Who knows how long we would have to wait for someone to legitimately surpass the doping records of before 2000. I get the sense that the powers at be in track and field wanted those records gone but can’t accuse anybody of doping after the fact. The shoes are a great opportunity to have our record boards untainted again and usher in an era of all records being achieved under rigorous testing.
Also, people forget for how short distance running has existed. Distance running will continue to exist for as long as humans exist, at least tens of thousands of years in the future. In the grand scheme of things it won’t be pre-carbon plate and post carbon plate, it will just be regular carbon plate running, “and also in the very beginning they didn’t have plates but it doesn’t matter they weren’t that fast anyway”. Sorry but in a sport that will have a recorded history of thousands of years, we don’t owe anything to some random 50 year period of post-rubber-tracks but pre-carbon-plate running. Post-track but pre-plate is such an arbitrary golden standard that some people are hel bent on preserving because it’s hard for us to see the insignificance of our own lifetimes in the grand scheme of history. That sounded more pretentious than I meant but hopefully you know what I mean.