cbenson4 wrote:
This.
I'll believe it when I see it. For now, I'm betting Kamworor is going to first see if anyone else is going to take it out, and then when no one does he'll bust out a 63-64 for a few laps, and then he'll be craning his neck back and gesturing with his arms for his reluctant teammates to come share the work, and when they don't respond the pace will slow to 68-70 again. This will happen a couple times in the race until, whoopsie, it's the last lap and Farah is still feeling bouncy. And they dun' goofed again.
I hope I'm wrong.
Yeah, this is right. What we need is for the Kenyan and Ethiopian federations to both get their athletes together and say "okay boys, we know that it takes a few different people driving the pace to hurt Farah, and we know you haven't done this in the past because you don't want to sacrifice your chance at a bronze or a silver by pushing early and hard. So we're going to offer a bonus prize purse of $300,000, to be split equally among the three of you, if Farah doesn't win."
It's completely understandable that nobody wants to push hard from the start - even if they know the tactic is handing the win to Farah, they still get to complete for the other medals, which are lucrative. To get a real team effort to happen, one of the federations needs to make it lucrative to be part of a team strategy to beat him - and that means paying all three Ethiopian or Kenyan athletes equally if Farah doesn't win.