I'm going with Herb Elliott. World Record and Olympic Gold by 22. Never beaten over the distance.
Sort of a stretch to think drugs, tracks, and shoes are worth 10+ seconds. Never being beaten sounds good but how many competitive races did he win in a row? How many of them were basically 2 person races with Lincoln. How does that compare to Morceli going undefeated for like 4 years and racking up 50 wins? El G had some epic win streaks also.
Pretty much all the guys pre Elliot are hard to take seriously. After that it is all speculation. Would epo, synthetic tracks and dragon flies make Ryun a 3:41 guy? EPO instead of blood packing and Shoes get Coe another 6s? Dragonflies get El G 2s?
Most of the last lap of the last lap of the 1500 meter run in the USA vs Germany Dual Meet in August of 1967. Jim Ryun stuns the field - and spectators - wit...
Of course, it stands to reason that the eternally anointed LetsRun champion would be a white American baby-boomer turned Republican congressman who was awarded the Presidential Medal of Freedom by Donald Trump.
Lagat was brilliant but even he ended up playing second or even third fiddle to EL G and Ngeny most of the time, only beating him like once? Their head to head record shows who's superior - Lagat is often praised for being challenge El G, not the other way around.
Some people would say Morceli was more dominant over his competition or had a better kick which would supposedly favor him in a head to head.
This is not a new discusssion - we had a similar thread on this a bit under a year ago (see here: ) and there never seems to be any overwhelmingly consensus. The Mile is an event that is often unkind to favorites, so I think it's fair to say that if you ran the race 100 times you'd have many different winners.
The field is: Jakob Ingebrigsten (2020)Matthew Centrowitz (2016)Taoufik Makhloufi (2012)Asbel Kiprop (2008)Hicham El Guerrouj (2004)Noah Ngeny (2000)Noureddine Morceli (1996)Fermin Cacho (1992)Peter Romo (1988)Seb Coe (1984)S...
Morceli suffers from coming right before El G. In the end you are guessing on drugs. You can make up guesses about shoes/tracks (about the same) but maybe Marcelo was just old school steroids and El G was full on epoing…
For all we know Webb was the greatest clean miler ever once you take out the drug cheats. Seems unlikely but who knows.
Morceli suffers from coming right before El G. In the end you are guessing on drugs. You can make up guesses about shoes/tracks (about the same) but maybe Marcelo was just old school steroids and El G was full on epoing…
For all we know Webb was the greatest clean miler ever once you take out the drug cheats. Seems unlikely but who knows.
So a Moroccan is a doper but not an Algerian. Kind of hard to believe!
I'm going with Herb Elliott. World Record and Olympic Gold by 22. Never beaten over the distance.
Sort of a stretch to think drugs, tracks, and shoes are worth 10+ seconds. Never being beaten sounds good but how many competitive races did he win in a row? How many of them were basically 2 person races with Lincoln. How does that compare to Morceli going undefeated for like 4 years and racking up 50 wins? El G had some epic win streaks also.
Pretty much all the guys pre Elliot are hard to take seriously. After that it is all speculation. Would epo, synthetic tracks and dragon flies make Ryun a 3:41 guy? EPO instead of blood packing and Shoes get Coe another 6s? Dragonflies get El G 2s?
EPO alone probably makes 6 seconds difference, as shown by the likes of Ramzi and Katir.
Herb Elliott ran 3:35 on cinders to win the Olympic gold whilst suffering from a heavy cold. He had run 3.36.0 at age 20 years and 5 months on cinders. And unlike Jakob, he started training quite late. There was no circuit with pacemakers back then. Australians also had to travel literally half-way across the world on 1950's transport.
He likely wasn't even approaching his peak when he retired. He was widely expected to become the first man under 3:50 for the mile and to break every WR from the 800m to the marathon.
The new kangaroo shoes likely make 2 - 3 seconds difference just on the shoes El G was wearing. The shoes and tracks today compared to the 1950s must be at least 6 or 7 seconds.
You also have improved training, physiotherapy and rehab, GPS watches, instant access to advice online etc.
There must be no other sport on Earth that is so disrespectful and ignorant of its history than athletics. In.another 20 years time, sub 3:40 miles will be routine. Maybe then, fans will understand the relativeness of times, or maybe they will be dismissing Jakob as 'slow'.
His WR race in Cali, too. Solo running on cinders with unreal splits and an incredible last lap. 3:51. Solo. On Cinders. Let that sink in.
Did you know that Ryun also raced on synthetic? Despite this, he never ran a mile faster than he did on cinders. Unpopular opinion: synthetic isn’t that much faster than cinder.