middle distance wrote:
I agree with general consensus that Aouita has proven to have the best range.
Ovett ran 200m successfully as a Junior, but not really when he was winning medals in the middle distances.
Certainly he showed amazing range in '77 with a half Marathon victory (65 mins I think) and the World Cup 1500 title a couple of weeks later!!
The other person who stands out with Aouita is Geb, of course; 1500m - Marathon.
Aouita was an 800m runner in 1988 when he won his bronze (to go along with his only other middle-distance medal - a bronze at Helsinki). He didn't even run the 5000m that year.
Similarly in 1986 when he ran his 10000m pb. He ran only two 1500m races that season, and his times were 3:36 and 3:38.
Aouita's 'range' was the result of blood doping, hgh, roids, and being the only athlete in history to deliberately drop down or move up events each season to avoid other competitors, keep his winning streak going, and bolster his 'greatest range ever' legend.
Steve Ovett, who we have no reason whatsoever to believe was doping, and in any case wouldn't have had access to some of the things Aouita was almost certainly taking, let alone the likes of the EPO era Africans, had a far more impressive range.
In 1978, he broke the two mile world record, in a real race, beating perhaps the greatest natural talent from East Africa in the process who was having an insane year himself, breaking multiple distance world records. He did this just 2 weeks after running 1:44.0 in coming second to a doper in the 800m Europeans, and then winning easily the 1500m. He only lost to doper Beyer in the 800m because he was focused on Coe in that race. He slowed I think twice in that race, apart from the suicidal first lap of Coe, so he was likely capable of breaking the world record that day in an optimal paced record attempt.
The year before that he ran 13:20 in his first or second ever 5000m, still only 21, and still in the process of moving up from really being a 400/800m athlete to a middle-distance runner.
If Ovett had entered the 5000m in Moscow 1980 he would have been favorite alongside Yifter.
Another fun fact about Ovett. Ovett's pbs at 21 in every event from 800m to the half-marathon (other than the 1000m which he didn't race) would have been the world record just 15 years before (with the ironic exception of the 1500m because of Herb Elliott's outlier WR).