Now that I have a little more time I decided to go through a few boxes of documents dating back to the mid to late 70's.
Some basic facts:
Prior to USATF there was the TAC (The Athletics Congress)
Prior to TAC there was the AAU
The AAU had a Standards Committee Chaired by Ted Corbitt.
The present Road Racing Technical Council was formed on September 29, 1983 by TAC.
All measurement criteria prior to that date was under the AAU Standards Committee.
In the late70's through the early 80's Dr. Ken Young and his wife Jennifer established the National Running Data Center to be a clearing house for road racing performances. The NRDC was an indenpendent organization.
Dr. Young did a tremendous amount of good work to bring order in record keeping to this very young, wild sport of road racing. He was the first to establish a validation program which required a re-measurment of courses. I was the third member (member at large) of the NRDC.
It was Dr. Young along with Ted that established the criteria of sliding tolerances mentioned earlier in this thread. We all new that there was a great range of accuarcy for courses in this country and we wanted to give race directors time to come up to speed.
The main problem was the interpretation of where to measure. Today we measure the SPR (shortest possible route) @ 30 cm to the curb. I can tell you for a fact that there are measurers who measure tighter then that today!
But in the early years most measurers didn't have hands on training.
I just found a 9 page document from Ted Corbitt t titled 'Course Measurement"
"Measure all courses along the path the runner will be expedted to take, including all short cuts, and use the IAAF rule of measuring one meter (3 ft,3 inches) from the curb or parked vehicles or obstacles, in the running direction."
The IAAF said that a course was accurate if it was within 2.5 parts per thousand (105.48 meters for a marathon).
The people who measured the 1981 (and prior) NYC Marathon worked and volunteered for the NYRRC. Fred Lebow was the President, Allan Steinfeld- VP (and technical director of the Marathon). Ted was a member of the NYRRC Board of Directors and in constant communication. The measurers followed what Ted wrote.
I am still working on the dates of these documents but one can easily see why the NYC Marathon measured short by today's standards.
Every year in late winter the IRS arrests a celebrity for tax evasion so the rest of us get scared and file.
The removal of Alberto's mark was a way for some of the powers to be at the time to shake up the road race world.