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.

I was asked last night which events I was most excited about at the upcoming World Indoor Championships. Because not all of the world’s best compete during the indoor season (e.g. Usain Bolt) and many of the events have different technical demands (e.g. 60m as opposed to 100m, both flat and hurdles) the quality of finals in Doha is likely to be more uneven than it usually is in an outdoor World Championships.

That said, there’s some really good competition on the horizon in events where the world’s best are showing up.

• In the distance events, the women’s 1500m should be interesting. Gelete Burka is the “defending champion,” but in Valencia she was robbed of her chance to cross the line first by a doped up Russian, and in Berlin she was just robbed, period, by someone running roller derby instead of athletics. Add neighboring Bahrain’s Maryam Yusuf Jamal, gold in Berlin and silver in Valencia, and we have a world class final.
• Bernard Lagat said in February that if he and Galen Rupp were the U.S. team for the 3,000m, they would medal. Lagat won gold in this event for Kenya in 2004, but much depends on who Kenya, Ethiopia, and hosts Qatar enter; the last two golds have gone to the Bekele brothers, and Saif Said Shaheen took silver in Moscow ‘06.
• Ethiopia is sending Meseret Defar, the 3,000m World Record holder. Kenya is sending Vivian Cheruiyot, the 5,000m World Champion and the woman who knows best how to beat Defar. (Have I mentioned my feature about Cheruiyot and Linet Masai in the recent Running Times?)

Outside the distances, which have to compete with the World Cross Country Championships for the best athletes, there are plenty of fantastic competitions.

• Trey Hardee, the decathlon World Champion, will face off against Bryan Clay, the Olympic champion, in the indoor heptathlon. The multi-events at World Indoors, unlike the rest of the events, are by invitation only, and the IAAF gets the best eight multi-eventers available for a top-class competition.
• Christian Cantwell wants to win a third shot put indoor championship, something nobody has ever done before. He also wants the world record. He’ll have to throw over Tomasz Majewski of Poland to do either.
• The women’s 60m hurdles has more athletes at near-parity than any other event I can think of. Lolo Jones, Priscilla Lopes-Schliep, and Damu Cherry all have a shot; so would Jessica Ennis, but she’s doing the pentathlon.

Unlike Valencia, where the track was fit inside the bowl of an indoor velodrome and therefore produced very dramatic and distinctive images, I have no idea what to expect of the inside of the Aspire Dome. More like the Tyson Center in Arkansas, the B.U. track, or what?

Doha is GMT+3, so they are eight hours earlier than U.S. Eastern time and eleven hours ahead of Pacific time. This means most evening sessions in Doha will be over before noon in the U.S. I’m not sure I’m looking forward to that part.

A few notes on coming assignments while I struggle to find time to complete other thoughts:

• I’ll be at the Millrose Games a week from today, January 29th.
• I’ll also be at the Boston Indoor Games on the 6th of February.
• Capping that, I’ll be at the IAAF World Indoor Championships in Doha in early March, including the IAAF council meeting immediately following. (Fear not, I am in no danger of being given any responsibilities not involving data.)

So far, I haven’t been able to justify the trip to Albuquerque for the USATF Indoor meet, and the NCAA indoor meet, while long a favorite of mine, conflicts with World Indoors.

I’m usually tickled to find a good joke (usually a pun) in a news story, and for some reason England’s Mohammed “Mo” Farah seems to bring up a lot of them.

Before the 3,000m final at this weekend’s European Championships, for example, Peter Gambaccini pointed out in runnersworld.com’s Racing News that Farah’s main competition was expected to be Spain’s Jesus Espana.

Yes, that’s right…it’s Mohammed vs. Jesus. Write the next line yourself.

Now that Farah has won, of course, it falls to the British press to hand out the lines, such as:

It was the first success story for the Britain team in Turin: Farah, from the madding crowd.

(Like many nationally-competitive distance runners in the USA these days, Farah was born in Somalia and emigrated at a young age to escape the chaos of that country. One wonders if Somalia might rank with Eritrea as a challenger to Ethiopian and Kenyan dominance if they were capable of developing athletes themselves. Think Abdi Bile.)

I had actually considered not going to USATF Indoors, but I got an assignment. Here’s the result.

Running USA, of course, is only interested in distance runners. The schedule placed both men’s and women’s 3,000m finals and the men’s 1,500m on Saturday, and the women’s 1,500m on Sunday, for reasons beyond my understanding. This meant I made an extra trip from Amherst to Boston and back on Sunday to watch one race. I grumbled a bit about this to myself, but really the problem was the narrow scope of the assignment and nothing else.

(The trip wasn’t wasted, of course, because I did get to watch the 800m finals, which were pretty cool if not terribly competitive; I’m going to be interested to see what Katie Waits does in the outdoor season. And also, the men’s shot put final, which for the first time since I started paying attention to the event was won by someone not named Nelson, Godina, Hoffa or Cantwell. In fact, I think there’s a pretty decent corps of young putters out there ready to take over.)

I filed another story this weekend, a longer-term project for the Boston Marathon program. Due to its relatively-limited availability, I’ll post it here after the marathon in April.

Rob Myers has never:

• won an NCAA title
• been ranked #1 in the USA in his event
• set a record beyond the state high school level
• made an Olympic team (he’s tried twice)
• advanced past the semifinal of a World Championship
• won an outdoor national title
• won a major open (i.e. European) race

Maybe that’s why he’s so often overlooked. for this year’s USATF Indoor Championships, most people picked him third with the competition expected to be between Alan Webb and Chris Lukezic at the front. (The latter has, to be fair, been having a great season.)

Last night in Boston, Rob Myers won his third USATF indoor championship in the 1,500m (or mile–the distance seems to go back and forth.) I don’t know how many he’s going to have to win before people take him seriously. The first two were often dismissed on the grounds of weak competition, and certainly his 2004 win would count as a “steal” considering how unknown he was at the time, but this year he took Webb to the line.

I’m not going to try to argue that Rob Myers is a world-beater, but he’s regularly beating guys who are supposed to be world-class. Isn’t it time we stopped being surprised when he wins national titles?

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.

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).

“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