Average_Joe wrote:
Among those of us who have been following the results at Boston since the 70s and grew up living right on the course and have run it a few times ourselves, it is recognized as no such thing.
Take those guys from 1994 and put them on Chicago and you are going to get faster times across the board. N'Deti is certainly faster there than 2:07:15
Well, why don't you stop by Bill Rodgers's place and ask him what he thinks? (Bill, by the way, ran about 90 seconds faster at Boston than he ever did on a record-quality course.) Steve Hoag, who finished second to Rodgers in '75, also posts here and will probably give you an honest answer. (I don't recall that Steve ever came within three or four minutes of his Boston time on any record-quality course, although I think he could have come closer than he did.) Benji Durden, who finished third in '83 with a 2:09:57 (as I recall), is also a straight shooter about such things and also posts here occasionally. (Benji's fastest on a record-quality course was at Houston, as I recall, in the range of 2:11+.) Most of the top American runners (sub-2:10) who have run Boston at some point during their peak years -- Rodgers, Meyer, Durden, Beardsley, Tabb, Bob K., Barrios (assuming he was a U.S. citizen at the time), Salazar (although his short-course NYC race in 1981 may have been at a marginally faster pace) -- ran their "PRs" there. The others, like Culpepper and Meb, came close, and almost certainly would have done so if they had run Boston under more favorable weather and race conditions.
In years like '75 and '94, Boston was a ridiculously aided race. I don't mean a St. George's type of "ridiculously aided," or probably even a 2006 Austin type of "ridiculously aided," but probably more than a CIM type of aided.
(None of this is to suggest, by the way, that a pacerless Boston race is likely to produce faster times than a pacing arrangement of the type that Geb ran in Berlin, where six guys surrounded him in a way designed to minimize air resistance.)
Anyway, I'm glad to see a few of the more extreme races get dropped from the OT list. If Boston stays, that's not a big deal to me, although it smacks of favortism and inconsistency.