only the german wrote:I'll say the only guy that has the natural ability to match Rupp's times in the future is Fernandez.
German's AJR 5k was run summer 2009; his WJR indoor mile that winter. In three years, he's improved to a 3:34 1500, which is obviously very good, but: 1) those years of steady aerobic and physical development Rupp had between the ages of 18 and 21, wherein Fernandez largely stagnated, are going to be critical. Track careers tend to peter out sometime in athletes' 30s, so 3 years of improvement is something like 15-20% of an athlete's total career. Fernandez may never close that gap. 2) Talent comes in many forms. For some, it's being the best 18 year old in the country; for others, it's having a higher performance ceiling. If athlete A is way better than Athlete B at age 18, and then Athlete B is far ahead at 26, it doesn't logically follow that there was wrong with Athlete A's training in the ensuing 8 years; rather, Athlete B's talent might be the ability to maintain a steady rise to the top, and Athlete A might just have been more mature earlier.
Everybody's been hard on Smith's coaching at Oklahoma, which as far as I can tell is about some bitter memories from Oregon before my time. And maybe he did really stunt Fernandez's career. Or, and this i think is more likely, coaching matters way less than people think it does, and Fernandez would have struggled pretty much anywhere. Point is, just because Fernandez was better at 18 does not make him more talented overall. It could mean many possible things, because talent is a diffuse, difficult-to-quantify concept.
Having said that, I wish Rupp and Fernandez had raced the indoor 3k at NCAA in 2009. That would have been something.