Anyone else who'd also rather a WR than Olympic Gold?

So you’d rather be Asafa Powell than Noah Lyles.

Tell someone you have the 5k record and their reply will be “ well I’ve run a marathon which is harder than a 5k” or tell them you have an Olympic gold medal

If I could have the mile WR for as long as El G, I'd take it over Olympic Gold. Same with the marathon mostly (particularly for sub-2). There were 339 events in Paris, so around 678 gold medals for men and women, most of which the vast majority of people have no idea of/don't watch/don't care about (basically every track event save the 100 is in this category, literally who cares about the 1500m Olympic champ? Like it's cool I guess but no one even knows how far that is unless you say "a bit less than a mile", unless they're Eur*pean or something). Obviously someone would be impressed if they found out you're the 10k Olympic champion or something, but not any more than like a skateboarder gold medalist.

But the mile WR holder title just hits different. Like bro a "3 minute mile"? The fastest mile ever? I'll absolutely take that over just an Olympic gold.

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To the OP: yes, if you get to keep the WR for several decades and it's far ahead of the next best marks, or if you broke a historically significant time barrier.

Being an Olympic gold medalist means you were the best runner on a day, or in a year. However, being by far the fastest human to ever run a distance, for generations, or to be remembered as the first human to go sub _ for _ is far more immortalizing. Chances are, if you're that good, you will eventually earn a gold anyway even if your championship career doesn't go perfectly.

Let's be honest, the average person knows about Bolt because of 9.58, not for his championship medals. And, regardless of whether or not it was race legal, Kipchoge entered the public consciousness, transcending the sport through INEOS 1:59. Komen was remembered because 7:20 reached mythical status and stood for so long, not for his one WC 5000 gold in 1997.

You will have that gold medal for the rest of your life,, a world record will be broken many times.

Many more gold medals, identical to yours, will be awarded in your life in subsequent olympics

Ask Ron Clarke or Jim Ryun. They would gladly exchange a WR for a gold medal.

Only on LRC can someone value a WR higher than an olympic gold. Do you think the man on the street gives a rat´s ass about world records? Outside the running geek circles nobody cares about Farah´s lack of WR:s. In the eyes of the general public he is forever immortalized.

Olympic gold 10/10 times.. records get broken, gold is forever.

I have a World Record so I'd take Olympic Gold.

My world record is for the fastest marathon wearing 2 different color socks, carrying a handheld water bottle and a roll of masking tape in the same hand, wearing North Face running shorts, carrying a Samsung Galaxy s10 in a Naked running belt while wearing a Boco Trucker hat and using a Garmin 310 GPS Watch.

So what if I finished the 'thon in 6:24:37, a world record is a world record!

AND!!! If you hold/held a WR and never won gold people who see you as a choker or someone who can't come through when it really matters.

Fernando Mamede comes to mind.

I'll take Carlos Lopes career over his (and of course Lopes had both).

This statement has always been a bit of a pet peeve of mine. There's a new gold medalist just like there's a new world record holder. I know the phrase is "gold lasts forever", but that's a marketing slogan more than anything. At the end of the day, former gold medalists are a line on a Wikipedia page just list former world record holders. If we remember them, it's usually because they did both, or their win/career was exceptional in some other way.

For example, consider the 5k from 1992-2000. The Olympic champs were Dieter Baumann, Vénuste Niyongabo, and Million Wolde. Meanwhile, world record breakers during that timeframe were Haile Gebrselassie (4x!), Moses Kiptanui, and Daniel Komen. Neither Kiptanui nor Komen won Olympic gold in any event. Would you say that the accomplishments of Niyongabo and Wolde are everlasting, while those of Kiptanui and Komen have been lost to the mists of time?

Now, all of this is separate from the question posed by the OP. Given the choice, I would be at least world-record-curious, but the general public seems to value Olympic gold so highly that it seems hard to choose anything else.

This makes sense if you care what others think of you. A WR would mean more to me personally than being the best in a single race. Even if that WR eventually gets broken, I will always know at one point in time not a single other human past or present was as good as I was. I care little what the average person thinks.

100% wrong on this point. The average person only tunes in to track & field once every 4 years, and Bolt was at the top 3 Olympic cycles in a row. I guarantee you the average person thinks his fastest time ever was run in one of those Olympic 100s.

This

Or ask Billy Mills if he'd exchange his Olympic gold for a 10,000 WR that would've lasted a couple years at most.

Honestly, I think most people would be happy to have either one.

Setting a world record is the more impressive accomplishment, but I know that I'd feel at least a little bit of resentment seeing it get broken, so I'd still rather have the gold.

It would be epic to have the 12:37 and 26:17 WRs

I agree. Also I happened to watch Race (the movie about Jesse Owens) last night and it made this exact point. good movie btw