So I went down a small rabbit hole to figure out wtf happened and the gist I've got is they are what are called "pacers" i.e. people you, the actual competitive racer, pay to run alongside you so you get motivation to keep running in these long distance runs. Like, one article mentioned the main guy running 42 km while pacers running like 10 km. It helps give you a good pace, rhythm, provide a wind break or something etc. Other articles mentioned the pacers ran the whole race alongside the guy at the same pace instead, so maybe the 42 km - 10 km thing was from a different race or only for a specific pacer or something. Typically, the pacers will have a thing on their jersey saying they are "pacers" which didn't happen here, but I've also read that pacers can also get awarded medals, which did happen here, so that isn't unusual, even if the public doesn't doesn't know about it usually.
The main racer in this instance is a 25 y.o. who is insanely talented - he is the winner of the Asian gold, and is practising for the Olympics later on. This can be seen in the fact that this race has over 2k people and there is literally no one else in the entire footage because this dude and his group of pacers are that far ahead of everyone else. For this race, his goal was to beat the Chinese record - that's the time the pacers where there to help him beat. Unfortunately, he wasn't able to do so. One of the pacers went on record saying he was not in this race to compete but only there as a friend to help the main guy beat the goal.
Of course Western news sources went Cold War manufacturing consent with it and accused China of paying the African racers to lose to the Chinese guy, adding in other instances of corruption (proven and unproven, even ones where people were punished were used as a way of somehow saying China bad) and Reddit of course went full racist CCP Bad Winnie the Poo North Korea etc etc you know the drill (even worse stuff about Asian and African stereotypes I'm not going to repeat).
Anyways, everything I've just said is what I managed to gather in the past 15 mins or so. If someone knows anything more, feel free to add or correct me.
while the vid seems to be nuked, after reading the first part of your post, I realised none of those redditors have ever watched olympic athletics in their lives.
Watch any track 5k/10k race and see the pacemaker just literally stop running with 800m to go. Almost every race has a pacemaker
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