Flat Hills Road

I occasionally get email from a European outfit called “All-Athletics” which bills itself as “the most comprehensive athletics database.” I have to wonder what Mirko Jalava thinks of this tag line.

At any rate, their most recent email included a list of “competition rankings” among one-day events this year, and the top four ranked as listed in the title of this post: Zurich Weltklasse, Rome’s Golden Gala, Monaco’s Herculis, and Eugene’s Prefontaine Classic.

I’m not going to argue with their competition rankings; Pre was a great meet this year, and next year with the Diamond League in place it’s not going to suffer any. But looked at as a list of cities… well, one of these is different. Anyone? Anyone?

Could we get our numbers straight, please?

The Eugene Register-Guard says Jenny Barringer was the third American woman under 4:00 for 1500m. The USTFCCCA says she was the fourth.

USATF (and several others, including the IAAF) say Dwight Phillips had the longest long jump since 1991. The Register-Guard says since 1994.

I’m guessing the confusion in the jump is because Phillips actually tied a mark from 1994, so some writers are counting it and others aren’t. Understandable, but still confusing.

I’m at a bit of a loss to explain the Barringer discrepancy, though, at least without my annuals in front of me. The IAAF all-time list shows Mary Slaney and Suzy Favor Hamilton ahead of Barringer, as has been noted elsewhere; who is this mystery third person?

Again, without more documentation, I can only guess. One possibility involves the difference between performances and performers: Mary Slaney actually has two marks faster than Barringer’s, so Barringer may be the third performer with the fourth performance. Another possibility is that the IAAF has removed marks from their list due to doping suspensions, but there actually is a “drugs disqualification” section on that list, and there are no Americans on it (there’s only one name, in fact).

Later: Peter Gambaccini points out that the discrepancy is probably due to the third sub-4 ahead of Barringer’s being run indoors. (And, as I suspected, by an athlete who was later DQ’ed for doping, though the mark still stands as the indoor AR. Mr. Logan, tear down this record!) So some writers are counting it and others aren’t. I wish there was an agreed-upon convention for this, but I don’t see how we’d get everyone to agree upon it.

Considering her far-from-in-form performance earlier this season, I’m far from the only one to be unsurprised at Pamela Jelimo’s underwhelming performance at the Prefontaine Classic this afternoon. She ran the first 600m like last year’s Jelimo, and then someone tossed her a fridge on the backstretch and that was the end of it: for whatever reason, she’s not in the condition she needs to be to run like she did last year.

The two things which were surprising in that race were:

One, Maggie Vessey. Sure, I’d heard her name before, but in this context she may as well have been dropped from Mars. Fortunately NBC showed (visually and audibly) that Vessey was just as surprised as the rest of us; she ran through the line like a pro, then her eyes went wide as she realized what she’d done. (Also: she was dead last in the field when Jelimo imploded. However weird a race it was, Vessey ran well and deserved the win.)

Second, the speechlessness of the NBC announcers at Jelimo’s collapse. They knew she’d run poorly so far this season–they mentioned it–but they were clearly still reading the 2008 script and hadn’t done any homework on anyone else in the field. They were almost silent during the most exciting (and, in their defense, most chaotic) part of the race. Sorry, guys, you got caught out on this one, and it made you look bad.