Never mind Ingebrigtsen vs. the ghost of Cram—the Bislett Games were a lesson in something else
The 1985 and 2022 men's Dream Mile fields would be a good match, but today's women would be annihilating, crushing, and killing their late-Cold War counterparts
Executive summary: If you used only the 1985 and 2022 Bislett Games as historical reference points, you’d be forced to conclude that women distance runners one day really will overtake their male counterparts, all independent of any DSD and doping bugs added to the distaff component of the system. (I would say “catch up to” men, but do you really think either side would settle for a draw at that point?)
The 1985 Bislett Games in Oslo, held on July 27 of that year (as opposed to a future one) was a high-density track spectacle even for a meet then already revered for its output, with new world records (as opposed to records fished from the ancient ruins) set in the men’s 5,000 meters, the women’s 10,000 meters, and the men’s mile. This was, of course, pre-Internet; imagine what Letsrun.com would look like if all three of those records were toppled in a single 2022 night. It might be the one thing that could elicit an over-the-top, all-caps headline from that overly staid and deliberative bunch.
It was also the first elite track meet I remember watching on television. I had recently finished my freshm…the ninth grade and was training for cross-country for the first time; I’d competed as ninth-grader, but with virtually no summer preparation other than jumping into various rivers and creeks from various bridge spans in the greater Penacook, N.H. area. I had also run 4:56 for the 1,600 meters that spring. Earlier in July, I had run the hilly Bill Luti 5-Mile Road Race in 30:54, which, while not quite Bislett-ready, seemed better than the 19:27 5K I had run the month before under better conditions. All of these feats, taken together, meant that I could watch the Bislett Games as something of an insider, perhaps sitting on the floor and eating Grape Nuts-flavored ice cream straight from the carton as I did so.
The Bislett Games is now part of the Diamond League schedule rather than a stop on what was then the Grand Prix European circuit. Both before and after moving to a new venue in 2004, the event has reliably extracted amazing results from the world’s fittest and fastest. On that 1985 evening, Morocco’s Said Aouita broke Briton David Moorcroft’s world record in the 5,000 meters by a hundredth of a second in 13:00.40. South African-born apartheid-escaper Sydney Maree, a man no one seems to remember at all, chased the Moroccan to 13:01.15, breaking Cuban-born Alberto Salazar’s American record by over ten seconds.
The women’s 10,000 meters saw Norwegia’s own Ingrid Kristiansen, then more or less unbeatable at everything, run 30:59.42, slashing over 14 seconds from the record set the previous year in Zürich by the U.S.S.R’s Olga Bondarenko. (A little less than one year later, Kristiansen would burn up the same track with a shocking new record of 30:13.74.)
More revealing than Kristiansen’s standout (by definition) time was the lack of depth in the race despite various women setting or approaching national records. Portugal’s Aurora Cunha’s second-place 31:35.45 was a national record, Lynn Jennings’ third-place 32:03.37 made her the number-two American ever behind Mary Slaney, and Lisa Martin set a new Australian standard in crossing the line fourth in 32:17.86. All of these women trailing Kristiansen were—despite times that look pedestrian, or at least NCAA-like, today—Olympic medalists or serious podium threats.
On the other hand, what concluded that night’s racing, the men’s Dream Mile, produced times that were not only unprecedented in real time, but still glow as brightly as the fires of Colorado today (video). The U.K.’s Steve Cram set an ultra-new world record in 3:46.31, slicing 1.02 seconds from Sebastian Coe’s four-year-old mark. (Then and now, 1,609.344-meter Dreams are apparently the sole purview of men; they could at least add a Daydream Mile for women.) Spain’s José Luis González blazed a 3:47.79 for second, passing Coe (3:49.22) in the homestretch and keeping clear of American Steve Scott (3:49.93), then the U.S. record-holder and still the second-fastest American ever (Maree is still the third-fastest).
Bislett Games results from 1985 are buried somewhere in this PDF containing complete results from that year’s Grand Prix circuit meets.
Four sub-3:50 miles in one race would still not be a disappointment in 2022, at any meet. But getting only two of them at this year’s Bislett Games (results) despite Norwegia’s Jakob Ingebrigtsen perfectly following the pacing lights seemed a bit of a letdown, even though the field arguably wasn’t as Dreamy as in past campaigns. Ingebrigtsen was delightfully rosy in comparative defeat—he won the race, but fell 0.14 short of Cram’s meeting and European record. (Astute readers will notice that Cram’s record really was listed as 3:46.31 in the official 1985 results, but has since been changed to 3:46.32. If human civilization persists for long enough, Cram—who closed his record run with a 53.0 lap—won’t even remain a sub-four miler.)
The winning time in the men 5,000 meters at this year’s Bislett Games, 13:03.51, was slower than Aouita’s and Maree’s times from the same meet 37 years earlier. It was the women’s 5,000 the other night that put the quality stamp on the entire meet. Twelve women ran under 14:58.89 despite drizzly conditions. Actually, all of them ran under 14:52, but 14:58.89 was the world record as of July 27, 1985, held by—who else—Kristiansen. (Zola Budd of the U.K. would break that record the next month in 14:48.07; Kristiansen would reclaim it the following year with a 14:37.33.)
Within this dirty dozen—maybe too loaded a term to use, but when the fruit’s ripe, pluck the shit out of it—was Alicia Monson, the latest American woman to run a time (14:31.11, in this case) that until five years ago would have seemed unreachable by a homegrown, NCAA-developed American woman. After Regina Jacobs ran an American record of 14:45.35 in July 2000, three women took sixteen years to pare 6.43 seconds from that mark, culminating in Shannon Rowbury’s 14:38.92 in 2016. Since 2020, three American women have run 14:31.11 or faster: Monson, American record-holder Shelby Houlihan (14:23.92) and Karissa Schweizer (14:26.34). Seven more ran under 14:55 in 2020 or 2021 (all-time U.S. outdoor list here).
You may notice that some of these names bear the pungency of documented scandal. Jacobs was suspended for four years in 2004 after testing positive for “The Clear” (a designer steroid, not a wrestler). Houlihan was suspended for four years in 2021 for testing positive for nandrolone (an old steroid, not an ingredient in quasi-Mexican cuisine). Adding to the similarities, neither Jacobs nor Houlihan, both Nike athletes, wore ZoomX “superspikes” in their record-setting efforts. So maybe the whole thing is a wash, or at least those two names.
I can think of plenty of noble or at least innocuous reasons for the explosion in fast American female times in the distance events in recent years, a bonanza with riches clearly in excess of what superspikes alone could endow. That American men and women have been upping the ante for years is evident in Milesplit data that I’ll review erelong.
But I prefer to focus on ignoble but plausible scenarios instead. And what I wrote below pertains not only to Americans but women all over the planet.
I have no idea why World Athletics decided in 2018 to allow DSD athletes to continue competing in certain women’s events. But the fact that they’re allowed to compete only in those events is an open declaration to the world that the global governing body of track and field is acutely aware of the unfairness now saddling women’s athletics, because the decision was not grounded whatsoever in any sensible application of scientific reasoning.
It would be one thing if World Athletics had simply allowed DSD athletes to compete unrestricted as women across all disciplines; this would now look like a bad decision, but one rooted in ignorance rather than one resembling a surgical dismantling of the women’s sprints and distance events—anti-female bias, really, or at least unforgivable apathy.
It doesn’t take an army of Francine Niyonsabas winning everything to toss a variable deeply dispiriting to the women athletes in the competitive mix. Add to this the open secret of Ethiopians never being drug-tested, at least not seriously, and winning a disproportionate number of medals and glory.
If you’re a current or budding world-class distance runner from outside of East Africa, and you’re seeing all of this happen and watching momentum go the wrong way, how does that affect the ethical calculi of you and your management team? Especially when you know teams all over the world are running the same kinds of analyses?