Interesting oddity about Ovett's 1981 mile world record

Those camera flashes are like pace lights. Could the crowd flash their phones at race pace around the stadium these days?

Haha I love that - great pickup.

That needed to go into the running conspiracy (interesting story) thread.

There is no way in hell that is an actual track marking - that was definitely draw on the track with something (most likely chalk as you said).

In general I think we'd be surprised how much stuff like this went on back in the day. We watch the DL and of course it's incredibly dialed-in, but it wasn't always like this. On that thread I mentioned I recounted how I had been told that there was an issue in the 1500m WR with the electronic timing simply not being triggered at the finish and more than one person seemed to be personally aggrieved to even entertain this could happen.

I've heard many stories over the years that are "circuit folklore" around smaller venues (like Rieti as another example) with some interesting stuff. I think you nailed a really important point - that end of the day a lot of the people involved in these situations were always like "well these records will be broken anyway so who cares" - in some cases like this one they were right. In other cases like Flo-Jo's 100m and her melted 1980's era wind gauge, that wasn't always the case.

Love this story though. Nice.

(side note: I have run on that Koblenz track - not in the meet as it was in the 80's, but I would guess on the same surface because at the time when I ran on it it was so old that even though it was a poured Conica surface it was so worn it was like a mondo carpet - probably about 5-6mm thick at that point. Very cool to have run in that historic stadium)