Best USA Men's Cross Country Team Ever To Be Assembled...

Pat Porter= best American cc runner...or at least most consistant

gotta throw in PRE too, he was bad ass in cross, 3xNCAA XC CHamp, and the year he lost, as a frosh, he was 3rd, 2 seconds behind the winner...he beat guys that were waaaay faster on the track than he was too...

hed go after anyone

Kele wrote:

At or before age 24, Webb was at 27:34, Ritz 27:35, and Rupp 27:33 at age 20. Pretty comparable to Virgin's 27:29 and Nenow's 27:36 at 24. Hunt's PR was 27:59, Donakowski 27:58, and Bickford 27:37. There are a ton of dudes in those time areas, just look at the recent Stanford meet: Torres 27:42, Moran 27:43, Carney 27:43, Culpepper 27:50, not to mention Hall, Teg, Lagat, Abdi, and Meb. Today's guys at the moment are not much better or much worse than '81, but they've got a lot of time and room to improve. As for our placings amongst the Africans, you're just plain biased towards the guys of your heyday if you don't think the competition is on a whole different level today. Sure you had some standout Africans back then, but the depth today is incredible and incomparable to the running world before the 90's.

This debate comes up more numerous than the hotness thread.

Here's another way to look at it. The '81 team ran as fast as the Kenyans. Todays "team" (if you insist on calling them that), are as good, but not better than the '81 team. The Kenyan's have gotten faster since '81. The US has not. Therefore today's "team" is not as good as the '81 team. Does that make it any clearer for you? Today's runners will not be as good as the 80's until they can compete with the Kenayans.

In the 80's our nutrition was pizza and beer. There were no sponsorship dollars and if there were it pales in comparison to today. Our coaches ran us ragged and if we survived we got pretty fast if not we got injured. Shoes were still in the experimental stage and advances in technology/physiology/pharmaceuticals were practically nonexistent. It wasn't out of the question to get stopped by the cops who thought that we were running away from the scene of a crime.

There is no doubt that the medalist from '81 would be substantially more competitive than today's crop of runners. Runners in the 70's & 80's were a different breed than today and comparing them is apples and oranges except to say that until the new crop of runners achieve better than what the oldtimers did then you will need to continue to rationalize your generation's inability to compete.

when you say: "runners in the 70's and 80's were a different breed than today and comparing them is apples and oranges" are you speaking WORLDWIDE?

Clearly you're wrong, if that is what you meant.

No one in the US in the 80's ran faster than Meb on the track. No one in the 80's ran faster than Alan Webb. No one in the 80's ran faster than Lagat. No one in the 80's ran faster than Hall over 1/2 marathon. No one in the 80's in college ran faster than Rupp in the 10,000 m.

Apples and Oranges? Think again.

And guess what...if you lived off Pizza and Beer, then you just were stupid and uneducated about how to fuel your body.

And if you are going to reach up to 85' for Eyestone then we'll just reach down for Kennedy.

Did anyone in 1981-1985 run as fast in the 5000m as Bob Kennedy?

Hmmmmmmmmm. No.

You mean Ritz's 25 evenly paced laps, first lap faster than the last lap isn't a real race?

The difference is how they raced. A time trial at Stanford doesn't compare to racing at world cross and placing 2nd as a team, with the individual champ. When the '07 team does something in that league, old timers will listen a little more closely. You can't throw around 10k times on the track and say you've proven anything. I'll take the '81 team anyday.

Dumb and Dumberer wrote:

You sound like a child. AND, since you seem like a numbers guy, you haven't reconciled the fact that a 27:23 guy was 4th man on the '81 squad. Chew on that youngin.

Kind of like Abdi & Meb (27:13 & 27:22 guys) losing at USATF nationals in the 10k to a guy in his debut? Odds are if we really took our absolute best runners right now & had them all run in one race, a guy like that wouldn't even make the team! Seriously, let's consider all are healthy & keying on the race. Who makes the team? I can tell you it'd be a damn good one.

Culpepper

Broe

Goucher

Abdi

Meb

Hall

Webb

Lincoln

Tegenkamp

Fam

Ritz

Rupp (hate to throw him in, but he ran 27:33)

Torres

Lagat

instead of replying to a bunch of different posts, i like to just reply to my own and comment where i feel like commenting.

yes, tegenkamp and webb could maybe be added to the list, because they could probably both run sub 27:30 10k's if they wanted, so they would probably be pretty decent in a 12k xc race, but i would not put goucher in there. yeah he finished 6th last year at world cross, but that was in the 4km race- 12km is 3x as long, and we haven't seen anything from goucher that would suggest he has the tank to run 10-12k just as well as he does his 5k(his best at 10k is 27:59- doesn't really cut it with the kind of company he would be in).

430miler: there is no way in hell culpepper is the best xc runner ever. what's the highest he's ever placed on the world stage? if xc wassn't in boulder this past season, he wouldn't have won.

i think a healthy 2008 or 2009 usa men's xc team, in which all the runners named above would be stronger, fitter, and faster could fair extremely well against the other nations in the world. ritzenhein, hall, rupp, and abdi are all sub 27:20 10k runners, and rupp and hall might even be able to break 27:00. follow those runners up with tegenkamp, torres, and mcdougal(althought i dont know if that many runners are alloud to run the race) and that would be a pretty solid, tight group. i think the last runner could finish no lower than 50th(this year USA's top runner finished somewhere 50+- michael spence). i think if people talk about what a great team could be put together and the word gets out, other runners may see the light and think 'hey we could put together a really good team and go for it' and maybe they'd change some of their plans. it would suck if a huge inscentive were necessary, but the fact is guys like hall and ritzenhein may want to train for a marathon instead which offers its own huge inscentives, but at some point, you wonder if they really need the money. i mean, i can understand them wanting to get in some marathon experience for trials and games, but that's what's so cool about a team- it's bigger than any one individual's accomplishments- the whole is greater than the sum of the parts.

oh, and to the poster who said lagat would probably beat them all(referring to our best top distance runners) dream on. there's no way lagat could run stride for stride with hall in an all out 12km race.

I think the key isn't so much how the current crop of runners race, the real point to take home is the focus of their racing. If you let the 81 team and this hypothetical team race each other in a XC 12k that they all trained for and focused on, I bet it would be pretty close. The problem is, hardly any of the guys running today consider XC a priority; they'll run it, but it isn't part of their long term goals.

The 81 team was better than this team because nobody on this team cares enough to beat them. They've got their eyes on big time track races and marathon paydays and olympic championships. In their minds, World XC doesn't fit into that picture enough to care about it.

On a side note, why did they drop XC style races from the olympics? I was looking at old oooooooold results from the first few Olympiads; there was a team 4 mile race held at a couple of them, scored the same way as XC(I think). Wouldn't Olympic XC be awesome?

No, I was referring to American distance runners and they were different than todays current crop of American distance runners. By the looks of our last World XC showing, substantially more competitive.

Who's record did Hall just break? Are you implying that Meb, Webb, Hall are as fast, relatively speaking, to Curp, Virgin et al as the current crop of Kenyans are to their early 80's counterparts? If you are you're missing the point. Meb and the gang are just marginally better, not materially better, than their early 80's counterparts. The Kenyans are materially better than their early 80's team.

From this I deduce that, if you are an American distance runner and are only marginally better than American runners from the early 80's then you are not keeping pace with the rest of the world and are, therefore, not as accomplished.

Now you can argue the who's, why's, where's and how come's of that deduction but you cannot refute that the current crop of Americans just aren't as good, on the world stage as they were in the early 80's. Trying to justify your point because Meb's time in the 10k on the track is so much better than Virgin's, blah, blah, blah is just playing with yourself.

I wouldn't say that we were stupid and uneducated, but we were ignorant. The whole nation was. By attempting to diminish my point by asserting your own profound knowledge of nutrition in 2007 over mine in 1981 illustrates the performance advantage that our new runners have over the old. Armed with this knowledge Hall should be running 26:45 (which I'm hopeful that he will do) and not be all that excited about breaking 20 plus year old records. We should have a stable full of capable runners chomping at the bit to get a piece of the Kenyans not hiding and waiting for the perfect race or more money. When you can prove that, then I'll bite. Until then keep living in your own little fantasy world wistfully comparing track times.

Looking back, they had team-style races in every olympics held from 1904 to 1924. Most of them were different- they had team scored 3000m, 3 mile, 5000m, and 4 mile (some of which were run on the track). In 1920 and 24, they had official Cross Country with an individual champion and team champions.

Man, olympic XC would rock out loud.

Jefe in the CO wrote:

...We should have a stable full of capable runners chomping at the bit to get a piece of the Kenyans not hiding and waiting for the perfect race or more money. When you can prove that, then I'll bite. Until then keep living in your own little fantasy world wistfully comparing track times.

in order to keep pace, we have to get more guys on the dope. those who don't believe the group at the very top of competitive running aren't on the shit are nuts.

you didn't believe the cyclists were on it a year or two ago either, did you???? poor suckers.

"From this I deduce that, if you are an American distance runner and are only marginally better than American runners from the early 80's then you are not keeping pace with the rest of the world and are, therefore, not as accomplished."

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the problem with your argument is that the crop of African runners in the 80's was significantly smaller than the current crop. African's simply didn't have the opportunities they do today, especially on the road circuit in the US. In the 80's, the US runners only had a very small number of Africans to compete against. Today, it's not uncommon for US runners to face a 13:05 5k African trying to win a $1000 at the local Turkey trot.

You say the American runners "just aren't as good on the world stage as they were in the 80's"....but I think it's pretty clear that the world stage today is quite a larger venue than it was in the 80's.

Your argument is weak.

Because the Americans don't keep pace with current pace with "the rest of the world" THEREFORE they are not as accomplished.

What does it mean to be "accomplished"? By what standard are you meaning? Apparently you are not looking at track times. Why not? Is that not a standard that can be compared MOST accurately from one generation of runner to the next?

When you say "the rest of the world", you mean Africa, right? Because clearly the US is keeping pace with non-African countries. Or do you debate that as well?

So before we can go on with this discussion, you need to make clear to me what you mean by "accomplishment". If we are to look at a simple standard such as a track, then it's clear that American's today are stronger than the American's in the early 80's.

Unless McDougal gets a new coach, I'd say add Teg instead. McDougal is notorious for running monster times when is doesn't matter and folding up camp when it does.

stanford time trial wrote:

You mean Ritz's 25 evenly paced laps, first lap faster than the last lap isn't a real race?

The difference is how they raced. A time trial at Stanford doesn't compare to racing at world cross and placing 2nd as a team, with the individual champ. When the '07 team does something in that league, old timers will listen a little more closely. You can't throw around 10k times on the track and say you've proven anything. I'll take the '81 team anyday.

I was on that 1981 team. "IF" todays guys all ran XC against our team they'd have beaten us I'm pretty sure. But that's a big "IF." You have to remember Nenow and Bickford were not yet the runners you know of. I was injured (after an easy 2nd in the trials) and Dan Dillon had his only bad day of his career at Madrid. Had either Dan or my situations been different (or if we had either Salazar or Meyer) we'd have beaten the Ethiopians with room to spare. The only difference that would have helped us is that all of our guys were real XC runners. A few chunks of mud on kicked up in the faces of the Oakley dudes might be enough to tilt the balance.

No one beats Virgin.

To the guy who claims there was no sponsorship $$ in the 80s, you are completely ignorant and way out of touch. The shoe money flowed like a river back then (at least in the early 80s) with at least 150 Americans receiving steady paychecks. True, the prize money was only beginning then, and there was no such thing as "American only" money, but appearance fees and bonuses added up fast.

turn right wrote:

Jefe in the CO wrote:

...We should have a stable full of capable runners chomping at the bit to get a piece of the Kenyans not hiding and waiting for the perfect race or more money. When you can prove that, then I'll bite. Until then keep living in your own little fantasy world wistfully comparing track times.

in order to keep pace, we have to get more guys on the dope. those who don't believe the group at the very top of competitive running aren't on the shit are nuts.

you didn't believe the cyclists were on it a year or two ago either, did you???? poor suckers.

That may be a big part of the reason we're not as competitive. My heart hopes not but my head thinks it's so...

My argument is based on the premise that the US could have moved right along with the growth on the world's stage. There were very few runners back in the early 80's. Once again we had a slew of 27 something guys and now we have a slew of 27 something guys. Why not any faster? Physical limitations, drugs, whatever. The point is that we, as a nation, did not build on our talent.

By accomplished I mean placing 2nd and 3rd at World XC with a two time individual champ. I'm a big fan of our new young studs but they need to have higher expectations than being better than the rest of the non African world. 27 and change is a great accomplishment for an American distance runner but not such a big accomplishment when it comes to medaling on the world stage.

Relatively speaking I do not agree that matching times, within all material respects, to the runners of the early 80's is a definition of stronger. They should be much faster. I'm not exempt from flawed logic but I view today's runners as having more opportunites to run faster than the runners' of the past. So unless they do, regardless of what the rest of the world does they are not as good. I want them to be and Hall has me as excited about running as Virgin did back in the day...

Malmo, by flowing money, how much are you talking about? Because buying brooks Villanova's from Marty Liquori out of his beat up junker of a car did not appear to equal Dathan's house in Boulder.

Jefe in the CO wrote:

Malmo, by flowing money, how much are you talking about? Because buying brooks Villanova's from Marty Liquori out of his beat up junker of a car did not appear to equal Dathan's house in Boulder.

You're mixing up your decades, man.