as a phy ed graduate you are not qualified to comment on an ivy league MD education i'm afraid
oh i agree with plenty of people on many things in the sport
i disagree with some who don't tend to put aside bias, emotion & irrationality & assess many situations with requisite cold hard logic & analysis that it requires
i'm sure a lot did, but in 10y of reading various message boards, i've not found any who actually did admit to having seen them - how many went out & bought an expensive motorised satellite dish in late '80s & watched eurosport/dsf/rtl/zdf/sat 1/tv 3/rai uno,etc - access to every german, french, scandanavian, italian sports channels & general channels, to watch prime sporting events ?
you know anyone else who did ?
apart from x-country which i didn't find interesting enough to watch until africans starting to appear in '80s, i watched them also
you missed too many golden league meets
all well & good, but that is your chosen job
personally, life is too short to watch a women's M nowdays unless there is a chance of a <2"20, so i don't watch them anymore
i'm not interested in when an elite runs subpar
i'm interested in when they run their best, which they hopefully do at least once in their career, which is obvious from the clock & manner of performance
see above
i judge it on clock & manner - not platitudes, but when some well known guys say they are in top shape, you listen - when hicham said he was looking for 3'24 in rieti in '02, you watch & he was on schedule for 1200m
you really are clueless
you are talking to an MD of 25+y qualification & you are lecturing me on human social, psychological & physical foibles ???
i'm interested in only what an athlete does at their peak, which is obvious from clock & manner of performance, not their decline - i'm interested in human ultimate ability
25y+ of having seen 10,000+ people with all manners of human ailments & i don't know ???
excuse me
you are a phy ed teacher who presented himself at 1st italian fed & all he got initially was a lowly decathlon coach position ( i wish i even heard of a world class italian decathlete ) & then had the gall to foist himself onto a kenyan training camp - obviously as they weren't paying for your "services" at the time, free, even if it may be turn out to be shit, is better than the nothing before
i'm afraid "your world" is nothing but self-appointment
try & see how far your "self-appointment" technique works in getting a professional job like engineer, architect, doctor, etc
you are a fool
humans at elite level have very little difference - the difference is trivial - even komen is only 0.6% superior to next best at 3k
these can be modelled
i am not out any mission to rewrite any alltime list, i'm interested only in the true merit of an performance under scientific, controlled scenarios which can be applied to most races - perfect pacing, drafting, wind considerations
to give an athlete his true merit & perspective
- jim ryun in '67 coud possibly have run 3'24/3'25 on a synthetic track with perfect pacing to the bell
- kipketer's solo 1'42.67 coud be worth ~ 1'41.15 outdoors with pacer to bell
- kip's 1'41.24 off ridiculous 48.3/52.9 ( 4.6s difference ) wouda been ~ 1'40.8 off standard 2s difference elites are told to aim for
an example to show that kip is still almost certainly still the best 800 runner we have seen as rudisha still needs to run 0.3s faster off presumed ( or corrected ) 2s differential to have a performance intrinsically superior to 1'41.24
if these concepts are too esoteric for you, then don't waste my time