Flat Hills Road

The recent edition of the IAAF newsletter (N.B. that link is to a PDF file) included the following bald announcement under the heading “Women’s 10,000m Final – 15 August 2009 – 12^th IAAF World Championships in Athletics”, after the list of athletes sanctioned for doping offenses:

Nine runners starting in the outside stagger did not cover the entire race distance.  Therefore, while their times and placings will remain the same they are not eligible for statistical purposes including Personal Bests or Season’s Bests:

…and then follows a list of the names.

As I wrote at the time, the IAAF had no good options here; the officials should have marked the lane in the first place, and failing that, should have called the race back immediately when the lane violation took place. But the statisticians will not tolerate inaction on this front, and this is a sort of signal from the statisticians that while there may have been no official notice taken at the time, they know when 10,000m have been run and when they haven’t.

The unfortunate part, in my opinion, is that this still creates the appearance that it’s the athletes who screwed up. And while they contributed (they could have remained in their stagger even without the markings), final responsibility still has to go to the officials.

There are some races which just won’t die. The protests surrounding the 1992 Barcelona Olympic men’s 10,000m final lasted for days before Skah finally collected his medal (to jeers). It looks like the women’s 10,000m here in Berlin may be just as complicated.

Here’s the situation: Linet Masai crosses the line first, ending an Ethiopian major-championship streak in this event going back to 1999 and winning Kenya’s first medal since that year. The results are published showing Meseret Defar in third, then abruptly withdrawn again. Later, they are republished to show Defar in fifth.

Meanwhile, those watching the video are chattering about the start. As is traditional, several of the starters were put in an outside start, expected to stay outside lane 4 until crossing a “break line” at the top of the backstretch. Normally, however, this “alley” is marked with small cones or flags; last night there were no markers, nor was the break line marked. The athletes starting on the outside broke for the rail less than 50m in to the race, and took the head of the pack.

If everything had been done by the book, those athletes–including Masai–would have been disqualified. But everything wasn’t done by the book; the alley was unmarked. Officials, apparently, decided to do nothing. The Ethiopian press, this morning, was fuming that the Ethiopian team officials declined to protest the results on the basis of the start; such a protest would have DQed Masai and Momanyi, the fourth-place finisher, and given Ethiopia a sweep of the medals.

I was speculating that if assassinating an Austrian archduke in Serbia could cause Germany to declare war on France, perhaps some missing lane cones could spark an Ethiopia/Kenya war if everything went wrong. We also wondered if the steeplechase barrier crew from Eugene was running the 10,000m start. But what options were left? Disqualify a third of the race, including the apparent winner? Or tell three Ethiopians that they are getting lesser medals (and lesser prize money) because they were beaten by two Kenyans who ran a shorter race?

The athletes should have been called back for a restart the moment the outside alley broke for the rail. When that opportunity was lost, there were no good options remaining.