The world record run by an Ethiopian woman in Berlin is the athletics performance of the year, writes journalist Atte Husu.
Atte Husu Sports journalist
When an athlete sets a world record, the performance can always be described as a sensation. But when an athlete improves the current ME by 1.63 percent, the sensation must be viewed on a larger scale.
Ethiopian Tigist Assefan the ME time of 2.11.53 in the women’s marathon run in Berlin on Saturday is a performance that has not been proven in the recent history of athletics.
Assefa improved the previous ME by two minutes and 11 seconds, i.e. improved the world’s fastest time by the aforementioned 1.63 percent.
The ME was the seventh individual of the track and field season, if we take into account the sports included in the prestigious competitions. None of the other six MEs come even on the same page as Assefa’s record as a percentage improvement.
The closest one can get is an American Ryan Crouser, who pushed the ball 23.56 meters in May. He improved the ME in his own name by 19 cents or 0.81 percent.
The lead actor changed
Saturday, September 24, was dedicated to the Kenyan king of endurance running To Eliud Kipchoge.
Manager Jukka Härkönen clarified at Urheilu’s request from Assefa’s administrator From Gianni Demadonnathat the race organizers in Berlin had paid Kipchoge 300,000 euros as starting money.
Kipchoge was still at ME pace at the halfway point, but froze at the end and arrived at the finish line in 2:02.42. That is also 15 seconds faster than Dennis Kimetto in 2014, the men’s then ME 2.02.57.
Since then, Kipchoge has improved Kimetto’s ME readings twice, both times on the streets of Berlin. In 2018, Kipchoge stopped the timing at 2:01:39, last year it was half a minute faster.
In the first of his records, Kipchoge carved out the largest piece of ME, 1.01 percent. When the latter is factored in, Kipchoge has improved Kimetto’s ME by 1.46 percent.
Assefa dropped more from the ME than Kipchoge in two record improvements combined.
Jamaican sprinting superstar Usain Bolt in 2008 and 2009 improved the 100 ME readings by a total of 0.16 seconds, from 9.74 to 9.58. Bolt therefore improved ME by a total of 1.64 percent.
The biggest single record improvement was also seen like Assefa in Berlin, when Bolt ran the valid ME, dropping more than 11 hundredths from the old one. Compared to Assefa, however, ME only improved by 1.14 percent.
While Assefa’s ME improvement is tremendous, it is nowhere near historic by track and field standards.
For example, a tall man by Bob Beamon in 1968, Mexico’s winning score of 890 cents at the Olympics was 55 cents better than the one in effect when reaching the Games of Ralph Boston WE. Petrau thus became a whopping 6.59 percent.
The charm of seeking a border
Without taking anything away from rewriting pole vault legalities From Armand Duplantisbut if Assefa had been equipped with a stick logic, where the ME height is moved up centimeter by centimeter, the Ethiopian would have walked the finish line instead of running.
In this way, Assefa would have boosted his chances of running a new ME in his next games. It would have appeared in his bank account in hundreds of thousands of euros in the form of ME bonuses and start money.
Duplantis has crossed the bar of the ME height seven times and earned more than one million euros just from the ME bonuses of the International Association of Athletics Federations, race organizers and sponsors.
At the time of ME’s birth, the Swedish star is still always associated with the question of where his true limits lie at that very moment. The last time this happened was exactly a week ago, when Duplantis crossed the bar with a height of 623 in the Diamond League finals held in Eugene.
In the case of Assefa, there was no need for a similar discussion on Saturday. Everything was left on the track. It’s the best possible situation in sports.
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