MrChocolateShakes wrote:
Am I alone in feeling uninspired by this performance? Over the course of my life, I have found inspiration in cases of people overcoming adversity and unideal circumstances, whereas Kipchoge's performance demonstrates only what is attainable through the perfect coalescence of conditions and technology.
In the sport of running, I sense that we have always aspired to exhibit the best of human ability, but in a space of increasing contributions from technology it seems that we are becoming increasingly incapable of truly estimating the contribution of sheer human ability and training, as compared to the advantages enjoyed by those aforesaid technological advances.
While it's true that these advances combine with fine-tuned training and human ability to realize the greatest potential of our species, we are also distorting those performances by masking the manner in which they are produced. In the sport of running, times are relevant only for our ability to reference times that were previously set. In this case, we have developed a respect for any given time for its association with a set of exceptional athletes, who were at one time among the best. Although we don't typically examine our reasons, fans of the sport are impressed by the presumption of a confluence of inherent (or genetically-endowed) talent, work ethic and training.
When we encounter technology, such as improved shoes and track surfaces, we must determine how much of an allowance we will make before it radically distorts performances and jeopardizes our ability to remotely compare them to marks across history. Across the course of this sport's international history, we have made myriad concessions, both major and minor: from the disproportionate advantages enjoyed by developed economies, where athletes needn't confront the rigors of survival faced by their counterparts in the Third World, to the benefits of lighter and more responsive shoes, and those of faster tracks, which have markedly improved over the past half century. On the international circuit, the advantage granted by track surfaces has been largely standardized, if only for the fact that all athletes in a given field will compete on the same surface. However, the same does not apply to shoe technology, which is protected by patent law and enjoyed by only a select cohort of athletes. Again, this is not to imply that the technology itself ought to outlawed or banned outright, but whether, or to what extent, the international body ought to allow it to influence international competition and records.
In the wake of dramatic improvements to technology, the question becomes not whether we ought to reject these advances outright, but whether we wish to allow them to interfere with the sport on the international level. When considering the significance of prize winnings and world records, our intentions have always been directed at discovering the best of human ability. When an athlete exceeds a mark, whether a time, a height or a distance, we are unconsciously inspired by how it compares to marks set by our predecessors who competed with inferior technology; and if we are to grant technology an increasing role in driving athletic outcomes, especially where that technology is only narrowly available to a select number of athletes, we will become grossly incapable of comparing those marks across time and even between contemporaries.
Kipchoge's sub-two-hour marathon reportedly served to prove that "no human is limited." With the advents of technology still unimagined, there is seldom any doubt that we can journey faster, higher and farther than ever. The question is whether we want the sport to exhibit technological advances over sheer athletic ability. At these margins, this question is more relevant than ever.