Ernest wrote:
Where did I state everyone calling for cessation of enquiry is a Frank sympathizer? They may well be, but it’s not a generalization I made.
As someone who’s put a lot of effort into legitimately running fast, one might expect you’d care more about integrity of the competitive result.
I do care about the integrity of competitive results. I just happen to think that the odds are very high that if any person who is sophisticated enough from a running perspective to go back and pull up old race results to see who was the age group winner for one of Frank's marathons does that and sees Frank's name, they are likely to have a pretty good inkling that Frank was a habitual cheater.
To the extent that is not the case, I simply don't think that the social cost of Frank appearing to someone as the age group winner in those races is high enough to justify continued widespread efforts to have the records purged of Frank's name. The race directors from the races in which Frank participated are all aware of Frank's misdeeds. If they haven't removed Frank's name from the records by now, I doubt that they are going to do it at all.
If you want to email the RDs to lobby for his removal from the records for the sake of the sanctity of the historical record, I have no qualms with that.
But, while I don't think that the top age group finishers who were bumped by Frank are the only victims of Frank's cheating, I think they are the the only ones who have been damaged enough such that they would be justified in publicly seeking further redress.
I think anything much beyond that is simply us wanting vengeance (for lack of a better word) for Frank's violation of our senses of order, propriety and fairness.
I think acting as if his family's words and actions actually really matter in any way, much less in such a meaningful way as to require us to somehow keep the light shining on Frank's misdeeds stems from the same desire for vengeance.
We took our shot. We were part of having him DQd from LA. We were part of having his cheating widely publicized in mainstream media. He cheated one last time by taking his own life so as to avoid having to deal with the ongoing ramifications of his past cheating, and, in doing so, he removed the possibility of him ever cheating again. It's just hard for me to justify ongoing efforts to keep a spotlight on Frank at this point, or to justify that we, as a running communitiy, are still somehow significantly aggrieved.