The shorter the distance, the last impact having lived at high altitude is going to impact your times. Kip Keino was a 4:23 miler until he started to train systematically, no runner would be sub 4 without a coach or reading about training techniques.
Keino was diagnosed with the gall bladder infection long before the ’68 Olympics but felt he could work through it. Ran most of the 10k and finished 2nd in 5k before winning the 1500m. How far and fast do you think he had to run from the housing n the Olympic village to the stadium in the Olympic village? Isn’t running what you do to warm up?
I’m not to clear on Clarke’s obsession with black faces beating him, plenty of white faces beat him, he simply was not a winner as far as championship races were concerned.
Funny how its only Kenyans trained in Kenya are doped up, those trained in the US, world record holders Kimombwa or Rono are clean. That Rono, a 10k record holder had a 3:59 mile pb makes sense to someone whoactually follows track, he rarely ran it, he didn’t train for it and unlikely he couldn’t run much faster given he had a 7;32.1 3k pr, world record at the time.