SmartRunnr your posts are laughable. Are you part Russian as you are helping give me a history lesson as to what it was like to live in Stalin's russia where they just re-wrote history and made stuff up.
The problem for your and Rossi is there are no photos. None. That's why this whole thing took a life of it's own. He's the only finisher not spotted out in the middle of the course.
People realized a media hound had a massive PB yet was quite about it and didn't get spotted on the course.
The problem for Rossi is there have been ZERO witnesses putting him out on the course. At every marathon I ran, I'd have a family member or friend who saw me on the course.
So you combine the fact that a) he wasn't capture in a single photo on the course and b) there are no witnesses or GPS data putting him on the course with the fact that c) he was physiologically incapable of running a 3:11:45 marathon in 2014 based on his training and it's 100% clear he didn't run it.
Am I worried? Not at all. I should have made it a million dollar challenge. He wasn't even in 3:30 shape last year. To run 3:11:45 would take a monumental improvement.
Yes, maybe a beginning runner could improve 20 minutes in a year but Mike had been running for a couple of years and all of his performances lined up on the equivalency charts so I felt pretty confident he wasn't going to improve by a massive amount. I figured he'd sort of plateaud. 20 minutes is more than 45 seconds per mile. Non runners may not understand how much that is for someone who has been running a well. That's 11+ seconds per lap on a track or nearly 3 seconds per 100 meters.
But if I made it a million dollar challenge, the incentive to dope would be massive and maybe with EPO and a doubling of mileage he could do it but i imagine someone that age would likely get hurt trying to do it.
So no, I'm not worried at all.