If you take Jakob back to 1967, with the same training, tracks and shoes as Ryun, he doesn't beat Ryun at anything. He's probably 20m behind.
Which should remind us that sport was not as popular or as seriously competed as it is today. Ryun was cut from the track team for run a 57 in ninth grade!
If you take Jakob back to 1967, with the same training, tracks and shoes as Ryun, he doesn't beat Ryun at anything. He's probably 20m behind.
Which should remind us that sport was not as popular or as seriously competed as it is today. Ryun was cut from the track team for run a 57 in ninth grade!
Everybody knew who the best runners were in Ryun's day. Cover of Sports Illustrated and all that. No one cares outside running fanatics today.
Jim Ryun retired at age 21 after years of overtraining, poor tracks, lousy shoes, and none of the advantages we have in the modern world. Peter Snell, Herb Elliott, Kip Keino, and even Paavo Nurmi were better in relation to what we knew during their competitive careers. Face it, the runners these days are using pogo sticks to produce multiple sub-4 minute miles. Even DII races have more than one in their heats! And how many sub-1600 high school kids do we have now. I rest my case.
if you took jim ryun back to the stone age, he wouldn't be as good as cavemen.
those guys learned how to run for the life from saber tooths with no shoes on + they did held spears in their hands so basically javelin throwers too.
There was no such thing as pro in Ryuns day. Different era.
This right here.
I grew up following these guys- I always wonder how fast they'd run with all the modern technology from shoes to tracks, nutrition and, especially a way to make a living at what they did.
And in 72 he should have been moved on to the final. He was clearly fouled and today he would have been.
No, he most definitely didn’t retire at age 21, and he doesn’t get bonus points for what could be considered overtraining. It’s fairly likely that the insane training load that would ruin most people actually led to Ryun being such a phenom/world beater from age 17-21.
Jim Ryun never won Olympic gold, Jakob has. Both were the better part of 2 seconds ahead of their competition at 1500m, but Jakob’s done this in a much more developed era. Ryun was the better 800m runner but never achieved much at the distance at the international level (apart from a fast 880 time); Jakob is the better distance runner and already has 2 world championships at 5k, and the 2-mile WR.
Jakob already ranks higher all-time.
What a facile argument. Ryun wasn't just "two seconds ahead of his competition", as you say Jakob also is, the American destroyed the previous world 1500 record by well over 2 seconds, and did the same to the previous mile record. Jakob has no world record at either distance. Ryun was also the world 880 record-holder despite not even specialising at the distance. From that perspective, as a truly great md runner, Jakob isn't yet in the same conversation as Ryun. He remains closer to Centro, with an Olympic gold but no world record over the distance and the mile, and no world championship title over that distance. And before you blinkered Jakob fans start hugging and puffing again, Jakob's attainments over the longer distances are irrelevant to the discussion of what he has achieved as a md runner.
This thread is not about achievements in middle distance running, dumbo.
If we are just asking, who is/was the better middle distance runner (JR for full career, JI up to age 23!), then it's clearly Ryun. Ingebrigtsen is not even a middle distance runner, he has no really good 800m performance.
If we ask, which of the two has had the better achievements over all the events, then it's already Ingebrigtsen, despite just being 23 years old.
If Ryun was "overtrained" is completely irrelevant for the subject. The point is not, what COULD someone have done, but what HAS someone done. It's also not true, that Ryun scipped running for three years, he raced in '69 and in '71. After '72 he choose to become a "professional" - his choice.
Jim Ryan would destroy Jakob now. If Komen was around now, he would also destroy Jakob over 3,000m. If Bekele was running 5,000m now, he would destroy Jakob too. We are in a weak era for track at the moment
If you take Jakob back to 1967, with the same training, tracks and shoes as Ryun, he doesn't beat Ryun at anything. He's probably 20m behind.
Ryun legally took PEDs for his ‘asthma’ medication’ and they were serious PEDs too. IHe was also competing in the pre testing era only a couple of years prior to testing. Guess what tests didn’t come in because PEDs weren’t being used. Ryun enters comps with drug testing and suddenly can’t run as fast. Also the talk of him running much faster on synthetic tracks is laughable given the fact he never ran faster on synthetic tracks. A good hot cinder track is near synthetic standard.
Jim Ryan would destroy Jakob now. If Komen was around now, he would also destroy Jakob over 3,000m. If Bekele was running 5,000m now, he would destroy Jakob too. We are in a weak era for track at the moment
The thought of a prime bekele being dropped into 2023 is scary. I can't imagine how fast he'd be running. Destroying world records.
Shoes, Better drugs, better training, better tracks, wave light (TM), the list goes on.
No, he most definitely didn’t retire at age 21, and he doesn’t get bonus points for what could be considered overtraining. It’s fairly likely that the insane training load that would ruin most people actually led to Ryun being such a phenom/world beater from age 17-21.
Jim Ryun never won Olympic gold, Jakob has. Both were the better part of 2 seconds ahead of their competition at 1500m, but Jakob’s done this in a much more developed era. Ryun was the better 800m runner but never achieved much at the distance at the international level (apart from a fast 880 time); Jakob is the better distance runner and already has 2 world championships at 5k, and the 2-mile WR.
Jakob already ranks higher all-time.
After a disappointing start to the 1969 season, the twenty-two-year-old Ryun succumbed to the stresses of adolescent stardom and intensive training and racing and announced his retirement. Three years later, Ryun came out of retirement for another run at an Olympic gold medal. He was quick to regain form, qualifying for the U.S. 1500-meter team. Ryun's Olympic misfortunes continued, however, when a midrace collision sent him sprawling to the Munich track in the semifinals. The ill-fated record holder pounding the track in frustration proved to be the final scene of his amateur career.
(However Ryun's last Olympic Games was in 1968 @ Mexico City when he was only 21. As the article above explains he did come back briefly for he 1972 Olympics but fell after a collision. But if you look closer you will find that all his best times occurred before 1968. I doubt if he knew what an "easy training day" looked like!)
Jim did his best running before the age of 21, I will not apologize for my statement. You young people need to brush up on the history of your sport. If you are an American you should be ashamed of yourself.
As another poster stated, he raced in 1969 and 1971, in 1972 of course, and then for a couple years struggled in the ITA. So it’s disingenuous to say that he retired at age 21.
Hate to get into a pissing contest but I have total confidence that I’m more familiar with the history of the sport than you, having spent more than half my life “brushing up”. I am an American, and I think I can turn your last sentence back on you and say that as an older American you should be embarrassed to still be arguing apropos of nothing that Jim Ryun was the greatest thing since sliced bread some 55 years later.
No, he most definitely didn’t retire at age 21, and he doesn’t get bonus points for what could be considered overtraining. It’s fairly likely that the insane training load that would ruin most people actually led to Ryun being such a phenom/world beater from age 17-21.
Jim Ryun never won Olympic gold, Jakob has. Both were the better part of 2 seconds ahead of their competition at 1500m, but Jakob’s done this in a much more developed era. Ryun was the better 800m runner but never achieved much at the distance at the international level (apart from a fast 880 time); Jakob is the better distance runner and already has 2 world championships at 5k, and the 2-mile WR.
Jakob already ranks higher all-time.
What a facile argument. Ryun wasn't just "two seconds ahead of his competition", as you say Jakob also is, the American destroyed the previous world 1500 record by well over 2 seconds, and did the same to the previous mile record. Jakob has no world record at either distance. Ryun was also the world 880 record-holder despite not even specialising at the distance. From that perspective, as a truly great md runner, Jakob isn't yet in the same conversation as Ryun. He remains closer to Centro, with an Olympic gold but no world record over the distance and the mile, and no world championship title over that distance. And before you blinkered Jakob fans start hugging and puffing again, Jakob's attainments over the longer distances are irrelevant to the discussion of what he has achieved as a md runner.
Talk about a facile argument. Sandor Iharos set world records at 1500, 5k, and 10k in the 1950s and I would argue there have been greater runners since who haven’t held any major world records. To claim that Ryun having held 1500 and mile WRs makes him definitively better than Jakob is to ignore the obvious facts that a) the sport has developed and expanded, including to better reflect African talent and b) Jakob is running against an additional 55 years’ worth of middle distance talent, from a records perspective. Honestly the sport didn’t start gathering much serious international momentum until after WWII and of course wasn’t professionalized until the 70s, so Ryun’s WRs were run in fairly early, relatively uncompetitive days.
Which should remind us that sport was not as popular or as seriously competed as it is today. Ryun was cut from the track team for run a 57 in ninth grade!
Everybody knew who the best runners were in Ryun's day. Cover of Sports Illustrated and all that. No one cares outside running fanatics today.
You got a lot of downvotes for a post that is completely factual.
In the 1960s literally every American sports fan knew who Jim Ryun was.
Now? 90% of American sports fans couldn't even name a single US Olympic level track athlete of the top of their head. The other 10% couldn't name more than one or two.
And the idea that cinder tracks can be as fast as synthetic ones? As somebody who ran during the period that high schools switched from cinder to the rubberized asphalt... this is patently absurd. Even those first generation rubberized tracks gave you a bit of bounce. Cinders just allowed your spikes to grab the ground so that you didn't slip. There damn sure wasn't any "bounce" provided by them.
This post was edited 36 seconds after it was posted.
There was no such thing as pro in Ryuns day. Different era.
This right here.
I grew up following these guys- I always wonder how fast they'd run with all the modern technology from shoes to tracks, nutrition and, especially a way to make a living at what they did.
And in 72 he should have been moved on to the final. He was clearly fouled and today he would have been.
the math has already been done. 1 second per lap for mondo. 1 second per lap for shoes. 1 second per lap for better "nutrition" 1 second per lap for better training.
Ryun is easily a 3:17. I am probably missing some other huge advantage today's guys have.
While everyone has favorites of a bygone era, there's no comparing 60-70 years ago to today. Would an NFL team from the 1960's "destroy" any decent NFL team today? Not a chance. Today's players are so much stronger and quicker it would be a blood bath.
Ryun was excellent in his era. He would probably hold his own in the mile, but there's so much competition today that didn't exist in Ryun's era. Jakob doesn't care about the 800. He wants to beat every world record from 1500 through likely the 10,000. As Jakob said in his interview after the 3000, it's about how comfortably you can run 55 second laps as your pace.
I have very little doubt Jakob won't continue to break world records.
Whole thread is a just a bunch of boomers upset about the fact their time has passed and nobody cares about their heroes anymore. Pathetic. The future is now, old man. Jakob is better. End of story.
What a facile argument. Ryun wasn't just "two seconds ahead of his competition", as you say Jakob also is, the American destroyed the previous world 1500 record by well over 2 seconds, and did the same to the previous mile record. Jakob has no world record at either distance. Ryun was also the world 880 record-holder despite not even specialising at the distance. From that perspective, as a truly great md runner, Jakob isn't yet in the same conversation as Ryun. He remains closer to Centro, with an Olympic gold but no world record over the distance and the mile, and no world championship title over that distance. And before you blinkered Jakob fans start hugging and puffing again, Jakob's attainments over the longer distances are irrelevant to the discussion of what he has achieved as a md runner.
This thread is not about achievements in middle distance running, dumbo.
If we are just asking, who is/was the better middle distance runner (JR for full career, JI up to age 23!), then it's clearly Ryun. Ingebrigtsen is not even a middle distance runner, he has no really good 800m performance.
If we ask, which of the two has had the better achievements over all the events, then it's already Ingebrigtsen, despite just being 23 years old.
If Ryun was "overtrained" is completely irrelevant for the subject. The point is not, what COULD someone have done, but what HAS someone done. It's also not true, that Ryun scipped running for three years, he raced in '69 and in '71. After '72 he choose to become a "professional" - his choice.
The question wasn't who is the better runner over all events - that is merely your interpretation, so that you can include the events Ryun never ran. Since Jakob is a 1500/mile competitor that puts him in the same category as Ryun with regard to those events. In that regard Ryun was far better in his era than Jakob is in his, since Ryun demolished the world records in the 1500 and mile. Jakob has neither record. The longer events that Ingebrigtsen runs are irrelevant to this conversation - just as they would be if the comparison was with Rudisha, who never ran anything over - or under - his specialty event but absolutely dominated it, which Jakob doesn't do in his events.
Whole thread is a just a bunch of boomers upset about the fact their time has passed and nobody cares about their heroes anymore. Pathetic. The future is now, old man. Jakob is better. End of story.
While everyone has favorites of a bygone era, there's no comparing 60-70 years ago to today. Would an NFL team from the 1960's "destroy" any decent NFL team today? Not a chance. Today's players are so much stronger and quicker it would be a blood bath.
Ryun was excellent in his era. He would probably hold his own in the mile, but there's so much competition today that didn't exist in Ryun's era. Jakob doesn't care about the 800. He wants to beat every world record from 1500 through likely the 10,000. As Jakob said in his interview after the 3000, it's about how comfortably you can run 55 second laps as your pace.
I have very little doubt Jakob won't continue to break world records.
Jakob doesn't care about the 800? I'm not surprised, since he is slower in that event than every top 1500/miler since Elliott.
This thread is comparing him to Ryun, not Bekele or Farah or any other distance runner. Ingebrigtsen may say he wants every record from the 1500-10k but that is simply bluster until it is achieved. He won't get the 1500 record or the 5k and 10k records. Nor will he get as many Olympic distance medals as Farah.