Commentary
On Phelps Phever & Stagnant Roadside Ditches
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008There’s a reason why Swimming has supplanted Track & Field as the top dog in Olympic sports. It’s no wonder why we’re relegated to searching out obscure Norwegian feeds to view our favorite Olympic events live while the rest of the world is suffering from Phelps Phever live on NBC.
No it’s not a vast conspiracy by NBC and the IOC to force Track & Field fanatics how to deal with delaying their gratification. Simply put, when it comes to "putting it all on the line" at the biggest, most-celebrated sporting event in the universe, for forty years our sport has been as stagnant as a roadside ditch filled with mosquito larvae while the sport of swimming is a gushing wellspring of improvement. Don’t believe me? Here are the charts that prove my case. The graphs show the gold-medal winning times in the 400m, 800m and 1500m from 1960 to 2008 along with their equivalent gold-medal-winning times in the swimming events:
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Time For A New Selection Process
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
Sports Illustrated track & field writer Tim Layden, writing recently about the USA 4×100m relay teams’ disastrous performances at the Beijing Olympics, had this insight about our selection process:
Efforts have been made in the past to conduct national relay training, but in the end, the brutal U.S. Trials system prevents coaches from knowing until the last minute who might be sent to the Games or the worlds.
That got me to thinking. I had always thought that our choices for a selection process were limited to an either/or scenario: a one-shot trials or a committee process like the one USA Gymnastics uses—one that leaves the athletes little or no say in the matter. Imagine a selection process that was similar to the points system used to select the athletes who will compete in the IAAF’s World Athletics Final next month. Here’s how that one works:
After the last [IAAF World Athletics Tour] Meeting before the World Athletics Final, the 7 Athletes having the highest number of points with their best 5 results (4 for throws) will qualify for each event of the World Athletics Final.
If we took that selection process and modified it to select a team of three athletes per event, we would be able to account for the injuries and other life events (births, marriages, family emergencies, illnesses, etc.) that inevitably happen within the four-year Olympic cycle, we would have a selection process that is not quite as brutal as the one-shot system we currently have and we would still empower the athletes to control their own destinies. Now doesn’t that make at least a little bit of sense?
Reader Mail: Any good podcasts out there?
Thursday, July 31st, 2008
Reader and friend-of-blog John O. writes:
…is there a really good regular podcast out there for people wanting to keep up on the sport of Athletics and Cross Country? A lot don’t come out very regularly or just sort of fall into the realm of how the sport is being run poorly. I’ve been looking for one that discusses results, does interviews, and then gives some talks on some topics. Got any Ideas?
Well, you’re in luck, John (No, sorry, we haven’t stolen Veronica Belmont away from Tekzilla. But we’re trying! Hey, Veronica – have your people call my people…). Ian Terpin is just two weeks into hosting a weekly podcast called Runnerspace Live that promises to "bring you the rundown on what happened in college and pro track & field during the week."
Criticism Of Wariner’s 2008 Performances Is Unwarranted
Tuesday, July 29th, 2008I get annoyed every time the Olympics roll around and then suddenly all of the journalists who have been ignoring track & field for the past four years begin taking notice of a sport about which they know so little. Take an article for instance, published yesterday on the Yahoo! Sports website by Josh Peter. If his headline ("Wariner changes into the slow lane") doesn’t immediately clue you in that Peter doesn’t understand his subject, then the article confirms it. Peter grabs onto the "Wariner shouldn’t have fired Coach Hart" angle with the tenacity of a terrier grabbing a dish towel that’s been left on the kitchen floor and then proceeds to shred it to pieces.
Feathers Flying From the Rooftops
Sunday, July 20th, 2008(Now that Jeremy Wariner seems to be his old self again, this article, which was originally published on thefinalsprint.com on March 31st, 2008, is relevant all over again. In any case, track & field fans never seem to tire of evaluating Jeremy Wariner’s strengths and shortcomings, or at least their perceptions of them.)
There is a scene in John Patrick Shanley’s Tony-Award winning play Doubt: A Parable in which Father Flynn is giving a sermon. During the sermon, he describes a woman who is racked with guilt after having gossiped about a man she hardly knew. Father Flynn describes in this parable how the woman goes to confession and asks for forgiveness. Instead of giving her absolution, the priest says:
Did USATF Blow Its Big Chance?
Friday, July 18th, 2008USATF just installed Doug Logan as its new CEO. Logan brings some baggage to the job, having been the commissioner of Major League Soccer from its inception in 1995 until 1999, when he was fired for failing to bring up attendance and for accusations of losing the league some $100 million in his 4 years at the helm. Oh, boy. What does that mean for USATF?
According to this New York Times article, "Logan was a sports entertainment executive when he joined M.L.S. and acknowledged he had little knowledge about the world’s most popular sport." Apparently he is a lifelong runner and has a sub 4 marathon to his credit. Does he know more about track & field than he did about soccer? If not, does that mean he will surround himself with insiders like he did at MLS? That’d be the last thing USATF needs.
Track & Field Fans A Dying Breed?
Thursday, July 17th, 2008Xinhua reports that the latest Visa survey found "a generational disparity over which [Olympic] sports [people like] to watch. People over 45 are twice as interested in athletics and baseball as those aged 18-24, while younger people are far more likely to watch hockey, boxing and tennis." Interesting. It’s no wonder, then, that the IAAF and UK Athletics have joined forces to release a magazine called Spikes which is geared primarily toward younger people. (You can read more about Spikes in a previous post titled "Edgy New Track Magazine.")
The Visa survey was directed toward people in the Asia Pacific region, but the creators of Spikes recognize a global need to reach out to the younger generation. Track & Field News, the 60-year-old mainstay of track in the US, scoffs at the idea of deliberately marketing toward younger fans with any sort of gimmickry. When I posted a thread on their message board promoting my own post about Spikes, T&FN editor Garry Hill replied by writing, "wanting to get rid of he World Records is edgy? I could swear I’ve been promoting that idea since the millennium began. Does it have more gravitas, perhaps, if I spike my hair or something?"