GoldenMiles wrote:
(yes, I rounded up, as I'm aware of Junxia's controversy)?
You need to round that up to 8:15, closer to 8:20. You may be "aware of" the Chinese shenanigans in 1993, but evidently you fail to appreciate their staggering scope. The track was obviously short in addition to the athletes being doped -- if it wasn't, please explain how Junxia was supposedly a whole STRAIGHTAWAY better than the rest of the DOPERS in the world at the time, in a meet in which she ran multiple heats of multiple events. The 1993 Beijing Games were utter farce, the IAAF is a joke for having ratified any marks from that meet, and even the unaccountably deified and supposedly educated Renato Canova fails to acknowledge it, most likely because he condones doping and cheating in addition to proper English.
Point being, the steeple WR isn't as far apart on the men's and women's sides as people are claiming, and you should all be doing your math in terms of % diffs, not absolute ones, remembering that women are ~11 percent slower than men in every event.