The 800 meters is a great event. It sometimes plays out as an impossibly long sprint where the most brazen athlete wins, and sometimes unfolds as a tactical minefield in which timing and the ability to accelerate at just the right moment is the key to victory. One way or the other, there is precious little room for miscalculation.
I think back to the 1980 Olympic 800m final, a race I've read about many times, in which Seb Coe, at the time the greatest 800m runner in the world and a prohibitive favorite for the gold medal, sat back in last place with 300m to go, giving his rival and countryman Steve Ovett all the advantage he would need to steal the victory.
But even though the races are always exciting, something seems to be missing. Where have the great 800m runners gone? After Coe and Ovett in the late 70's and early 80's, there was Joaquim Cruz who won Olympic gold in 1984. A decade passed and then there was the incomparable Wilson Kipketer in the late 90's. Kipketer tied and then eclipsed Coe's world record of 1:41.73, placing it at 1:41.11, a mark that hasn't been seriously threatened since it was set in 1997.
Perusing the all-time lists, I'm struck by the fact that its dominated by Kipketer, Cruz, Coe, and their contemporaries. Kipketer has seven of the top ten times, with Coe (1981), Cruz (1984), and Sammy Koskei (1984) filling out the list. Looking down the list, only five of the top thirty times are from this century. Since 2003, the fastest time run is 1:42.69 by Sudan's Abubaker Kaki, good only for 31st on the all-time list.
The U.S. all-time list is similarly slanted towards the past. The American record is Johnny Gray's 1:42.60 from 1985. Of the top ten American times, not one is from this century. The list even includes Rick Wolhuter's hand-timed 1:43.5 from 1974, thirty-five years ago. Gray is still the only American to run under 1:43.20, a feat he last accomplished in 1988.
So are we on the verge of a breakthrough, or is there some other persistent reason that the U.S. hasn't produced another Johnny Gray, and the world hasn't produced another Wilson Kipketer?
Could it be that training for middle distance runners has changed in some fundamental way -- perhaps with less emphasis on pure speedwork, and more on endurance work? Can we blame it on modern running shoes with their higher, heavier heels that protect but perhaps weaken the achilles tendon?
Whatever the reason, we seem to be stuck for the moment. Will the world championships in Berlin add any names to the all-time list? I don't see it happening.
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3 comments:
Why we haven't kept up in the 800 and in distance running in general is obvious---we aren't working hard enough. We have become too soft--afraid of not recovering, afraid of injuries, afraid of burnout. We don't do enough track work and speed work. Steve Ovett said his main workout each day before he won that 800 was 8x200 in 22 sec. I watched Steve Prefontaine run his daily workout of 20x 300 in 39 sec. at Bowdoin College as he prepared for the Olympics. There is not the will to work on speed today as there once was. We also need to race more. When I ran in college( with 5 Olympians on the team) we had 12 indoor invitationals. Ron Delany, Charlie Jenkins, and Don Bragg still won the Olympics and nobody burned out.
I think this post speaks to the fact that training has changed, not that we as athletes in our current society have become "soft". If this was the case, then you wouldn't see progression of world records in longer events such as the 5k, 10k 1/2 and full marathon distances.
I do however think that there could be something to the idea that running shoes have changed (for the worse?) and therefore have made us more prone to achilles related and other lower extremity injuries. We may indeed see a tendency over the next couple of decades for running shoes to take a more minimalist form.
Clearly when running a long sprint race that requires more time spent up on the toes it puts a great deal of stress on the achilles' and calves.
I hate to mention the possibility of the records being like the homerun records in baseball, perhaps, a little tainted. The early 80's were an untested time. We'll never know.
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