For a handful of top-notch athletes, including Lagat and fellow U.S. Olympians Matthew Centrowitz and Leo Manzano, Saturday's race will mark the end of a taxing year of competition.
As a result, the U.S. increasingly looks like a top-notch science fair to companies hoping to get into this slow-moving, but potentially massive, market.
Both are still overall bullish for the raw commodity sector as the specter of inflation and a weakening of the U.S. dollar both were ratcheted up a notch.
And let's ignore the fact that the U.S. government can literally print the money to service Washington's Treasury debt--after all, in the inflationary 1970s the real value of a U.S. Treasury bond plummeted and Washington's top-notch credit rating was unaffected.