Another Great Race
Putting the W.E.I.R.D. back into the weirdest Olympic track race, the steeplechase.
Here’s the NBC video of the men’s 3000 meter steeplechase.
Perhaps not quite as sensational as the men’s 1500 meter the day before, but close. I know a lot of people have theories about why they don’t like track, but Olympic events come around for a few minutes every four years, so why not enjoy?
The men’s 3000 meter steeplechase was a Kenyan Olympic monopoly from 1968 through 2016 when Kenyans won every gold medal in the 11 Olympics in which they competed.*
As I wrote for UPI just before the 2000 Olympic steeplechase:
In Sydney, Kenyans try Friday for their seventh straight Olympic gold medal in the 3,000-meter steeplechase, that odd track event that combines distance running, hurdling, and splashing through water. Excluding the two Olympics they boycotted, the Kenyans haven't lost this event since 1964. Why do Kenyans perform so extraordinarily well in the steeplechase and other endurance races? Is their secret that they all ran to school as children? Is it growing up at high altitude? Is it something they eat? What about their training and coaching regime? Or, disturbing as this may sound to many in this racially sensitive era, do Kenyans also tend to enjoy some kind of physiological advantage over the other peoples of the world?
Whatever the cause of Kenyan superiority, no one can deny it. Although two swift Moroccans have emerged to offer the first serious challenge to Kenyan domination of the steeplechase in years, runners from this East African nation still account for 91 of the 100 best times ever.
At present, 24 years later, Kenyans (counting Kenyan-born hired guns running for oil-rich Qatar) account for 78 of top 100 steeplechase times ever. The more things change, the more they stay the same.
But, in Tokyo in 2021, Soufiane El Bakkali of Morocco broke the Kenyan streak. While the two Norwegian track stars, Warholm and Ingebrigtsen, look like Morrissey, the 6’4” mustachioed Caucasian El Bakkali looks like a young Mediterranean version of Big Brother.
Why aren’t the East African men dominating distance running quite as much in this Olympics, allowing Americans to win, so far, four medals (one to an Ethiopian-American, three to white Americans)?
One reason might be that back in June, 26 Kenyan track and field athletes were suspended by the Anti-Doping Agency of Kenya.
The effort to police juicing has both national and international aspects. For instance, Nigeria, presumably, has a lot of sprinting talent. But it wins far fewer Olympic medals than much smaller Jamaica in part because its runners are always getting caught for PEDs juicing, which they blame on the incompetence of their sports bureaucrats at protecting them.
In contrast, Jamaica and Kenya win countless medals and only occasionally gets caught. That strikes me as demonstrating impressive state-capacity at not getting caught.
For example, the American heroine of the 2000 Olympics, Marion Jones, was sent to prison in 2005 by U.S. prosecutors for various PEDs-related abuses. Shortly thereafter, Jamaica surpassed the U.S. as the top sprint power. Some of that was due to the individual brilliance of Usain Bolt.
But some of that seems likely to be due to a question I’ve often asked myself: If I were the Attorney General of Jamaica (or Kenya) and my staff came to me with substantial evidence that Jamaica’s Olympic national heroes were cheating the Yanks out of medals the way the Yanks cheated Jamaicans out of medals in 2000, would I make this a high priority issue?
No.
But this year the heat seems to have been on the Kenyans, and, yeah, they seem slightly less superhuman than traditionally?
* Footnote: Kenya boycotted the Montreal Olympics in 1976 for a complicated anti-South Africa-related reason and the Moscow Olympics in 1980 to protest the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan. By the way, neither the apartheid regime nor the Soviet Union are around anymore.
Steeplechase seems to be a marquee event in N. Africa and an afterthought in the west.
The story of the Olympics however is that the Americans are getting medals and loading athletes into distance finals. This is new.
I think its possible that when everyone was more or less using the classic Lydiard training methods the Kenyans were winning because they have better natural aptitude for these events and it was hard for our outliers to match their outliers. It seems however there are lots of developments in optimal preparation of distance runners such as heavy low rep weight training and all sorts of cross training -- Are the Kenyans and Ethiopians up on these?
Another curious development is that south Asian men are now awesome at javelin but still seemingly useless at every single other track and field event