Flat Hills Road

Here’s my story about Day 1 of the USATF Championships. I’m hoping that was just warmup.

I’ve been fascinated recently by how finely sprinters are able to break down their races. I suppose it’s no more surprising than the 1/50 slicing needed to break a 10,000m race down into 200m segments, but I love hearing them talk about plans and goals for 20m segments of a race which lasts less than twenty seconds.

At any rate, there’s a lot of that in my Tyson Gay follow-up on IAAF.org today.

Also, Gay has to rate as one of the most polite athletes to give a press conference. I’ve seen him on-screen looking positively scared of the reporters (in Osaka, after winning) and while he had plenty to say and not much shyness on Saturday, he also started his answers to two different questions (completely sincerely) with “Yes, ma’am.”

The IAAF.org report on the Reebok Grand Prix was posted this morning. I’ll be emptying out my notebook on Tyson Gay later today for a follow-up.

There were a lot of articulate and likeable women winning races last night. Another quote I haven’t (yet) seen in use, from Carmelita Jeter: “I’m doing better because I have a new coach, and I’m actually listening to him now. It’s not just in one ear, out the other, like it used to be.”

You can find my preview of Saturday’s Reebok Grand Prix on iaaf.org.

In the wake of last month’s World Cross Country Championships, held this year in Amman, Jordan, I’ve seen several different articles asking the question, “Whatever happened to World Cross?” (And, as usual, I’m late to the party.) Pat Butcher sums up the question best: World Cross used to be (ca. late 1970s, early 1980s) the single best distance-running event on the annual calendar. Now it’s not. Why?

Butcher (and, in a follow-up, Larry Eder) goes on to suggest a number of factors: Increased competition for attention and top athletes from spring marathons. Domination by East Africans (and the East Africans are aware that this is a problem, but like the lobstermen in my home town, they can’t figure out how to save their industry without also cutting off their own livelihood) (see also here and here). The loss of strong individual English-speaking personalities. The overall worldwide decline of the sport. IAAF mismanagement. (The specific form of this mismanagement is not detailed, but in this case simply failing to find the magic solution might count.) There is even a nod to my colleague Steven Downes’ argument that golf-course-like venues (“10,000m with one hill”) have had the unintended consequence of removing some unpredictability from the event’s results.

Despite my age, I have a lot of sympathy for World Cross nostalgia. As a budding track fan, my first brush with international competition was the last World Cross Country Championships held in North America, when Boston’s Franklin Park hosted the event in 1992. Every athletics fan remembers that year, even if, like myself, they weren’t actually there (my older brother was). Lynn Jennings won her third consecutive championship; John Ngugi won his fifth in astoundingly dominating fashion. The junior races included a entrants like Paula Radcliffe (who won her first international title) and Haile Gebrselassie. Runner’s World ran at least four pages of photos afterward. Yes, in print. Professionally, my post-runnersworld.com return to international events was at the 2006 World Cross in Fukuoka, Japan. (It was also my first visit to Asia.)

But I wonder if maybe the nostalgia isn’t making us ask the wrong question. Perhaps the question isn’t, “What happened to World Cross?” but “How has the world changed since World Cross was at its height?” Look, for example, at this year’s venue: Jordan wants to become an international sports destination, and World Cross is a sort of starter event for them. Leave aside what that idea (and the Times) implies about the event’s status and consider the changing global landscape. Of course World Cross isn’t what it used to be; the world isn’t what it used to be, and the athletics landscape no longer centers around Europe. That kind of change is going to create casualties, and World-Cross-as-it-was is one of those casualties.

Looked at this way, one can still blame the IAAF for not finding the magic formula to maintaining at least the appeal and importance of the event, if not the same face of it. But at least they’ve been trying. To see the bin World Cross might otherwise be headed for, look up the history of the International Peace Marathon in Kosice, Slovakia, which once rubbed shoulders with Fukuoka and Boston as one of the preeminent international marathons.

If we stop asking, “How can we make World Cross what it was?” and ask the harder question, “What should World Cross be in today’s athletics world?” we’re going to get a lot closer to a great event.

My preview is online now at iaaf.org. I’ve complained about preview-writing before, but the plain fact is that writing previews lets me write meet reports, which is more fun. And the two in combination let me get paid for going to track meets, which is even more fun.

I’m missing the press conference today, which is too bad, because I had a market for a Shalane Flanagan interview. I haven’t forgotten about my Adam Nelson back-stock, but he’s not throwing this weekend, so my mind has been elsewhere.

About this preview specifically, it’s worth noting that a U.S. track fan might find more at this meet to be excited about than I have mentioned in this article. The gap lies in the fact that U.S. track fans, in addition to their interest in the top levels of professional competition, also have eyes on the best Americans, high school runners, and/or masters competitors, and internationally, these are fields that just don’t matter. The high school runners are “interesting” only in so far as their competitiveness internationally as Juniors (which is to say, historically not much, in this country). The best Americans are “interesting” only if they’re regularly making appearances in big internationals, so Alan Webb despite his uneven record is interesting. Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher with their medals are interesting. Nick Symmonds, who could probably run for Mayor of Eugene and win at this point, is… not all that interesting. Rob Myers, the most underappreciated miler in America today, is… not all that interesting from this point of view.

The advantage to this approach is that it allows me to mask my shallow knowledge of sprinters and field eventers.

I’ll also be writing a meet report to appear in New England Runner. It will probably mention many of the same performances, but it will also mention the masters milers and high school athletes like Omar Abdi, who have local connections. If Shalane Flanagan runs an AR at 5,000m, something the Global Athletics crew thinks is a real possibility, that will be huge for NER, but most interesting for the IAAF only if in doing so she manages to beat both the Ethiopians entered.

I covered the Millrose Games last night.

Of note: a British journalist of my acquaintance commented on the headline’s use of “scare” with a world record as the subject. (I didn’t write the headline.) I don’t have a problem with the personification (anthropomorphization?) of records, myself; in the past I’ve had them celebrate birthdays and get drivers’ licenses to illustrate age.

Also, for those who didn’t read the USATF release word for word, Adam Nelson announced that next year, when his wife has finished law school, they’re moving back to Athens, Georgia to open a yogurt shop. I guess that’s what you do with an MBA and a law degree. The name of the shop will be “MoYo”, because Nelson’s nickname as a child was “Mo”. But the name works even if you don’t know that, and even if Nelson is pulling our collective legs.

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.

If you’re one of the lucky folks who gets the IAAF Magazine (no, not Spikes) you should have the 2008 Yearbook by now. If you’re paying careful attention, inside you will find a few pages in which I torture a fireworks metaphor while describing last March’s World Indoor Championships. They love their gunpowder in Valencia, I have to say.