What is the most impressive running world record

Almaz Ayana 10000m. She absolutely destroyed it, and ran everyone else to PBs in that race.

great WR I have ever seen. hands down.

gloria wrote:

Why the 2 mile, of course.

The weakest record.

staminat93 wrote:

Van Niekerk's 43.03 has to be up there

Rudisha?

the steeple WR?

let us know what you think it is

Bekele. 26:17. Foreva.

Kevin Young's 46.78 for the 400m hurdles. I'm fairly certain it is the longest standing men's track record in history. Only two men in the last 26 years have ran within half a second of the record.

Bolt's 9.58 will probably last another 5-10 years but will eventually be broken as newer and faster tracks add that extra 0.1%. Athletes like Coleman, Lyles, and De Grasse are capable of running 9.6s. If the right technology is developed, it will get them the rest of the way like it did for the other 100m record breakers.

The person who finally breaks Young's record will need to completely reinvent the book on hurdling like Moses, Young, and Akii-Bua did. It will take an incredible technicle discipline never seen before with a training regiment that is true to the name of "the man killer event".

Van Niekerk's 400 meter world record.

all of them really wrote:

Flojo's 100 and 200

I'm skeptical about the "faulty wind gauge" skeptics' claims. The wind was swirling around the stadium when she ran 10.49 so the wind gauge wouldn't necessarily register the breeze that we see when the starter held up his flag.

Don't care if she doped or not. How was she so much better than all the other doped women?

Cue: "she was a better responder" nonsense.

Short window of opportunity for new steroids faster tracks and zero testing out of competition.

The other big dopers at the time were East Europeans ie white.

lollll

Lydiard Cerutty wrote:

Dirty:

Daniel Komen 7:20 for 3k

Clean:

Kenenisa Bekele 12:37 for 5k

lolllll

all of them really wrote:

How was she so much better than all the other doped women?

Because she already was a world class sprinter (2nd in the 1984 Olympics). Compare her physical apperance in these two clips:

Video of Rudisha's 800 record makes me cry.

His pre-race, "If you want to die, follow me" - greatest called shot ever. (Post a link to that article if you have it).

MurderDub wrote:

1. Bolt 100-- Every athletic person in the world has run this distance. He is the fastest ever by over a tenth of a second. Case closed.

2. WVN 400-- This is the second most common T&F distance which athletes from pretty much all sports have run at one point or another. It has been broken four times in 50 years. It's also the likeliest of these records to have been run "clean."

3. Radcliffe Marathon-- Unlike most female world records, it is still debatable that Radcliffe doped her way to an untouchable record.

4. Hicham 1500-- Back to the original assertion that records at commonly run distances are better.

5. Rudisha 800-- The talent pool in this event is not great and it is not run by most athletes, but this race sure was special.

What’s the rationale by assuming 43.03 was likely clean?

The new 100km world record today is pretty incredible.

SalmonRice wrote:

Kevin Young's 46.78 for the 400m hurdles. I'm fairly certain it is the longest standing men's track record in history. Only two men in the last 26 years have ran within half a second of the record.

Bolt's 9.58 will probably last another 5-10 years but will eventually be broken as newer and faster tracks add that extra 0.1%. Athletes like Coleman, Lyles, and De Grasse are capable of running 9.6s. If the right technology is developed, it will get them the rest of the way like it did for the other 100m record breakers.

The person who finally breaks Young's record will need to completely reinvent the book on hurdling like Moses, Young, and Akii-Bua did. It will take an incredible technicle discipline never seen before with a training regiment that is true to the name of "the man killer event".

Definitely one of the "weakest" events in athletics in the last 20 years. Five men have come within half a second to the record, not two.

For me, it's one of the weakest records. John Akii-Bua has run 47.82 in 1972 - from lane 1. Edwin Moses has run 13 times under 47.50.

The time a record stands is not always the best measure to rank the "quality" of the mark.

I think the best mens running records are 19.19; 9.58; 3:26.00

How clean? wrote:

MurderDub wrote:

1. Bolt 100-- Every athletic person in the world has run this distance. He is the fastest ever by over a tenth of a second. Case closed.

2. WVN 400-- This is the second most common T&F distance which athletes from pretty much all sports have run at one point or another. It has been broken four times in 50 years. It's also the likeliest of these records to have been run "clean."

3. Radcliffe Marathon-- Unlike most female world records, it is still debatable that Radcliffe doped her way to an untouchable record.

4. Hicham 1500-- Back to the original assertion that records at commonly run distances are better.

5. Rudisha 800-- The talent pool in this event is not great and it is not run by most athletes, but this race sure was special.

What’s the rationale by assuming 43.03 was likely clean?

I don't "assume" that it was clean. We know that several of the Jamaican sprinters tested positive for trace amounts of Clenbuterol in the 2008 Olys and that Bolt has been linked with Angel Heredia. Radcliffe has been rather dodgy in her public statements and disclosures. Hicham ran in an era notorious for EPO blood doping when there wasn't a proper test for EPO and for a nation whose distance dominance evaporated when the testing improved. Rudisha is running in an era when Kenyans have been getting busted left and right for doping. None of this necessarily means that these athletes did dope, but when compared with WVN, where nothing suspicious has arisen as of yet, it does mean that his record appears the "cleanest."

For the record, I don't subscribe to the connotations of athletic purity invoked with the term "clean," as if a world in which synthetic tracks, personal nutritionists, medical exemptions, political intervention on behalf of certain groups and against others, etc., etc. provide some athletes with such marked advantages could possibly result in a totally fair contest.

Exactly. Relatively few athletes run the 400 hurdles. Every athlete has run a short sprint. Every athletic boy knows if he is faster than his friends and the athletes in his area. Most people have no idea if they can hurdle large objects at a faster rate than other people because they don't want to do it.

The best records are the ones that have been challenged by the most competitors. 100, 400, 1500, Marathon.

2:00:25

JWalms wrote:

Walmsley 2018 WSER. 14:30

But he didn't run 14:30. He ran 14:30:04. And I am sure he blames the mama bear for that.

the man, the myth, the legend wrote:

2:00:25

That doesn't count.

Some quantitative analysis from back in 2012:

https://arxiv.org/abs/1408.5924

PDF:

https://arxiv.org/pdf/1408.5924.pdf

Page 20 has a list of WR probabilities. It's not perfect, but some of it makes sense.