Averaging the men's and women's world records produces kickass men's times in every track and road event
Very few Americans have ever reached these "midpoint times" in long road races
When Letesenbet Gidey ran a half-marathon in 1:02:52 last October, I thought…well, a lot of things, many unflattering to Gidey and the sport.
One reaction was that an American male with a half-marathon personal best of 1:02:52 could credibly call himself a national-class runner. A total of 103 American men have reached or exceeded this standard on fair, certified courses throughout road racing’s history, with about thirty of them born in Africa. If the U.S. has not yet organically produced a century club of sub-1:03:00 half-marathoners, then it’s hard to form a cogent argument that 1:03:00 is not a national-class time.
Last year, only 11 American men, five of whom were born elsewhere, equaled or bettered 1:02:52. Ten of them did so at the U.S. Half-Marathon Championship in December. After Conner Mantz won that race in 1:00:55, I was feeling Gidey again, and buried a piece of musing in this morass of sniping: In winning a national men’s championship, Mantz had run a time closer to the women’s world record for the distance than to the men’s record. The midpoint between 57:31 (Jacob Kiplimo’s world record from last November) and 1:02:52 is 1:00:11.5.
“Midpoint between” when dealing with a set containing two elements means “average of.” I decided to average the world records in the flat Olympic and World Championship events and a few other common road and track distances and see if I could create any breaking news.
The numbers below are the results of that process. The third column shows the World Athletics points assigned to a male achieving the corresponding time, and the last column displays the number of American men who have achieved that performance level in the corresponding event.
Before tackling what probably jumps out at you—that is, the hugely varying totals in the last column—I’ll explore what to me is a fascinating pattern in column three. ‘
After discarding the non-Olympic one-mile and 3,000-meter distances, it appears that a male robot capable of performing at precisely the level between the men’s and women’s world records in every event would fare extremely well in the 100m, gradually fade as he moved up in distance to the 800m, and then gradually get better with increasing distance up to and including the marathon.
There seems to be no physiological rationale to explain this. That is, looking solely at the established ways men and women differ athletically, I can’t explain the basis of what the pattern implies, which is that the women’s world records in the middle distances are inferior to those in the sprints and long distances. But that doesn’t mean it’s difficult to speculate about what might be happening.
Keep in mind that the chart above was generated using only two data points for each entry—the men’s and women’s world records in the listed events. It’s safe to assume that every one of these records was aided by banned substances. It’s also reasonable to propose that world-class women who dope to the maximum gain experience more performance gains than do men at the same level, because their native systems boast far lower androgen levels. If these assumptions are valid, then it means that women sprinters and long-distance runners benefit even more from doping than others do, have gotten away with more egregious levels of doping, or both.
Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 1988 100-meter 10.49 world record has been questioned as much for its almost certainly inaccurate wind-gauge reading (a finding ignored by World Athletics in 1995 and throughout) as for the fact that no serious observer believes that Flo-Jo was clean. (It should amaze me that Sydney McLaughlin’s hiring of Flo-Jo’s coach, Bob Kersee, as her own coach in 2020 generated very little controversy. I checked; it doesn’t, because as long as McLaughlin keeps her nose clean, her face pretty, and her prayers to Jesus public, she’ll be eternally protected from adverse consequences of doping just like Allyson Felix always was.)
But even if you toss Flo-Jo’s mark and replace it with Elaine Thompson Herah’s 10.54 from last year, the average rises by only 0.02 seconds to 10.06 and the points total declines to a still-sky-high 1185. Of course, this year’s Diamond League coverage has helpfully revealed the musculature of the whole cadre of Jamaican women sprinters to be so extreme that their biceps and quads resemble overfed ticks on the verge of exploding.
The women’s all-time 400-meter list is a glorious mess. The record is held by East Germany’s Marita Koch, who delivered a 47.60 in 1985 at the pinnacle of the Eastern Bloc doping program. In second place is Czechoslovakia’s Jarmila Kratochvilova, whose 47.99 in 1983 was fostered by the same circumstances. Next is the 48.12 of Salwa Eid Naser of Bahrain (cue laugh track), currently serving a two-year doping suspension for whereabouts failures. Then comes France’s Marie-José Pérec (48.25), who late in her career began training under Koch’s husband. In fifth is Olga Bryzgina (48.27) of the Soviet Union, the third country named in this paragraph that no longer exists.
The low point score of the 800-meter “midpoint time” implies that Kratochvilova’s 1:53.28 world record is comparatively soft. Since we* know she doped—and she’s denied this, but if she’s telling the truth, it means she’s actually a “he”—this implies that the right doper simply hasn’t taken a proper stab at the now-39-year-old record. A 48-flat translates to close to 1:52-low in the right athlete, so if World Athletics green-lights the pharmacological preliminaries, someone can surely do it. Alas, China’s time has likely come and gone.
(Another possibility lies at the other end: David Rudisha’s 1:40.91 is even weaker. If so, someone should ask every half-miler in the world why they aren’t trying harder, because no one has run within 1.13 seconds of Rudisha’s mark in the ten-plus years since.)
The columns pertaining to the marks for the 10,000 meters and longer are dictated by two women: Gidey and Brigid Koskgei, the owner of a hilarious 2:14:04 marathon. Kosgei’s and Gidey’s performances are obviously fueled by as many drugs as they could possibly benefit from without melting the pavement around them and causing birds to fall from the sky in their wake. And Gidey’s half-marathon time suggests she’s capable of a marathon under 2:12:00.
Now look at the last column. My instinct here, which continues to try to exert bullshitting effects even as I type this, is to mistrust the World Athletics charts, because there is no way Americans are that bad at long distances compared to the rest of the world.
Actually, they are. My inclination to argue otherwise stems solely from an American-centric view. I know perfectly well how things are, but part of me feels that they ought to be more statistically equal for ephemeral or starkly indefensible reasons, and that’s despite having no discernible emotional attachment to any outcome in this realm. The world is rife with similar “is-ought” fallacies.
That said, the inclusion of the 15K distance—while interesting because of how fast Joshua Cheptegei’s and Gidey’s records are—unfairly penalizes Americans, because the only stacked 15K now available stateside is the Gate River Run in Jacksonville, Florida, held on a not-fast course and often in muggy weather. (The Cascade 15K in Portland was a great race, but like its host city, the event is long dead.) But this also provides an opportunity to appreciate a few big names from the past.
Americans, however, have no such excuse in the half-marathon, in which only three U.S.-born men have run under the “midpoint times” listed. Ditto the marathon, where the same three names appear.
Are Americans really that weak on the roads? They really are. (By the way, ask the next self-professed track nerd you meet under 30 who the American record holder is in the marathon. In my experience, around four in every five will guess Hall or Rupp, usually Hall. And they won’t know that they’re guessing.)
"Who the fuck is Kenneth Keter?" you ask. I'll gladly tell you. He's a Kenyan who at age 25 ran a personal best of 2:06:05 last October for eighth place at the Amsterdam Marathon. He's also a superstar by any American standard, as well as the 72nd-fastest Kenyan of all time. The 72nd-best American time is 2:11:35, run by both Fred Torneden (yep, that one) and 2004 Olympian Dan Browne.
I could perform the same exercise for various other men’s long-distance events and the gamut of women’s, too, and produce similarly bleak (from a U.S. perspective) pictures. But consider what this would all look like from the perspective of a Kenyan teenager whose exposure is chiefly to the long distances. Such an observer would also be inclined to think that the points tables were skewed, but in a different direction. He would wonder why Galen Rupp is such a household name here when a flood of runners no one will ever hear of have performed significantly better than him in the marathon, and he might be vexed by his country’s inability to produce quality athletes below the 800-meter distance.
Another fascinating way to look at the above chart is to consider how many American high-school boys, if any, have run the times listed. According to the Track and Field News all-time top-10 lists, two boys have run 10.04 or faster under wind-legal conditions. The number jumps to seven for the 200m, more than ten for the 400m, four for the 800m (with two of boys breaking 1:47.00 this year), one for the 1,500m (Hobbs Kessler in 2021), and three or four for the mile (Alan Webb, Jim Ryun, Colin Sahlman in 2022, and Kessler if his indoor 2021 time is counted).
At distances beyond that, no fuckin’ way. You won’t see an American kid running 7:43, 13:21 or 27:36 even if civilization persists beyond June of 2029, which is unlikely. I doubt I need to work hard to convince any experienced running fans of this. But if a 16-year-old has run 7:32 and 12:54 and a 17-year-old 27:02, it might just be a matter of needlessly keeping humanity afloat until around 2215, when free migration patterns and the absence of international borders will even these injustices out.
The confounding factor of doping aside, the “surprises” in this exercise can clearly be reduced to differences in basic human capital. Kenyans are tiny people who have been living energetically at high altitude for countless generations and tend to marry within tribes, and they produce a lot of incredible distance-running stock. The U.S. is much larger and more ethnically diverse, but its stock has historically included people best suited for shorter distances and other athletic endeavors.
Now imagine how great the difference in distance-running quality between the U.S. and East Africa would be if no Americans had ever used banned substances at all. That’s not to excuse anyone’s loopy burrito stories or comically flimsy explanations for their magical late-thirties improvements, but once a runner reaches a certain level and commits to the game, their conscience is no longer a guide when it comes to choosing which rules to obey. As Koch told the BBC in 2014, “I never did anything which I should not have done at that time.”
(Useful reference: World Athletics points calculator, courtesy of Calgary Track and Field.)