This Faith Kipyegon thing illustrates something that really bothers me with how women are marketed to/treated in general

I love how Hull, a Nike athlete, who publicly stated that she liked to help Faith, didn't even get an invite. Lmao.

Agreed, agreed, agreed. Men's sports are awesome. Women's sports are awesome. The fact that every "generational" female athlete spawns 1,000,000 hypothetical "How could she do against men?" questions is NOT awesome.

We know how she would do. She would lose. Badly.

Let the two co-exist as two awesome and essentially incomparable things. We don't spend our time wondering how Michael Phelps would do in a race against a Sailfish.

Calm down. It was a good show. Your rant is too complicated to relate to.

Calm down snowflake. Stop tying to make up a controversy. There were probably a lot of athletes who would have liked to be a part of it that weren't invited.

Watched the YouTube stream, how does anyone listen to those dreadful US commentators

Carl, Keely, and Dikjeet all said that elite women deserve male pacers. Do they not understand that Jacob needs a male pacer who can run 3:40 for the mile?

I'm a huge Faith fan, I'd (naively?) like to think she isn't on PEDs based on the esteem her competitors clearly have for her.

But this was a bad watch. If you've read Kara Goucher's book, Nike is not for women. Nike is for money. This was a pure money making exercise and it has the effect of making 'Faith Fail' to anyone who is a running fan. The execs will be happy with the fan engagement. But Faith looked stressed and almost distressed out there before she even started, you could tell there was no chance from the outset.

If Faith put her hand up and asked for this, then fair play. But I'm assuming Nike asked/made her do it. It took men 20 years to go from 4.07 to 3.59, this was never happening. So Nike has leveraged the man v woman angle, perhaps knowingly set her up to fail, to make money. It's gross.

If Bell and Reekie were meaningfully involved they should have paced her to 800. Then get Hull and someone else to come in at 900m to pace the rest. Having those women at the back was tokenistic. You can bet the boys got paid truckloads more.

Faith's the GOAT in her event, this is enough.

Last thing- we are agreeing here that the 'woman doing man running thing' is dumb. Shame it's on this board somewhere almost every time a pro female or Nikki runs a great time. "I could run that" "She placed 50th, big deal..." "Let's see them do that against the men" etc.

Well she mighta run 4.05 so maybe that's why she wasn't there?

Here's an even bigger truth which you may or may not consider unpleasant: this sport, like all major sports, is driven by marketing money.

So if you want big flashy events to continue, you need to accept the marketing hype. It's a necessary part of the whole. Women spend a lot on clothing, so including them in the picture is especially necessary for the marketing hype train to roll on.

I'm not saying I agree or disagree with your sentiment. I am saying that marketing (hype) is central to the existence of sports (ALL major sports, ALL events) to an extent that you may not fully realize. Pro sports is theater, entertainment.

Meh. You have a point with the female pacers but I otherwise disagree.

4:05 just doesn't have the same ring as sub-4, does it? From a marketing perspective, sub-4:05 is a disaster. Sub-4 has all the history and nostalgia.

Yes, it was doomed to failure. But when you have a woman who's run 4:07 and is head and shoulders better than the rest of the world, I can't fault Nike for trying. Who knows when you'll have another athlete like that?

The sub-2 project was a cool science experiment. Even if Kipchoge had fallen short it would still have been fun. And there's no doubt that it launched Nike's supershoes into the spotlight. A wildly successful marketing venture.

I'm not sure they'll see quite the return here, but it was a cool setup. I just wish the announcers had been a little more realistic. It's annoying listening to hype men and nothing but hype men. Like if one of them had just said "You know, I'll be stunned if she does this," it might've added a little weight to how significant an undertaking it was. Instead they all acted like it was a given.

To me it unfairly highlighted - because we don't get this direct comparison in real competition - how physically superior men are to women. The male pacers were practically jogging alongside her. It kind of diminishes Kipyegon's abilities as a woman, which ironically is the complete opposite intention of the Breaking 4 event.

Best take so far, hence the quick downvotes.

You want it all, but you can't have it!

That's why I said that I prefer rotating women pacers than men, though that post got downvoted to oblivion.

Athing Mu will run 3:59 in October after Worlds if she doesn't quit the sport altogether by then.

You heard it here first! ;-P

Vaporflies at 3% improvement give her the sub 4.

OP.

I loved your post. I've never understood why the quest for women's equality and accomplishments for many means acting like men and women are the same - we're not.

The thing that really struck me during the race was a bit ironic. I found it interesting that in a race that was hyped with Faith saying, "Anything a man can do, a woman can do", ended up letting the world clearly see in black and white that's not remotely true when it comes to elite sports.

Halfway in, you could clearly the see the difference between an elite man like Grant Fisher (or Stewy McSweyn) and Faith Kipyegon. The entire race Fisher looked like he was JOGGING at 4 minute pace and Faith looked like she was holding on for dear life. It was like a parent playing with a child.