This is quite strange. I mean yes Cheptegei finished 2nd. But if he had a good race he would have finished within 20 secs of Kiplimo. Not 38 secs behind.
This is quite strange. I mean yes Cheptegei finished 2nd. But if he had a good race he would have finished within 20 secs of Kiplimo. Not 38 secs behind.
MessedUP wrote:
This is quite strange. I mean yes Cheptegei finished 2nd. But if he had a good race he would have finished within 20 secs of Kiplimo. Not 38 secs behind.
* " I mean yes Cheptegei finished 2nd. " : at this NYC Half.
Nothing strange.
Cheptegei never ran a good Half. And Kiplimo is notoriously erratic on track.
They’ve gone 1-2 at World XC (2019), 1-3 at World XC (2023), 1-3 in the WC 10k (2022) and 2-3 in the Olympic 10k (2021). So those don’t seem like notable “underperformances.”
They are on different doping cycles.
John Wesley Harding wrote:
They’ve gone 1-2 at World XC (2019), 1-3 at World XC (2023), 1-3 in the WC 10k (2022) and 2-3 in the Olympic 10k (2021). So those don’t seem like notable “underperformances.”
Not sure why people expect them to go 1-2 every time in some order and finish 2 seconds apart.
MessedUP wrote:
This is quite strange. I mean yes Cheptegei finished 2nd. But if he had a good race he would have finished within 20 secs of Kiplimo. Not 38 secs behind.
I say the cutoff for a good race is no more than 18.73 seconds behind.
It might be team tactics of the type seen often in world class Nordic Skiing or cycling. Say a Norweigian woman breaks away twenty meters, then another or more can go to the head of the chase pack and try to slow it down so the one up front can build an even bigger lead, in the end it's all about the gold medal and/or the prize check for first place.