Lyndon Larouche wrote:
The Canadian university system is about as competitive as DII/DIII or any major DI conference. If you are serious about university level running (regardless of where you come from) you go to the US. There are a few exceptions - Guelph being one of them.
This is the US's comparative advantage - dozens of schools which are willing to pour millions and millions of dollars into athletic programs. This does not happen anywhere else in the world on the scale you see in the US.
Let's be real about a few things:
#1 who cares? like really, even if Canada has better national records... who cares? I am a Canadian and I don't care beyond a very very very superficial level... the Canadian 'system' is quite terrible from the viewpoint of athlete development and getting kids into the sport.
#2 NCAA is a great college system... as a development system for international competition (in distance events) not so much. I believe there is a competitive running renaissance going on right now in North America, but I think this is patching up a lot of problems inherent to distance running development. I know there are a lot of very dedicated NCAA coaches who are concerned about developing athletes for the big picture, but I also know that there are some very unscrupulous coaches/programs who will burn people out over and over again for short term success. Canada piggy-backs off this system for a lot of our people and I don't think that does us a lot of good when we look at the success rate of the post-collegiate athletes.
Whoever started this thread is a moron of the first degree and was probably looking to start a dumb nationalistic argument. If the author truly believes Canada is somehow enacting a better development model which can take credit for performances of any of our people... well I'd like to hear it. We have some success stories but its a patchwork of decent club/youth development programs.