V 11 N. 48 Why Has the Progression in World Records in Track and Field’s Middle and Long Distance Races Stagnated? by Richard Mach

 July 12, 2021   Sometimes the editorial staff at our humble blog put in  a piece by a guest writer who has something of importance to say or in this case to ask.  Today is one of those days.  What,  with all the unpredictable variants and goings on in pre-Olympic Tokyo, can we expect in two weeks when we tune in to the not-to-be-directly-viewed Games?  My guess is that athletes in these modern times will be geared and tuned  to perform at high levels regardless of the absence of cheering fans.  They have the advantage of knowing they will be financially rewarded for their efforts, and good performances on the Olympic stage mean bigger payoffs now as well as down the road.   Maybe the most affected by fan absence  will be the pole vaulters who seem to rely on the crowd to pump them up before their jumps?  The short racers will probably be least affected by the absence of the crowd as there is little time to consult with fans in the stands during a 9 to 19 second race.  The distance runners may indeed be the ones to take notice when they need a boost if their momentum starts to fade.   Our guest today Richard Mach, former Western Michigan distance runner and now clinical psychologist looks at a bigger question of why the best all time distance performances may be lagging.  Enjoy Dr. Mach's analysis.  And please respond if you have some thoughts on the questions he poses.   George

Why Has the Progression in World Records in Track and Field’s Middle and Long Distance Races Stagnated? by Richard Mach

With the Olympics now fast approaching, a quick review of the US’s very recent Olympic Trials offers the real possibility of a number of new world records being set in our sport.  Three of those world’s best ever records have already fallen in just the past two weeks with both 400 m hurdle racers, Norway’s Karsten Warholm  and America’s Sidney McLaughlin, dipping under what has ever been run before.  And the 31 yr old shot putt record held by someone who was found dirty a scant 2.5 months later — as well as his being suspended from competition for life 8 yrs later for drugging — has finally been eclipsed in the small circle by the Big Man and Oregonian, Ryan Crouser, at 6’7”, 320#.   Mondo Duplantis from Louisiana jumping for Sweden is setting the bar at 20’ 31/2 inches in his last two DL meets in Oslo and Stockholm, a centimeter higher than his current WR and US’s Grant Holloway, a Virginian, in a near perfect — and legal  —12.81 came within .01 sec in his semi in the USOT of tying Aries Merritt’s superb WR in the 110 HH.  

With Timothy Cheriuyot, the finest 1500 m man in the world the past 4-5 years now, left off the Kenyan Olympic team, the anticipated possible race with Norway’s phenom, 21 yr old Jakob Ingebrigtsen to eclipse Hicham El Guerrouj’s now 23 yr old WR 3:26.00 may be off.  And with Michigan’s’ Donovan Brazier in hopefully a temporary slump and not traveling to Tokyo, the current WRH, Kenya’s David Rudisha’s record—  that’s two sub 51 second 400 m splits — seems safe.  As does South Africa’s Wayde Van Niekerk’s blazing 43.03 WR of five years vintage.  The kind of talent today in the 5000 m and 10000 m races does not preclude a new WRH in both.  There’s Uganda’s Joshua Cheptegei, the current WRH or his fellow countryman, Jacob Kiplimo, or one of the stellar Kenyans or the Ethiopian, Yomif Kejelcha {WRH in Men’s indoor mile} or a certain hardly more than kid from Norway ready to burn the track up and run under 4:03 or 4:13 mile pace, respectively, for those two distances.  

And we have the youngster, Athing Mu from New Jersey running in the low 1:56s @19 in the 800 — seemingly effortlessly — to watch in an Olympic final. Is a low 1:53 possible?  And what kind of a split can be expect from her after posting an open 49.57 in perhaps anchoring the 4 x 400m relay?  With our top women contenders in both the 1500 m and 100 m stricken from this coming competition for less than solid reasons in the former, Shelby Houlihan, and a culture-free decision on the other, we are unlikely to see gold in either; nor, in the case of Richardson, anyone, even Jamaica’s Fisher-Pryce from attacking the 10.49 the dead-at-37 Flo Jo somehow laid down now a solid 3rd of a century ago.  And this is hardly a full scan of the races. Additional performances may crop up within the next few weeks only adding to the drama of this Games finally coming off a solid year late — thanks largely to the checkered responses to the COVID-19 pandemic by most of the world governments, who, in one fell swoop, have revealed the unplumbable depths of their individual and collective incompetence.  

The world records for men from the 1500 m on up on the track have remained remarkably untouched until recently. And then in only the two longest races. In looking over the WRs of the flat races most often run in international top-flight competitive conditions, we find ourselves confronted with these distant dates for the setting of world records in the 1500 m, the mile, the lightly contested 2000m, the 3000m, the infrequently now raced two mile, the 5000 m and the 10000 m track races.    

Below is a table listing the distance, the world record, the date set, the athlete who holds — or in the castoff the 5 and 10 thousand m races, held} the record, the nation they represented, the place the record was set and finally the length to the nearest month since that record was set.  

Distance Time   Date set Athlete                Nation Locus          Length

1500 m 3:26.00 14JUL’98 H. El Guerrouj         MAR Rome           23 yrs 

*Mile 3:43.13 7JUL’99 H. El Guerrouj MAR          Rome           22 yrs

2,000 m 4:44.79 7SEP’99 H. El Guerrouj MAR           Berlin           21y 10 m

3,000 m  7:20.67 1SEP’96 Daniel Komen        KEN            Rieti             24y, 10m

2 Miles 7:58.61 19JUL.’97         Daniel Komen       KEN Hechtel 24 yrs

5,000 m 12:37.35 31MAY’04 Kenensia Bekele     ETH         Hangelo         17y 4 m

**

10,000 m 26:17.53 ’05 Kenesia  Bekele ETH         Brussels         16y 1m

________________________________

* During that same period between ’96 and 19” or 23 years, the mile record for women remained unbroken and then only by 0.23 seconds strongly suggesting the Russian, Masterkova, was drugging.  And a 26 yr hiatus indoors for women and then a vast improvement of nearly a full 4 seconds, but both competitors performances must be looked on with only faint enthusiasm because Romania and then the DiBaba sisters during those two different periods seemed to be in a  class by themselves, which, too often, spelled PEDs.  

** 

Until the serious advent of the premier Ugandan, Joshua Cheptegei, onto the international scene and his breaking both the 5,000 and 10,000 meter world records this past August and September in the middle of the world wide pandemic.

Incidentally, the Steeplechase WR was set nearly 17 yrs ago in Brussels by Qatar’s ‘Kenyan’ athlete, Saif Saaeed Shaheen aka Stephen Cherono. 

As you can see, the length of times these ‘distance’ race records have been in place against all world class assaults are remarkably sizable.  In fact, one might be tempted to say, incredibly large.

The average for these world records in the seven races — their mean longevity if you will — including stopping counting @ the dates of the two Cheptegei has more recently broken —  is approximately 21 years, 3.5 months.  If we remove the very much less competed 2000 m and 2 mile races, that now 5 race average is pared down less than a year to 20 yrs and nearly 8 full months.  So, as a rule of thumb we might settle on the figure of about 21 years that all distances from the 1500 m to the 10,000 m have, on average, lasted:  

                             Two full decades plus a year.    

The first  question that comes begging for an answer is when in history has there ever been any such a long, unbroken hiatus in record breaking in these races?   After a thorough perusal of the stats concerning the progression of all these world records since the early 30s, some now 90 years, the answer is … well …. never.   This drought — if you will — is quite simply unprecedented.  In fact, in recorded history, there has never been anything like this.  

For instance, in the mile, the longest period any mile record survived in modern times (since 1931} has been a bit under 9 yrs — between Hagge ’45 and Bannister ’54 — along with two other periods of 8 yrs each. And the world during that post-war period was hardly preoccupied with athletics as it pulled itself out of the aftermath of a debilitating world war.   Today, we’re into more than 2 and a half times that long a period with 22 yrs since Hicham El Guerrouj of Morocco set the still standing mark.  For the 5,000 m WR between Hagge ’42 and Zatopek ’54, the single longest period was a bit more than 12 and a half years.  And for the 10,000 m WR there was once a 13 yr hiatus between Nurmi ’24 and Salminen ’37.  Otherwise, the duration across the modern period has been, on average, more like every 2 or 3 years for these three records.    And, back then, the races, and, thus, the records were less frequently contested. If we, as a species, are coming up against our limits, might we not expect the records to fall in smaller increments — perhaps smaller and smaller increments — as well as less and less frequently?   But, that has not been the case either.  

Suddenly enough, until the Ugandan’s cracking two quite incredibly ‘hard’ records of the Ethiopian {4:03 pace and 4:13 pace respectively} after that 9 yr period between ’96 and ’05, all record breaking in these races simply stopped.   Tracks got better over the next nearly two decades.  Real prize money entered the picture through especially the Diamond League. And, quite recently, shoe technology itself ‘seems’ to be contributing to faster times.  And we mustn’t forget the potential value the new technology of pacing lights strung around the track seem to have for fast times beating out the pre-determined pace.  Some have opined that the delta or rate of change in improvement in facilities, in tracks and shoes and even training methods has diminished when compared with the 90s and before, but I am not among them.

During this period from the mid-to-late 90s until today, the political situation across much of the world has done nothing if not worsen while far right wing fascism— playing to the people while depriving them of life liberty and happiness — rises up and threatens to engulf the world.   Which may have a loading on talented athletes seeing their notoriety as assuring their safety and that of their family especially in rapidly changing national circumstances within unstable regimes.  As an example akin to the spate of former Kenyan stars running as quick citizens while members of the US Army, Kenya’s 1500 Oly Champ @ 1500 m @ but 19, Asbel Kiprop, was invited to join the Kenyan police force, where, he, then, was  —reputably —given to exercising questionable reign over the populace.   Kiprop will finish serving his 4 yr suspension for EPO {blood doping} on 3Feb’22 when he is 32 and a half yrs old. 

Ethiopia and Kenya, the origins of so many world class distance runners are brittle democracies at best.  The US Fund for Peace think tank last year ranked as 11th and 32nd most fragile democracies, Ethiopia and Kenya; and Morocco 83 as considerably more stable.  Finland is ranked as most stable at 179th and the US is 143 somewhat less stable than the UAE at 150.  But these rankings in 2020 do not necessarily reflect the conditions in North and East Africa during the record setting years.   Kenya appears to be sitting uneasily on a bomb of sorts there.  Ethiopia, so far, remains mostly under the radar.  And, Morocco is only occasionally issuing a stellar athlete with significant promise.  

And then there is the very real and rankling issue of covert drug use, wherein estimates of how wide spread performances enhancing drug use actually is vary widely   We need only to harken back to the reign of the Russians and her communist satellite countries in the record books and look at ‘before and after’ pictures of female athletes, who grew muscle like Barry Bonds or Mark McGuire and had the physiques 99 out of every 100 full blooded men dreamed of having to know something was afoot. Czechoslovakia’s answer to Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jarmila Kratochvilova, still holds the women’s 800 m world record in 1:53.28 set now but a mere 38 years ago.   No legitimate outlier is that far ahead of the curve.  Last time I checked, unlike Flo Jo, she is still alive.  But, considerably more diminutive.  

And, yet, on the other hand, while we attempt to coexist along with an ever mounting cognitive dissonance, it is true that when there is a internecine rivalry and particularly when within a single country like, for instance, there was between the Brits, Coe and Ovett, when the WR in the mile was broken between them a total of 5 times with and an overall drop of 2.1 secs within two years — the last three of which took place in one 10 day period — they push one another to beyond what was thought possible; and then when that mano a mano period is over, the record may be destined to languish for some years. 

But, 22 or 23 yrs?  Unheard off.   

And we shouldn't forget Sweden’s dueling twosome — Hagg and Andersson — who, between them set 6 world mile records within 3 yrs.  And dropped the record a full 5 seconds down to 4:01.4 during the early 40s.  And it stayed right there until the man for whom running was more of a part time hobby — caught up in his medical studies he was — walked out on the Iffley Road track with his two mates on a windy day,  in Oxford on a still somewhat soggy cinder track on the 6th of May, 1954 and commenced to crack through what many physiologists saw at the time as an impenetrable barrier.  And no less than certain death.

So we have any number of factors and, ultimately, perhaps uncountable, loading on not only the environmental factors, but sociological, economic, political and psychological circumstances afoot in the world at these times: Factors that contributed to the circumstances allowing or set up for a record to be broken  One question may be how much do often arduous politically driven conditions end up escalating record breaking as it does escalating Nobel prizes in Literature. Both share in common their exceptional and rare status. 

We are looking at the beginnings of what could be a running dynasty coming out of Norway topped by 20 yr old Jakob Ingebrigtsen along with his two world class older brothers.  All coached by their father.  The ‘boy’ will be 21 on the 19th of this September.  He is one of but two human beings on this planet who have run under 3:30 for 1500 m {3:28.68}, under 7:30 for 3;000 m {7:27.05} and under 13 minutes for 5,000 m {12:48}.  The other is the athlete I believe has the single best record on the distance books and that is Daniel Komen the Kenyan lights-out star, who, within a little more than a year stunned the track world with his performances.  Only El Gerrouj has come within a little less than 2.5 seconds of Komen’s blazing 3000 m WR of 7:20.67.   Hard records prove to be so because they stand up against oncoming history and human evolution the longest.  And so we might ask, are the three still held by the Moroccan — Hicham El Guerrouj — so far unbreakable because they are so extended beyond what was before that we all must wait for the rest of humanity to catch up?    

If I might allow myself the temporary moniker of world record prognosticator, I am certain the youngster is after the 1500 m record and the 3000 m as well.  Gjert, his father and coach, may we pray, is not another Cerutty type, who trains his charge into the ground and the fans are consigned to looking @ a burn-out syndrome that never entirely rights itself again.  

We may be sitting at the front end of a wholesale reordering of the record books in track and field provoked, in part, by the conditions imposed on the athletes during that pandemic still underway as I write this.  And these premonitions are certainly sparked by the last few weeks when those three new WRs were set.  Are Cheptegei’s recent breakthroughs as well as the others observed above a kind of harbinger of things to come?  

Record breaking can be contagious.  And we certainly are due in the middle and long distances on the track.  The present flight of athletes are bigger and stronger than ever before.  The technology is advancing at just under phenomenal rates.  The pacing metronomic light system strung around 400 m tracks are relentless metering out the pre-defined pace.  And takes any preoccupation around proper pace out of the picture.   And the lead-out athletes tow the heavy hitters through a predetermined time during a predetermined distance while our stars put their brains in park and simply follow the leader before the lead out peels off and lets the heaters race one another all the way to the tape.  

And, yet, could it be that man has reached his zenith?  Can go no higher?  No faster?  At least for the present.  That the current record setters in the distances are extreme outliers on the continuum of human performance — all members of tribes from the African continent, where the DNA of Homo sapiens has had the longest period to mutate and change?  And where over the millennia this gradual and exclusive evolutionary adaptation to running down large animals over considerable expanses at altitude and in the heat has made them the natural selected elites of our running world today?

But why is any of this so important?  What is intrinsic to the meaning embedded in world record breaking?  And, for that matter, the world records themselves?  What are they telling us?   What can we extrapolate about the future of mankind from these data, the exploits  of the most superhuman amongst us?   What is there intrinsic in the drive within the human race to exceed what have often been thought to be ultimate,  un-tresspassable limits?  What is that telling us about life on this planet, about human capability and about its contribution to what is becoming a more and more uncertain future for our offspring ahead?  

I would be most interested to read the thoughts from any and all the readers of this fine blog.

from Bill Schnier

   Didn't we see last year an onslaught of WRs in the 5K, 10K, and other seldom-run races such as 3K and 2K?  They might have all been by women but they are still WRs.  I suspect the absence of actual WRs recently has more to do with enhanced drug enforcement and drug testing not available 23 years ago.  The EPO types were in full force 23 years ago but might be curtailed these days.  Nevertheless, with extremely enhanced shoes and monetary enticement, I expect the WRs to be broken frequently in these Olympics and especially in next year's World Championships.