jama wrote:
[quote]Brit miler wrote:
From the ever growing list of talented US milers without Olympic gold, is Ryun the best you Yanks can offer up?
Yes, actually Centro is coming and look at those Brits recently! Put all of your athletes in about two sports and you should have some success. Congratulations on that!!! Come on over with Basketball, Football (the real football), baseball, softball, volleyball, etc. and see how the "Yanks" match up.
Actually soccer is a bigger drain of talent in the UK and Europe for middle-distance runners than all of the American sports you listed.
Until around the 70's, track in the UK was a very elitist sport, dominated by Oxbridge students who accounted for less than 0.5% of young Britiah males. With the advent of satellite television pumping huge money into soccer and then the Premier League at the start of the 90's, even a mediocre soccer player could earn 100 x what Ovett and Cram were making in the 80's. Both Ovett and Cram were fairly talented soccer players who if they had been born just one decade later would almost certainly have been signed up by some premier club at 16. We would never have heard of them.
On the other hand, Galen Rupp isn't scouted by a mega-rich US soccer club - because there aren't any. So instead becomes America's greatest ever distance runner.
So from 1890 to 1970, perhaps the talent of 0.5% of British youth had a chance to become an 800/1500m runner. From 1990 maybe 10%. For a brief period between 1970 and 1990 it was more like 100%, and that's why you had Foster, Moorcroft, Ovett, Coe, Cram, Elliott, McLean etc.
Ironically, the import of ao many foreigners into British soccer over the last two decades may be a factor in the resurgence of British middle-distance running.
