Heard through the grapevine wrote:How about comparing him statistically to runners who:
1. ran a PR in a secondary-for-them event after moving up in distance
2. did so the summer after graduating from college, and
3. did so having just signed a lucrative, multi-year professional contract with THE top T&F sponsor, ensuring that he'll have coaching and logistical support, and incentive to train and race at a high level until he's at least 28-29.
I doubt you can find many people in similar circumstances, and I've even left out the fact that Wheating started running so recently, and has been a pretty low mileage runner.
I'm not sure you really understand what "statistics" means. You're basically suggesting that we should only compare Wheating to people who are essentially perfect clones of Wheating from an alternate universe. That's not statistics anymore, that's science fiction.
Nobody's suggesting that Wheating "can't" ever PR again, or that he's over the hill. He's obviously an enormous talent, and there are many factors, including his relative youth and inexperience, that should make us optimistic that he'll continue to improve.
On the other hand, he has now reached a level of performance that is so rarefied that, historically, most people who have reached it never reach or exceed it again. That doesn't say anything about whether Wheating, as an individual, will PR this year. It just says that, if you were a betting man and liked to play the odds based on past patterns (which you obviously don't), you'd be smart to bet against him PRing this year, with odds of about 60% against.