Nutella1 wrote:
The idea that the track was short or that they used a different starting point is well accepted within the community.
college kid wrote:
Ummm...ever heard of bribery? I think for the right price, the Swiss timing officials may have turned a blind eye.
Also, if the splits someone mentioned earlier in the thread for the 10k are accurate, something was up with the track. (No, I can't explain why the men didn't run faster.) There is no way the existing 3k world record was broken after 7k at 10k world record pace. Simply not possible.
Shanghai in 1997. I got nothing.
Regardless of how the Chinese women "achieved" those WRs in '93, they should be erased from the books. There is NO way that they are legit.
It's extremely unlikely that the track was actually short, for reasons already mentioned.
But let me put forth all the issues with this.
1) The Swiss timing officials were present. Could they be bribed? Possibly.
2) The male athletes ALL ran relatively mediocre times relative to their own personal bests. There is honestly no feasible explanation for this that I can come up with.
3) The Asian Games were held on the same track, but yielded normal results. Had the track been short, I'm certain that the Japanese and Koreans would have had something to say about it, considering their animosity with China.
4) Similar results for the women were obtained in 1997 in Shanghai on a different track. That same track was was used for multiple other events that did not yield illogical results.
The only one of these four problems with the theory that can actually be addressed is the first.
Are the times legitimate? No. But was it a short track? No. It's one thing for there to be slight problems with the theory. However, points 2-4 realistically cannot be addressed at all.
The only people who "widely accept" this theory are the ones willing to look three major impossibilities that come along if it were true.
Now, I know other people have proposed that they just started or finished on the wrong lines and such, but there's another piece of evidence that disproves that.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CuOSbU4N-AEThis video was posted in the thread earlier.
1) It shows they started at the beginning of the straightaway, which is the correct place for a 1500m race
2) It shows they finished at the end of the straightaway, which is the correct place for a 1500m race.