hr stuff wrote:
We need a sports dictatorship agency to evaluate youth talent and tell them and their parents what sports the youth need to focus on.
Most of the great distance talent plays soccer but not well enough to make a living at it. Some try at FB or BB, but let’s be honest potential distance runners aren’t thriving there.
Meanwhile, most of the great soccer talent is playing football or basketball, but also not well enough to make a living.
Find the almost great kids in sports and send them in the right direction.
LOL "we need a sports dictatorship agency"... It is absolutely hilarious to hear people write about what "WE" (the US) need to do in order to satisfy the Olympic distance medal desires of the 0.000001% of the country that go on LRC.
That said, I don't disagree with your assessment that the talent is displaced across other sports. We had a soccer player join our track team in HS who had never ran before. He very quickly became a decent 400m/800m runner (49 / 1:57) during his first and only season, while simultaneously playing club soccer (would often play 90 mins of soccer before coming to run the 4x4 and 4x8). He could have done a lot better with dedicated training, perhaps a move up to 1500m as someone else suggested, but did not enjoy the sport and never came back.
There is certainly a huge lack of financial and cultural incentives to push athletes towards running sports over more popular team sports in the US. In addition to those barriers, I think the biggest thing preventing most athletes from trying distance running is that 1) it is not fun for them and 2) the training is painful. This seems to be a point of pride for some runners (e.g., "My sport is your sport's punishment"), but it doesn't make people outside the sport want to get in it. Most HS athletes cannot be convinced to run vomit-inducing interval workouts after school when they could be having fun playing team sports like football, basketball, baseball, soccer, etc...