Flat Hills Road

It looks like the IAAF is doing their Athlete of the Year selections a little differently this year. In the past, as I’ve noted, they presented a slate of athletes and asked their panel of judges (there are about 1,500 names on this list, of which mine is one) for male and female votes, and also solicited votes on their website; this narrowed the field to a group of three “finalists,” with a much smaller group selecting the actual winners.

This year, the process has changed in two ways. First, it appears there will be no internet vote. (N.B. there has been no announcement; it may be that the internet vote still hasn’t opened, or will be opened for the finalists only.) This is fine by me; the website results were sometimes bizarre and only counted for 30% of the weight anyway. Second, the panel has been asked to select three men and three women, but we have not been given a list to select from. We are free to nominate pretty nearly anyone we want.

I am just cynical enough to think this is the Usain Bolt effect on the Athlete of the Year. Given one vote for one male, anyone who has been paying attention would have to be insane not to vote Bolt, and competition for the other two finalists would be fierce. Given three votes, we can put one on Bolt and look for two other likely candidates. With those names in the finalists, we can say, hey, Sammy Wanjiru did win two fast marathons this year. Kenenisa Bekele did win the Woolworth Double in Berlin. Tyson Gay did retain some semblance of competition in a sprint landscape that includes Bolt.

The women’s list is much harder to come up with, not because the performances have been poor but because there have been so many good performances. Who would you nominate?

This entry was posted on Wednesday, October 21st, 2009 at 9:02 am and is filed under awards, iaaf. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.