Reaper wrote:
1. Show one international race where he doesn't do this.
2. Well going out in a similar pace every race isn't winning him anything. Why wouldn't he ever try anything different?
3. He is never right with the leaders in international races. His stupid race strategy doesn't allow it.
The guy is one of the dumbest athletes we have in T&F. Luckily for him he's talented.
Congrats, in your two-minute thought experiment you definitely have more insight into Nick Symmonds's racing than he has in the last 6 years of international competition.
Let's talk about the 800...
It's been said that an ideally fast 800 would have a two-second positive split, an idea Symmonds buys and Rudisha and others have somewhat confirmed in all their recent fast PRs. Sometime in the summer of 2011 after USAs, Symmonds said his runs were becoming too evenly split and he needed to work on his speed and getting out faster, which he did.
In the Olympics, on the other hand, I think I timed his splits at something like 25.0, 25.46 (50.46 official), 25.94, 26.55 (52.49). Yes, his last 200 was by far his slowest, he just slowed down less than the rest of the field. These indicate to me that he ran it as fast as he possibly could... to medal he would have to go at least .42s faster. If he had finished the last 200 in 26.0, you might have a point that he went out too slow (but then again he would have medalled in that case). His strategy going in was to simply run the maximum time he was capable of running that day and hope it would get him a medal, a perfectly reasonable strategy in my opinion. This is the same strategy Manzano used - he didn't try to run with Makloufi, he just ran what he was capable of running and picked off the guys who blew up.
You have no evidence that Symmonds is some kind of super-talent. Obviously anyone who runs 1:42 has a lot of talent, but then again he didn't get any scholarships out of HS and chose D3. I see him as a very smart runner who has developed himself quite well.