Olympic Games
Gold medal Going To Jefferson Perez?
Friday, September 26th, 2008
Reader Richard Boroto wrote the following comment to 400meteroval.com tonight:
At a ceremony this week honoring silver medal-winner, Jefferson Pérez, Ecuadorian Olympic Committee President Danilo Carrera announced that we may see an announcement about doping by the two Russian race walkers in Beijing in the next few days, which would mean the gold medal for Pérez . Carrera didn’t reveal the source of that information.
Pérez finished 2nd at the 2008 Olympics to Valeriy Borchin of Russia. Pérez’ time of 1:19:15, a season’s best, was 14 seconds behind Borchin’s winning time of 1:19:01.
Proud Down Under
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
The Aussies are proud of their performance in Beijing, as well they should be. They tell us about it here.
Beijing By the Numbers
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
European-Athletics.org has crunched some numbers for us that have to do with the Beijing Olympics. It’s definitely worth a look.
No News Is… Bad News?
Tuesday, August 26th, 2008
One side says fewer doping positives at the Beijing Olympics is good news. The other side says it’s bad news.Which side of the debate are you on?
Please be sure to leave a comment!
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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Beijing Event Countdown Timer: Day 9
Saturday, August 23rd, 2008
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?