I enjoyed this reply and all your expert knowledge on Aths. Have always appreciated your thoughtful AFL football posts for that matter too. But getting back to Stewie. Yes, to win a medal, let alone a gold in a key Olympic track event, is incredibly difficult, especially in this era of drug 'temptation'. (And the Kenyans certainly aren't exempt from that. When you can make a fortune in terms of a poor country. Interesting to hear Cheruiyot not qualifying at home due to a hamstring issue recently but headed to Europe and made a remarkable recovery then selected!}
I wonder whether Stewie's incredible high pace over great distance would have made him more potent in the 5000?
Cheers for the cudos Leon. Not an expert, but a keen observer and student of the running game
. I think once my children are all grown up and I am an old lonely empty nester, I'll probably get back into coaching more heavily, as I was in my pre-children years. And hopefully take some athletes through to higher levels. But for now I coach 2-3 young blokes just to keep my hand in it and keep my interest and my knowledge current.
I think you are absolutely right from a purely physiological perspective, Stewy perhaps may find his peak distance develops at 5000m. Or maybe he is one of these unfortunate blokes who finds his absolute peak is 3000m. I say unfortunate, because while 3000m is a very popular distance for juniors and at European grand prix meets, unfortunately it's not a championship distance unless you want to go over the steeples. He did qualify for the Olympics in every distance from 1500m to 10000m. So shows you they type of versatile talent he is. But he chose to race the 1500m in Tokyo though, because his ranking was the highest in that event.
An inconvenient truth, that people try not to acknowledge, which goes against him in those longer races. The longer the events get on the track, the larger the apparent genetic comparative advantage the East Africans seem to have. So while he may outperform the rest of the world more over 5000m than 1500m. There will always be that group of East Africans that prove too good for the rest over 5000m+.
And it's not that all East Africans can run, that is complete misconception. It's that select ethnic groups have unique, random genetic variance that shows up prominently among them. The Kalenjin people are an ethic/tribal group of people that produce pretty much all of Kenya's runners, it's not like they come from across the entire population. And the Ugandans who have only recently risen to prominence are all from a small sub-tribe of the same people, but that sub-tribe is an even smaller portion of the Ugandan population than their cousins are in Kenya. It's not so much the folklore that these people all ran miles to school, live at altitude etc (some do, some don't). These things help, but there are plenty of people around the world living in similar circumstances. Recent studies come down to the unique structure and bio-mechanics of their legs and how efficiently they work. Efficiency obviously then becomes a greater advantage the more steps being taken in a race. This of course doesn't explain the prominence of the Ethiopians (and their Eritrean cousins over the border), but there is something tangible going on that isn't just lifestyle related.
And this of course brings us back to the middle distance races like the 1500m. There is no dominant group of people in this event group. Probably the most diverse, evenly matched of any of the track events, with people from every corner of the earth all dueling it out when you watched the fields being introduced over the past two nights. The Men's 1500m in Rio was won by an American of Polish background. Last night a Norwegian won in one of the fastest times seen for many years, with Britain making a big resurgence in this event that they have such a proud history in. So while the super East African athletes will always be in the mix, the comparative advantage of their unique bio-mechanics is not as great in this event group.
I think the race played out fairly similarly to how I predicted it in that last reply. However one major piece I got wrong - Jakob Ingebrigtsen. He did front run alongside Stewy and won from the front. Remember I said that only happens when you have an athlete clearly better than everyone else at the peak of their powers? Perhaps a world record holder several seconds better than everyone else. Sure we don't quite have anyone in that category yet, but perhaps that is the path Ingebrigtsen is on. He ran one of the fastest times in years, front running in an Olympic final at the age of 21. I knew he was among the favourites to win it, but didn't think he'd quite dominate it like that. So I slightly underestimated him. If Stewy was ever going to win an Olympic medal, that race was set up perfectly from him. Which is why at the function I was at last night, there seemed some disappointment for him as he crossed the line. Someone pointed out that it was a bizarre mood in the room that we were disappointed for him finishing 7th in an Olympic final, in an event Australia hasn't even had a finalist in for many years - an incredible result that no one dreamed of until the last year. And a race he was really competitive in, too, not just making up the numbers. But I think it came down the fact that it was a very rare chance of the stars aligning - him in the form he was in and a championship race playing out exactly to his strengths, meaning a very rare chance had slipped out of his hands in the last 200m.