Flat Hills Road

I’m spending most of my time on a pair of projects with short deadlines right now, but I wonder if many people read both Conway Hill’s anonymous open letter to Doug Logan, and my colleague Steven Downes’ post for Britain’s Sports Journalists Association, “The rate for the job: how cuts hit freelances“.

While it’s obvious that the second link was written by a professional writer and the first… wasn’t, they both have a common theme: skilled professionals hoping to make a living from their craft feel their work is not appropriately valued. The anonymous author of Hill’s letter argues, with some justification, that “elite” athletes are the engine from which all revenue in the sport springs, and that USATF’s structure loads the weight of any number of programs not directly related to professional athletics as drag on this engine. (There’s some merit to this argument: does the NBA carry the burden of grass-roots basketball development?)

I am less of a professional than any of the journalists Downes cites in his argument, but as such I’m an example of his argument: if newspapers, magazines, etc. were paying a better rate for more professional coverage, I’d be doing a lot less paid writing and a lot more rambling online for nothing. (I am the Wal-Mart of athletics writing, except without the market share or massive profits.) Instead we’re pinching reporters with decades of experience. (Granted, the papers themselves are taking a beating financially, but one wonders if compromised quality may have something to do with that.)

The bottom line is this: paychecks are more than tokens. They also represent a value placed on the recipient’s work, and if they see that work as valueless, they’re likely to produce lower-value work–or simply quit and find something else to do.

Since posting my own analysis of USATF’s Project 30 report, I’ve had the chance to discuss the report with a few other people whose opinions I respect. Two of them independently raised a question I hadn’t considered. A significant amount of the report makes sense only after accepting the idea that winning Olympic medals is the ultimate raison d’etre for USATF. I noted this assumption and moved on, but not everyone accepted it so easily. Does this motivation come from the USOC and/or the USATF charter? (Probably.) Is it the right way to be approaching the sport? Good question. It leaves out questions of participation, public health, integrity (it’s tricky to balance an overriding imperative to win medals with an anti-doping message) and even sponsorship.

Refining that last question: assume that Project 30’s goal is to maintain USATF’s future. This requires sponsorship and broadcast rights agreements, both of USATF and USOC. What will bring more sponsors to both organizations? Do sponsors chase the prestige which is assumed to come from winning lots of medals? Or do they follow consumer attention, which may or may not be predicated on winning a lot of medals?

Or is this a national pride issue? I’m sure there’s been some academic research on this point.

The 2008 IAAF Yearbook, which I’ve mentioned before, has a section in which almost all the Olympic champions respond to a survey. Some of them are cute, some are silly, a few are even a little boring, but the one which really caught my eye, perhaps because of his recent heroics, was Steve Hooker.

One of the questions was, “What was the last thing you thought before your Olympic final?”

Hooker’s answer: “The Belgian 4×100m team looks pretty cute.”

For those who haven’t had enough of me being opinionated, I have an analysis, with some commentary, of USATF’s Project 30 report posted on the Running Times site.

It’s a credit to the panel and their secretary that the report’s conclusions seem almost inevitable given their research. The important part of the report, I came to understand, is how it gives CEO Doug Logan an agenda, even a mandate, for change, without making that agenda part of his personality. (I suppose this is the role management consultants play when it’s time to fire people in big corporations.)

I hope it works; I’d like to see the relay impediments removed so we can see USA vs. Jamaica in both 4×100m relays in Berlin this summer. I’d also like to hope that USATF’s political sinkholes can be avoided, because they’re part of the problem.

Favorite part of this piece: I’ve been running low on sleep, and when I was reading the report at some point the only way I could come up with to describe the more wishful-thinking-heavy parts of the report was, “I want a pony.” It’s only a fraction of the report, but they’re so pitch-perfect for most of it that the unlikely parts look that much odder in context.

I really recommend that anyone sincerely interested in the future of the sport read the whole report. The background material, in particular, is an education.

By now everyone’s heard that Shalane Flanagan is no longer coached by John Cook, the caustic impresario Nike coaxed out of retirement to bring her back from catastrophic injury in 2006. And probably, everybody has read the article from Sunday’s Washington Times in which Cook suggests that Flanagan and her husband, Steve Edwards, had been planning this coup for a while.

I don’t know anything more about the split than anyone else, and I don’t doubt that Steve Nearman, who wrote the article, got his facts and quotes right. (I’ve criticized Nearman before for his Alan Webb critiques and for his look at James Madison’s athletic downsizing.)

We’re not told how Cook was lined up to coach Flanagan in the first place. I’m guessing someone other than Flanagan was paying the bills at first. Cook’s jab about “loyalty is hard to find” ignores the possibility that Flanagan might just be more loyal to Erin Donohue, her teammate since 2000, than Cook, her coach since 2006. And while Cook may or may not be right about Donohue’s potential (she’s right to say if that’s how he thinks, he shouldn’t be her coach,) nobody has asked this coach “who has made friends and foes with his directness” whether he considered the effect dumping Donohue would have on his relationship with Flanagan.

I’m guessing yes. Other reporters have told me that in Beijing, Cook had nothing but good things to say about Edwards, but now he’s claiming “I was warned … to keep an eye on him.” So either the warning came after Beijing, or Cook is capable of being polite for the sake of politics. And maybe he just got tired of the situation, for whatever reason, and decided to light the fuse by cutting down Donohue.

Cook has been around the block a few times. I doubt there are any angels in this situation, but painting Cook as a sympathetic character is an interesting approach.

Update 2/10: I’ve removed some text from the original post, and clarified some pronouns where the edits made them unclear.

Also, to add about coaches’ pay: It’s more common for coaches of professionals, especially distance runners, to not be paid than for them to be paid by the athletes. Many coaches are still employed by college teams, others are funded through other paying athletes, and others are paid for by the athlete’s sponsors. (Coaches I know have been approached by sponsors specifically to protect the sponsor’s investment in a developing athlete.) I won’t argue whether this is right or not, and obviously it works better for some coaches than others, but I think it’s a red herring here. The danger of this split isn’t in who paid or didn’t pay who; it’s who is now going to be willing to join the Flanagan/Edwards team with Cook’s non-endorsement on the record, and for that matter, who’s going to be interested in working with Cook, although I’m guessing (again) that he’s not very worried about that.

Steve Hooker’s meteoric rise up the all-time indoor pole vault list (he was tied for #4 after Millrose, and stands alone at #2 behind seven Sergei Bubka marks after the Boston Indoor Games) begs a question: what’s the difference between outdoors and indoors when we’re talking about the pole vault?

Track athletes obviously see a difference in the physics of 200m banked tracks indoors as compared to 400m flat tracks outdoors. Adam Nelson pointed out that the composition of the indoor shot, which is generally padded to avoid damaging arena floors, changes the grip putters can get on their implement, and that the feeling of the ring under their feet is also different, but the marks between indoors and outdoors are not generally very large. (22.66m indoors, 23.12m outdoors.)

There are two significant differences between the indoor and outdoor pole vaults: wind and runway. Wind is the obvious change: sometimes there’s wind (and other weather) outdoors. There is never wind indoors, at least not of any significant magnitude. This means vaulters don’t have to adjust for conditions, a small but appreciable advantage. Runways are a little more subtle; indoor facilities sometimes (not always) have springy, elevated runways like the one the Boston Indoor Games organizers trucked up from Madison Square Garden for vaulting at the Boston Indoor Games last night. This can also be an advantage if the vaulter is used to the runway. Combined, then, it’s not too surprising that unlike nearly every other event, the pole vault WR is marginally superior indoors to its outdoor counterpart: 6.15m indoors compared to 6.14m outdoors. (Both, of course, held by Bubka.)

Hooker highlighted this Saturday night when he selected 6.06m as an intermediate height before approaching the World Record. It’s an arbitrary height indoors, smack in the middle of the block of Bubka which tops the all-time list. Outdoors, however, it’s a watershed: three men, Maksim Tarasov, Dmitry Markov, and Brad Walker, all at 6.05m marks outdoors. On a combined all-time list, then, Hooker is #2, with a lot of Bubka ahead of him, and that 6.16m height he keeps trying is the highest anyone has ever vaulted, period. There isn’t a distinction in his mind between indoors and outdoors.

Will the statisticians continue making a distinction? Hooker should have the Australian Record now, for example. Will the Australian track statisticians give it to him, or call him the indoor record holder? Considering there are no indoor facilities in Australia, and their domestic outdoor season usually happens during the European and North American indoor season, those lists can’t be terribly deep.

Are there other events where the distinction between World Record and World Indoor Record is meaningless? The men’s high jump records differ by only 2cm. The men’s long jump is off by .14m; the men’s triple jump is off by even more. The shot put is the only comparable throwing event. Women’s PV is about 10cm, both held by Yelena Isinbayeva; women’s high jump is only 1cm lower indoors than out, and the long jump and triple jump show about the same spread between indoors and outdoors as the men’s events do. The women’s shot put records are even closer than the men’s. But only in the men’s pole vault is the indoor mark superior.

I’m guessing that the reason behind this is not the conditions but the depth of competition. More top athletes have faced more and more challenging competition outdoors, over a longer history. I think indoor and outdoor field events are heading for convergence, and Steve Hooker may be at the front of the wave.

My report from the Reebok Boston Indoor Games (thank heavens the title sponsor has given up that silly “RBK” affectation) is on iaaf.org.

I’ll have a “Brief Chat” with Shalane Flanagan post-race on Runner’s World’s Racing News blog soon (tomorrow or Tuesday) and a meet story in the next issue of New England Runner, as well.

Update: Added the link to the Brief Chat, which ran today (Monday).

Kara Goucher told us that Coach Bill Squires, who advised her coach, Alberto Salazar, as he trained for the Boston Marathon, came out to one of her workouts this week and was briefing her on the Boston course.

Knowing Coach Squires, I asked, “Did the workout start on time?”

“Well,” she admitted, “we may have been delayed a bit.”

“I got a Harvard shirt, because I’ve been training on their track this week. I’m hoping it makes me smarter by osmosis.” — Kara Goucher

Talk about the Boston Indoor Games so far has revolved around three records: the men’s pole vault WR, because of Steve Hooker’s performance at Millrose; the women’s pole vault AR, because of the Dragila/Stuczynski duel at Millrose; and the women’s 5,000m AR, because Shalane Flanagan has an excellent chance of becoming the first American woman under 15:00 indoors. (The race could easily be that fast; the question is more likely to be whether Flanagan is in shape to hang on to the pace that long. It’s early in the season yet.)

The fourth mark, which I’m probably not the first one to mention, is the men’s 1,000m AR. The mark is 2:17.86, and it belongs to David Krummenacker, who set it at this very meet in 2002. The same night, Tim Broe whacked a chunk off Steve Scott’s indoor 3,000m mark, a record now owned by Bernard Lagat, and though Lagat has bested the pre-2002 AR in the 1,000m, Krummenacker’s time stands supreme.

(I interviewed Krummenacker after he set the record. I was one of very few reporters at the Boston Indoor Games that year; there are plenty of us now.)

Despite my build-up, however, the 1,000m record is essentially soft. The reason is that it’s not run as often as it used to be. It’s not an international championship event any more (if it ever was); the world record is nine years old (2:14.96 by Wilson Kipketer) and apart from a few fast times from Abubaker Kaki and the men he outran last year, very few marks since Kipketer are at the top of the list. Certainly a 1,000m AR is more attainable than an 800m AR; just ask Krummenacker, or Ocky Clark who held the AR nearly thirteen years before that. (Johnny Gray’s 1:45.00 800m AR has been old enough to drive for nearly a year now.)

All of which brings us to the man of 2008 at 800m. No, not Andrew Wheating, but Nick Symmonds, who actually won the race that stamped Wheating’s face on everyone’s memories (and was, as far as I could tell, a class act about sharing the spotlight). Symmonds, like Krummenacker, has a background of 800m/1,500m doubles. He’s run well in Boston before, and he’s familiar with the track. In other words, he has about the same credentials Krummenacker had in 2002.

Perhaps the best part of this race, though, is that whether or not the pace is record quality, Symmonds is unlikely to have the win handed to him. Christian Smith and Duane Solomon, who have both represented the USA internationally in the 800m (Solomon in 2007 at the World Championships, Smith at the Olympics last year) are also in the race, as is a veteran by the name of David Krummenacker.

Maybe this isn’t a record attempt by Symmonds, and it’s obviously set up to make a good race no matter what the time. But the environment is there and the mark is not out of reach. If the record goes, don’t say I didn’t warn you just because I didn’t mention this race in my preview.

Update: Looks like Kaki is going for the WR in Stuttgart.