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Ed, I
think that it's you who has his perspective all wrong. With three fifths of the
world population it's the rest of the world who hasn't been heard of INSIDE
China, "and for the most part (we have) disappeared."
malmo
I think you're both right. Ben essentially knocked .3 off his
time. That is approximately a 3 percent improvement, which is huge at
the elite level. This was the difference between being the world
record-holder and being an Olympic semi-finalist if he had a good
day. But if you take the Chinese 10K world record and subtract 3
percent, you get a 10K time that would have medalled at every olympics and
would have been fairly close to the old world record.
We;ll never really know, because as opposed to Ben, who made several
well-publicized comeback attempts, we never heard from most of the Chinese
again. One or two of them left China and had some subsequent world-class
perofrmances, and a few of them popped up briefly, but for the most part they
disappeared. And we also have no real idea how good they were before the
breakthrough.
- Ed Parrot
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