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.

I should be working, but the IOC is monopolizing my head space right now. The 2016 Olympic host is supposed to be announced within the hour. The leading candidates, supposedly, are Chicago and Rio de Janeiro; Tokyo and Madrid are also in contention. I want to get these thoughts down before the host is actually announced.

I can’t figure out if I want Chicago to win or not, but I’ve seen a lot of silliness posted online recently about the Chicago bid. People are entitled to their opinions, but I think sometimes those opinions are based on incomplete or erroneous assumptions about the cities and the process.

The most common pattern I’ve seen is people thinking the vote is up or down on a given city. These people make the argument, “Chicago shouldn’t host the Olympics because…” and then go on to say something like, “They have better things to spend their money on” (possibly true and a strong argument, but one the proposal counters very well), or “Chicago isn’t safe.” The problem with this argument is, if it was accepted, it would mean the IOC would turn down one city (Chicago) because it wasn’t safe, and instead select… Rio? Is Rio safer than Chicago? Seriously? This isn’t a binary-choice situation; it’s choosing the best of the alternatives. (Conway Hill has an excellent exploration of the idea that Rio may have the best bid, and very strong arguments, because he focuses on positive reasons Rio is a better choice rather than negative reasons why “Chicago shouldn’t win.”)

There’s also the “Obama has better things to do than campaign for the Olympics.” This, also, may be true, but consider the alternative. Madrid’s PM, Brazil’s Lula, and I’m sure the Japanese PM, are all in Copenhagen for the decision. Conventional wisdom is that “personal diplomacy” from Russia’s Vladimir Putin is what won the 2014 winter Games for Russia. If Obama didn’t go to Copenhagen, it would be interpreted as a strong vote of “no confidence” in the Chicago bid, and would almost certainly mean Chicago would not win.

In other words, unlike the IOC’s decision, Obama’s situation was binary: positive support of the Chicago bid, or negative action against the bid. He did not have a neutral option. And whether or not I agree that Chicago is the best choice, I do think it’s appropriate that our President be a positive supporter of our bid. It certainly would be inappropriate for him to positively support another country’s bid in opposition to ours.

Selfishly, I’d love to see a Chicago win, because I bet I could get some good work out of it, and see another Olympics only a time zone away. (I’m assuming I’ll still be able to get a media credential, which is not a given, of course.) But really, if Rio or Madrid win, I won’t be terribly disappointed. (After Beijing 2008, I doubt Tokyo has a shot at bringing the Games back to Asia so soon. Madrid is too “safe” a choice in the face of Rio, I’m afraid. But can any of them afford the Games, really?)

(ETA: Chicago eliminated in the first round of voting. Tokyo goes out on the second round. The third round will decide.)

(ETA2: And it’s Rio. Good for the IOC for finally going to South America. I hope Brazil stages a competent games without going too deep into debt.)

It was a week or two ago that two different stories caught my attention. They didn’t have an obvious link, but both referenced a place: Eugene, which hosted a spectacular Olympic Trials last summer and will host the USATF Nationals next month. (Yes, I’ll be there.)

Alan Abrahamson, in his “Open Letter to Doug Logan“, had this to say about Eugene:

Eugene, Ore., is a nice-enough place; Hayward Field there is rich with tradition. So what? You and I both know you’re not going to grow the sport from Eugene. Indeed, it’s not unreasonable to argue that going back time and again to Eugene – the Olympic Trials there last summer, the nationals there in a couple weeks and again in 2011, the Trials there again in 2012 – only reinforces the image of track and field as a niche sport in an eco-cute college town when what you need is instead an electrifying presence in New York, in Chicago and especially in L.A.

Earlier this month, Ron Bellamy at Eugene’s Register Guard quoted Pre Classic race director Tom Jordan:

“For a long time, rightly or wrongly, I had the feeling that the Pre Classic was kind of the last bastion of keeping the reputation of Eugene as a track capital going,” Jordan said. “And that’s no longer the feeling at all. It’s sort of like the engine’s firing on all cylinders and we have a great potential to create a whole new generation of track fans.”

With new leadership at USA Track & Field — CEO Doug Logan — Eugene can’t assume that what it’s been in the past, or what it became last year, will be immediately understood or appreciated. Or ignore the fact that there are track fans who want to see the Trials in larger cities after they return here in 2012.

The vision that came to mind was the Svalbard Global Seed Vault, the blast shelter in the Arctic permafrost created in an effort to store a sort of backup for biodiversity–samples of seeds from around the world, so species might be re-established if they are ever lost. I imagined Eugene as this sort of preserve for track, hiding away in Oregon as a shelter from which the sport might re-emerge if it’s lost elsewhere.

It’s a nice idea, but it suffers from the same problem as the seeds: if the species is lost due to a hostile environment in the outside world, don’t we need to fix the factors which caused it to die out before we try re-establishing it?

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.

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.

I’m spending most of my time on a pair of projects with short deadlines right now, but I wonder if many people read both Conway Hill’s anonymous open letter to Doug Logan, and my colleague Steven Downes’ post for Britain’s Sports Journalists Association, “The rate for the job: how cuts hit freelances“.

While it’s obvious that the second link was written by a professional writer and the first… wasn’t, they both have a common theme: skilled professionals hoping to make a living from their craft feel their work is not appropriately valued. The anonymous author of Hill’s letter argues, with some justification, that “elite” athletes are the engine from which all revenue in the sport springs, and that USATF’s structure loads the weight of any number of programs not directly related to professional athletics as drag on this engine. (There’s some merit to this argument: does the NBA carry the burden of grass-roots basketball development?)

I am less of a professional than any of the journalists Downes cites in his argument, but as such I’m an example of his argument: if newspapers, magazines, etc. were paying a better rate for more professional coverage, I’d be doing a lot less paid writing and a lot more rambling online for nothing. (I am the Wal-Mart of athletics writing, except without the market share or massive profits.) Instead we’re pinching reporters with decades of experience. (Granted, the papers themselves are taking a beating financially, but one wonders if compromised quality may have something to do with that.)

The bottom line is this: paychecks are more than tokens. They also represent a value placed on the recipient’s work, and if they see that work as valueless, they’re likely to produce lower-value work–or simply quit and find something else to do.

For those who haven’t had enough of me being opinionated, I have an analysis, with some commentary, of USATF’s Project 30 report posted on the Running Times site.

It’s a credit to the panel and their secretary that the report’s conclusions seem almost inevitable given their research. The important part of the report, I came to understand, is how it gives CEO Doug Logan an agenda, even a mandate, for change, without making that agenda part of his personality. (I suppose this is the role management consultants play when it’s time to fire people in big corporations.)

I hope it works; I’d like to see the relay impediments removed so we can see USA vs. Jamaica in both 4×100m relays in Berlin this summer. I’d also like to hope that USATF’s political sinkholes can be avoided, because they’re part of the problem.

Favorite part of this piece: I’ve been running low on sleep, and when I was reading the report at some point the only way I could come up with to describe the more wishful-thinking-heavy parts of the report was, “I want a pony.” It’s only a fraction of the report, but they’re so pitch-perfect for most of it that the unlikely parts look that much odder in context.

I really recommend that anyone sincerely interested in the future of the sport read the whole report. The background material, in particular, is an education.

By now everyone’s heard that Shalane Flanagan is no longer coached by John Cook, the caustic impresario Nike coaxed out of retirement to bring her back from catastrophic injury in 2006. And probably, everybody has read the article from Sunday’s Washington Times in which Cook suggests that Flanagan and her husband, Steve Edwards, had been planning this coup for a while.

I don’t know anything more about the split than anyone else, and I don’t doubt that Steve Nearman, who wrote the article, got his facts and quotes right. (I’ve criticized Nearman before for his Alan Webb critiques and for his look at James Madison’s athletic downsizing.)

We’re not told how Cook was lined up to coach Flanagan in the first place. I’m guessing someone other than Flanagan was paying the bills at first. Cook’s jab about “loyalty is hard to find” ignores the possibility that Flanagan might just be more loyal to Erin Donohue, her teammate since 2000, than Cook, her coach since 2006. And while Cook may or may not be right about Donohue’s potential (she’s right to say if that’s how he thinks, he shouldn’t be her coach,) nobody has asked this coach “who has made friends and foes with his directness” whether he considered the effect dumping Donohue would have on his relationship with Flanagan.

I’m guessing yes. Other reporters have told me that in Beijing, Cook had nothing but good things to say about Edwards, but now he’s claiming “I was warned … to keep an eye on him.” So either the warning came after Beijing, or Cook is capable of being polite for the sake of politics. And maybe he just got tired of the situation, for whatever reason, and decided to light the fuse by cutting down Donohue.

Cook has been around the block a few times. I doubt there are any angels in this situation, but painting Cook as a sympathetic character is an interesting approach.

Update 2/10: I’ve removed some text from the original post, and clarified some pronouns where the edits made them unclear.

Also, to add about coaches’ pay: It’s more common for coaches of professionals, especially distance runners, to not be paid than for them to be paid by the athletes. Many coaches are still employed by college teams, others are funded through other paying athletes, and others are paid for by the athlete’s sponsors. (Coaches I know have been approached by sponsors specifically to protect the sponsor’s investment in a developing athlete.) I won’t argue whether this is right or not, and obviously it works better for some coaches than others, but I think it’s a red herring here. The danger of this split isn’t in who paid or didn’t pay who; it’s who is now going to be willing to join the Flanagan/Edwards team with Cook’s non-endorsement on the record, and for that matter, who’s going to be interested in working with Cook, although I’m guessing (again) that he’s not very worried about that.