just an fyi wrote:
are you for real? wheating went from like 90th to 70th at ncaa cross in the last half mile a couple years ago. he ran a :26 on his last 200 when he ran 3:38. if you aren't pushing the pace fast enough wheating will eat you up. did you even watch pac-10's last year? centro and rupp beat wheating because they got the jump on him and ran :52/:53 on their last laps but wheating was rolling down on them the last 100 and if you saw the photo a couple meters after the line you would have thought he won it.
This evidence does not help your cause. You just cited two races he lost. Fine, he closed well in both races but he wasn't fit enough to be near the front so in the end it didn't matter how his kick was. The fittest guys won those two races.
What you need is to provide results from races in which he beat clearly faster competition.
Maybe you can point to the Trials, since that was a big surprise. But here's the thing - Wheating ran freaking 1:45.03 in 2008. So did he make the Olympic team because of his nasty kick or because he was so fit that he ran 1:45 flat? If you look at the 2008 list, only Symmonds and KD ran faster times that year. Symmonds at 1:44.10, KD 1:44.55. So on paper Wheating should have been an Olympian after all.
Show us some races where he beat some obviously superior people in a kick and we'll talk.