely due to El G and Paula Radcliffe kicking up a fuss, so you can blame those two for super shoes.

You just gave me cancer. My high school mile record is 4:07 by Seneca Lassiter. No one at my high school has run under 4:10 in almost 30 years. There were great coaches at that school and the closest anyone came was 4:11. Does that mean with the “super spikes” they’d ran faster? No it means we will never know and we should drop the stupid talk about the spikes and give credit where it’s due. Stop taking away from every athlete because of the spikes. What Elliot Giles said was spot on.

nbzeik wrote:

No one has ever stated Rudisha set his WR because if technology. He’s just the best we’ve ever seen.

That is exactly the problem.

His WR is certainly going to be broken soon, and it will be impossible to compare whether the new performance is actually intrinsically better.

We all understand that tracks and shoes will improve gradually over time. We know it is hard to compare times from the 70s to the now. As well, training will improve with more data, so we expect generational decade-by-decade changes in performance.

The issue here is that we suddenly have C-listers running faster than Tergat and Wanjiru at their primes, and people are pretending it's because of the training or better athletes. When it's JUST. THE. SHOES.

The new generation of shoes are clearly driving the fast performances we are currently seeing. For me this is no different from the world making progress. None of you wants us to move back to cinder tracks again, or?

My only concern is that we must ensure to have a level playing field. I think World Athletics have been waaaaaaay too slow to deal with this and that they should have made much clearer rules after the 2016 Olympic marathon.

migelj wrote:

The new generation of shoes are clearly driving the fast performances we are currently seeing. For me this is no different from the world making progress. None of you wants us to move back to cinder tracks again, or?

My only concern is that we must ensure to have a level playing field. I think World Athletics have been waaaaaaay too slow to deal with this and that they should have made much clearer rules after the 2016 Olympic marathon.

There never was a level playing field for anything else in athletics. The same in all walks of life.

Why do you want to try apply that to shoes?

Maybe I should have thought more carefully about my wording. I agree that the playing field has never been perfectly level, however I think it has been rather level most of the time. The new shoes has the potential to make it a very uneven playing field and I personally would dislike that strongly.

Do you disagree, "its only 5k"?