Flat Hills Road

Basketball teams talk about their home crowd as a “sixth man”, an advantage they have on the court. The biggest surprise to me about the 2010 World Indoor Championships in Doha has been Ethiopia’s third athlete in nearly all their events.

Unlike the outdoor championships and Olympics, where each country gets three entries (if qualified), the limit is two for indoors. The defending-champion “bye” doesn’t exist indoors, so there are never more than two athletes from any country in any race. But for some reason there are around 500 Ethiopian fans in the Aspire Dome every night. There was a small, vocal section for the rounds on Friday. There were three sections on Saturday, and they were chanting and cheering from the moment Meseret Defar stepped on the track until Deresse Mekonnen received his gold medal at the end of the evening. Competition isn’t due to start for the final session for another 45 minutes, but there are five sections full of Ethiopians who have been here over half an hour and have spent much of that time dancing, chanting and singing as though they were waiting for a football match and not a track meet.

They love their own team, of course, but unlike some meets with a large Ethiopian fan base (I’m thinking of the Boston Indoor Games) they’ve been more than happy to cheer athletes in events without Ethiopian entrants. They’ll clap for the high jump, chant for the hurdlers, and they’ve delayed the starts of more than one sprint race because they simply won’t be quiet for the start.

It’s not clear to me whether these fans are Ethiopian expats living and working in Qatar, or if they traveled here from Ethiopia (which is not so far away, really). Ticket prices are not steep; the primary expense of coming here is travel. Still, these fans are on the corners and in the upper deck: the cheap seats. basically. However they’re here, they’ve utterly transformed the atmosphere of the arena. This would not be the same event without them, and it would be much less than it is now.

It’s official: Wilson Kipketer and I entered the same race, and I finished ahead.

They have a Media Race at the World Championships, usually an 800m. I gather this happens every time; this is only my fourth Worlds, and I don’t recall it happening in Seville, but I raced in Edmonton and Osaka. I had hoped to improve both my place and time over Osaka (9th and 2:18.8x, if I recall correctly) but I wondered about place when I realized how many sub-2:00 runners were entered here, including World Record holder Wilson Kipketer.

The field was indeed both larger (eight heats) and faster; I ran the fast heat in Osaka, but was in the second-best here. There were four men under 2:00 in the fast heat, with the winner in 1:55.19 (apparently a competitor at the French indoor championships last winter) and second in 1:55.67. Kipketer jogged.

Many of the same runners from my Osaka heat lined up with me this year. I had gone out too fast last time and vowed to follow a smarter strategy this time, so I held back a bit. I shouldn’t have. The leader went through 400m in 1:07.14 and split evenly to finish in 2:14.20. I sat 10th and passed four rivals in the third 200m, but the closing half-lap was very tough; I’d used too much making up ground after the bell. Four runners within a second of each other were like a wall in front of me, and I couldn’t close on them let alone find my way around. I wound up in 2:20.41. I’d say my tactics were OK, but my sense of pace needs work; a month ago, however, I wouldn’t have expected to run one 70-second lap, let alone two, so I’ll take what I can get.

In the composite results, I placed 13th overall, and the first American (again). Kipketer was 15th in 2:21.11.

Every World Championships has a number of TV ads which run before and after each session on the big screen. In Osaka, my favorite was a Mizuno ad in which a recreational runner out for a jog passes athletes meant to represent a series of Japanese marathon stars (Seko, etc.) and one who looks startlingly like Frank Shorter.

Here, my favorite is an adidas ad featuring marathon World Record holder Haile Gebrselassie racing a 200m against Tyson Gay. If you know Haile, and you know Tyson, you can probably guess how it goes from there.

Peter Gambaccini's line about a 4 x mile record attempt in Oregon:

The world record of 15:49.08, set by Irishmen Eamonn Coghlan, Marcus O'Sullivan, Frank O'Mara, and Ray Flynn in Dublin in 1985, is not likely to be threatened.

You think? That wasn't exactly a team of scrubs, there. This leads to all kinds of questions. To break that record, four runners have to average 3:57 between them.

• Is there a contemporary American team (by which I mean, ignore sponsor commitments and possibly even injury status: our criteria is that they be active athletes with a blue passport) that could even come close to that? (The Oregon team is chasing the collegiate record of 16:04.5 and will only need to average 4:01.) Lagat-Webb-Manzano-Lomong? Anyone? Would you pull in 800m specialists?
• How about any nation? Morocco vs. Kenya vs. Ethiopia in a 4 x mile? Have Qatar or Bahrain bought enough depth? Even the Russians always seem to be able to run out of their minds for a good relay.
• Certainly an all-star international squad could do it. How would you build a team like that?

I feel a little bad about that headline, but there’s some truth behind it. Yesterday, I came to the Reggie Lewis Track and Athletics Center (RLTAC, an abbreviation often used and rarely explained) from Boston University, where the New England Intercollegiate Championships was being held. (Maybe some other time I’ll try to explain the meet I used to know as “Big New Englands.”) B.U.’s fieldhouse was packed with athletes, coaches, some parents, and miscellaneous fans like myself. Once the rounds were over and the afternoon session was in full swing, they were moving new races on to the track as soon as the previous race was over, not quite as quickly as Penn Relays but still pretty briskly. Every athlete in every race had a built-in fan base in their team, and no lap of any race went by in silence.

So going in to Reggie was quite a contrast. Sitting in the two-thirds-empty press risers, I discussed other results around the country–Kim Smith, Jenny Barringer, German Fernandez–with another reporter, who wondered out loud, “Do you ever think we’re at the wrong meet?” The press wasn’t there (many of them, wisely, preferring various NCAA conference meets,) the fans weren’t there, and even many of the athletes didn’t show up. (Only one of the men’s shot put’s “big three” will be putting this afternoon.)

It’s not Boston; the meet has actually improved dramatically since the days when an overly-optimistic contract doomed the event to several years of anonymous existence in Atlanta’s cavernous Georgia Dome. There was a lot of energy (but very little space) the year it was held in New York City’s Armory. But it’s really hard to go to the Boston Indoor Games at RLTAC and then come back three weeks later for a “national championship” meet which has less energy and enthusiasm than an essentially meaningless collegiate meet across town.

Larry Eder has a series of observations about what’s wrong with the USATF Indoor meet and constructive suggestions for improving them at RunBlogRun. I can’t speak to the quality of his suggestions, but he has more and more thoughtful ones than I do.

On Monday, I sat down for an hour with Adam Nelson, the 2005 World Champion in the shot put. The first article from that interview ran this morning on the IAAF website.

Boiling an hour interview down to 1,200 words means things shrink a lot, so there’s a lot more to add which is not in that article. I’ll let you digest the story first, then start in with my notes.

It continues to amuse me that the Fluffy Bunny Track Club not only exists, but is expected to contend for a team title in one of the masters categories at the USATF Club Nationals this coming weekend.

It turns out that amusement is pretty much the point.