Watching the replay on YT now. Very happy for Maier. Amazing how deep American marathoning has become recently. I count 7 guys under 2:09 in the last 6 or so months. Mantz, Young, Simbassa, Richtman, Ford, Albertson, Maier. Definitely a step in the right direction.
In my eyes he's the 3rd best American and the most likely to make a run at the top 2.
Great performance but could have been a 2:06 at London.
Maybe not. Most elites had a really rough second half in London. It's also possible he got a decent appearance fee for Dusseldorf which he wouldn't get in London - non-British 2:11 runners aren't getting paid to race London. Or Puma offered him a bonus to race it. There's certainly going to be a monetary reason for a an American to bypass Boston in April to turn up at a second tier marathon in Germany.
Congratulations looks like he found his events in the half marathon and marathon. At 25 yrs old I hope he still attempt to lower his track 10000m some more.
With a 2:11 you are not in a good position for prize money or appearance fee in London. The UK has enough marathoners in that range.
But in Düsseldorf a newly restarted event you were in focus and could even win with lots of camera time. He had actually a good group for that tempo and lots of space at the refreshment points.
just for kicks, a couple random observations about the dusseldorf broadcast:
First, if anyone was ever wondering, german broadcasters commonly botch any and every non-German name. They are not that dissimilar from rojo in their ability to mispronounce just about anything.
In this race, the broadcasters actually managed to mispronounce Maier (!), incorrectly making it rhyme with „layer“, not with „dire“.
And their mispronunctiation of fiona o-keeffe‘s last name was also fun, making it rhyme with „no-beefy“.
As to whether O‘keeffe was intended to be pacing teammate miriam dattke, I could see no indication that this was true — fiona didn‘t seem to race near dattke, or maintain any spacial awareness of whether dattke was even still racing in the same pack. She didn‘t behave like any unofficial pacer I have ever seen.
Fiona did not have a pacer race bib. Do people just make stuff up for fun???
I would be curious why fiona dropped out. I think that‘s a valid question!
I think that people deep in their denial of some kind of addiction (or eating disorder), sometimes make efforts to conceal how bad it has gotten. They try to cover up how low they have sunk.
And I do not claim to know whether Fiona O‘Keeffe is in denial of anything at all, but I did notice that instead of racing in bikini bottoms (her usual choice) or boyshorts (the tight spandex kind that you don‘t have to do a bikini wax for), she chose to race in split shorts.
I am female and my comments are not intended to speculate in any hateful way about women or their weight.
But I saw her decision to race in split shorts as very curious.
Women who‘ve been through puberty, and are not in any kind of underweight amenorrhea, typically have at least a few ounces of flesh in the upper thigh. It is somewhat difficult to see whether Fiona does or doesn‘t have a Q-tip‘s worth of thigh fat in the upper thigh because of said split shorts.
I know Dave Smith catches a lot of heat on these boards, but SO MANY of his athletes go on to have very successful running careers after college. Clearly he is doing things right.
Taylor Roe, Alex Maier, Sinclaire Johnson, Gabija Galvydyte, Josh Thompson, Kaela Edwards, Shadrack Kipchirchir and many more.