Flat Hills Road

The IAAF announced the five men and five women who are finalists for the Athletes of the Year this week. You’ll recall that voters were asked to nominate three names, with no restriction on which three (I could have nominated myself) and those were used to select the five finalists.

My male nominees did pretty well, with all three of them making the final five. I named Usain Bolt (how could anyone not?), Kenenisa Bekele, and Steven Hooker. I reasoned that I should limit the pool to Berlin champions and other World Champions (e.g. World Cross) and the major marathon winners. Bekele I named because of his 5,000m/10,000m double in Berlin, a difficult double to manage.

Hooker got the nod partly for the incredible drama of his win in Berlin, but there were other dramatic wins in Berlin. Hooker also had a very impressive indoor season, though, including near-World-Record winning vaults in New York and Boston, and to add to that he’s a great interview and very helpful to the press. Athletes take note: it does pay off.

(The other two finalists are Tyson Gay, who would have had the best 100m season in history if he hadn’t shared it with Usain Bolt, and javelin World Champion Andreas Thorkildsen.)

My nominees on the women’s side were less successful. Only one of my nominees, Poland’s World Record-setting World Champion hammer thrower Anita Wlodarczyk, was a finalist; the other four finalists are Yelena Isinbayeva (yawn), Sanya Richards, Valerie Vili and Blanka Vlasic.

I also nominated Allyson Felix, who like Gay had a very impressive season. Like Richards, Felix won an individual World Championship in Berlin (200m for Felix, 400m for Richards) plus a relay gold (both ran the 4×400m) but unlike Richards, Felix was winning her third consecutive World Championship, and I still think that counts for something.

I also went for a long shot and nominated Linet Masai. Masai’s 10,000m World Championship has been tainted by the bungled officiating at the start, but it was important just the same in breaking the near-total dominance the Ethiopian women have held over the long distance events in the last decade. Furthermore, Masai beat the world record holder in New York in May in an astounding race at Randall’s Island. Maybe she’ll have more chances to be Athlete of the Year, but I think we’ll be remembering 2009 as the year we met Linet Masai.

Now we’ll see how the final selection goes; it will be announced at the Gala next month. The winners will be selected by a much smaller pool of which I am not part, so I’ll know nothing until the press release arrives.

I have a window here where I can mention my votes for the Jesse Owens award (and my reasoning) without being tempted to make it look like I voted for the winners (we don’t know them yet), or trying to change your minds about how to vote (because voting is now closed).

As I mentioned, I voted twice, once online like everyone else, and once in the journalists poll. (I’m still tickled to be asked to participate in these things, and a little distressed that our pool of “journalists” is so small they need to include me in order to get enough voters.) I used my online vote as a “sentimental” vote for the ones I liked most, or identified with most; the official vote went to the athletes I thought had best earned the award as it is described with their competitive results in 2009.

So that latter vote went to Tyson Gay and Allyson Felix. Felix was a tough choice over Sanya Richards; both athletes were double World Champions, winning individual events and running a leg on the 4×400m relay. Felix, however, delivered her third consecutive 200m championship, a truly historic accomplishment considering she was facing down two-time Olympic champion Veronica Campbell-Brown. I might have considered Carmelita Jeter with those two had she won the World title as well as her undeniably fast late-season times, but Felix and Richards came through in the big show, and I still think that counts for a lot.

You’d think that would put me off Tyson Gay, particularly with Christian Cantwell and Trey Hardee on the nomination list, but I give Gay a tremendous amount of credit for attitude and American Records. Like Jeter, Gay ran phenomenal marks late in the season, but I really voted for Tyson because he never once used Usain Bolt as an excuse. He ran hurt, and still ran faster than anyone other than Bolt ever has. He faced off with the most dominant sprinter in history and gave the best he had to make the races real races and not walkovers for Bolt. I think that effort deserves to be rewarded.

On the website, I cast my women’s vote for Jenny Barringer. Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher are great athletes, and the runs they’ve had in the past three years have been tremendous, but I have a suspicion that Jenny Barringer is the second coming of Lynn Jennings. (Or, more likely, the first coming of Jenny Barringer; she may be completely without precedent.) Nominally a steeplechaser, she ran PRs from 1,500m to 5,000m (including becoming the first of three–THREE–American women sub-4 at the shorter distance this year), dismantled a series of quality fields in the NCAA track championships, and is probably going to dominate the NCAA cross country meet this fall in a way no American woman has since Flanagan… and Goucher. Get on the Barringer train now, because she’s acting like she’s just getting started.

I don’t actually remember how I used my online vote for men. It may have gone to Christian Cantwell, who took the shot put gold back for the USA in a thrilling competition in Berlin, but it may also have been Trey Hardee, who put together one of the most dominating decathlons I’ve seen from an American in Berlin, and made it look easy despite his relative inexperience. The story at the U.S. championships was that with Olympic champion Bryan Clay out, the U.S. team in Berlin would be weak, but coming out of Berlin it actually looks like the Hardee/Clay duel in 2011 may be more interesting than anything that happens in Daegu–unless, of course, they both arrive in Daegu healthy and can deliver the way they both did in the ‘08 and ‘09 global competitions.

So that’s how I voted. We’ll see in December if I voted with the majorities.

(I’m still interested in hearing thoughts on the Athlete of the Year balloting–assuming Usain Bolt gets one vote, who do the other two go to?)

Update, November 19: Gay won, Felix did not. Here’s the announcement.