Re: Re:t-and-f: Re: German women + records

[Elliott Oti]

Richard McCann wrote: Remember, the question is not "why were Eastern European women so much better than their contemporaries?"  The pat answer that women's athletics was not as well developed fits that question.  The question posed is "why are the Eastern European records still so far ahead of the current women's performances, almost 20 years later?"  While still lagging, athletic opportunities worldwide are much better than in 1980--witness the Chinese women's arrival on the scene (albeit suspicious.) I've resisted commenting for some time, but I think I'll bite this time.   The answer isn't simply "doping". That implies that the East Europeans were all competing "dirty" while all today's female athletes are "clean". That's naive. Female 400m and 800m athletes have been caught doping during the last decade; undoubtedly at least some are doing that still today; none of them came anywhere near Kratochvilova's time. The West Germans opened the can of worms in old East Germany's sport system and made public their doping records. This has had the unfortunate consequence that the East Europeans have become the sport's official scapegoats, simply because other nations have not been as thorough witch hunters, or were fortunate enough not to have centralised systems with centralised, meticulous recordkeeping.   The answers given by various other posters are IMO to the point and sufficient. To wit: systematically searching for and identifying youthful talent on a large scale. Efficient, effective and advanced training methodologies. Hard and brutal training regimes. And  systematic doping. But!  the quarter mile in 47" and the half in 1'53" is not run on doping alone, otherwise female bodybuilders would be breaking every track record in existence. It is rare to find all these factors present together nowadays.   Elliott