EvanJ wrote:
I wish there were only one championship again. All of this talk could be avoided if Wilmot, Haney, Cerake, and Anderson were running against these guys.
Half of those guys raced against eachother six times this year, though Wilmot was a bit sporadic dealing with his injury issues, and Dressel got off to a stronger start.
Aside from the season opener for the two runners, Dressel was a consistent 3-5 seconds ahead of Anderson until State, where Anderson had his breakout performance and beat him by 20 seconds. If you take that into account and assume they are close, the answer (if everyone ran the same kind of performance over these last couple weeks) would be that Wilmot would be the fastest.
However, I would agree that things might change if they were all in the same race.
For example, the biggest question would be how well Dressel and Fisher would handle a couple big and sustained mid-race moves as was seen at NXN. Yes, Hardy pushed it a bit at about the same spot as the first move at NXN, but it wasn't sustained and he didn't make a second break like Wilmot did to really give the race that jolt (Dressel did later on as they went up the hill, but imagine if it was more than a 1-on-1 with Maton trying desperately to hang on to guys that were better on the hills than he was). At the Washington State meet, it was Hardy and Anderson that matched the moves to stay in contention while Wilmot and Dressel faded - and at NXN, it was Anderson that faded (though not by all that much) while Wilmot got away. At FLN, no one got away because it was only one move mid-race that didn't shake apart the lead group once the leaders were established - Dressel made a move up the hill, and that is noteworthy, but it also wasn't sustained for very long - and he didn't handle it when it happened to him at State.
Additionally, the layout of the course would change things - imagine if there wasn't a hill on the second loop at FLN - Maton wouldn't have been dropped so easily, and he very likely could have been in contention and mixing it up. He lost the race because he was weaker on the hills, not because he wasn't in as good of aerobic shape or that the surges took more out of him or that he didn't have as devastating a kick. Likewise, if Haney was at FLN instead of NXN, he probably wouldn't have survived the surges as well as he did because he, like Maton, is more of a speed guy and hasn't fared as well on hilly courses either (re: his "off race" at Mt. SAC). He probably would have gotten dropped on the hills as well, and ended up battling it out once again with Hardy like he did at Stanford.
I agree, it is too bad that they didn't all line up at the same race. It would have been interesting, and the outcome probably would have been dependent upon what kind of course they ran on.