Flat Hills Road

This year’s TAFWA (Track and Field Writers of America) breakfast was the longest I’ve ever attended, but it included presentations from three top USATF officials, five of the six runners who made the 10,000m team for Berlin last night, and a few words from Alberto Salazar, not to mention the annual awards presentations. I’ll attempt to have a better report on tafwa.org soon, but there were two bits I found particularly interesting.

First, Doug Logan talking about the new Nike deal for USATF described the athlete support section in a way which reminded me strongly of Logan’s old job at MLS. Logan is (justifiably) unhappy with the dominant role of agents and shoe-company sponsors in the sport, and claims to have a long-term plan to change how sponsorship and athlete support work in the sport, at least in this country. This deal provides a clue, as USATF is wading in to bridging the gap between collegiate competition and competent, mature professional athletes.

It’s a great selling point, because post-collegiate support was a major complaint in the Project 30 report, but it’s also likely to disappoint the shoe companies and agents because it begins the process of having all athletes essentially sponsored by the federation. This is the MLS model, where all players are contracted and paid by the league, not the teams. It’s a little like socialism in that it suppresses the open sponsorship market for athletes, and it may undercut how much the top athletes get paid, but it may also spread the available sponsorship money across a broader base of athletes, and if it works in that way it might be worth the trouble.

(As an aside, there is widespread disappointment in Eugene that many of our sport’s stars aren’t running “their” events because they have byes through to Berlin. Bernard Lagat is at least putting on a show in the 800m, but Wariner in the 200m and Tyson Gay running just one round are both wet firecrackers. Those who complain about this largely blame the agents, not the athletes. I think the real problem is that stars like Wariner and Gay aren’t going to be competing inside the live television window.)

Interesting fragment #2 came when Alberto Salazar, usually one who shuns the spotlight, followed two of his athletes to the podium and delivered a brief, apparently unscripted minute of praise for his colleague, Jerry Schumacher, and a number of other coaches around the country (Terrence Mahon was also mentioned by name). As part of this, Salazar mentioned that he thought a coach could only develop and mentor six or seven top-level athletes at once, and that he wanted to continue to attract top-flight coaches like Schumacher to Portland, each coaching a small group of developing athletes under the Oregon Track Club umbrella and support structure, as long as he could persuade Nike to keep funding it. Considering the success he and Schumacher have been having in the last few years, I tend to think this is a good idea. Questions: who’s next?

(Full disclosure: I am a nominee to be Vice President of TAFWA starting next year; the elections are happening later this year, and so far as I know there are no other nominees. Join now if you want to vote against me.)

Since posting my own analysis of USATF’s Project 30 report, I’ve had the chance to discuss the report with a few other people whose opinions I respect. Two of them independently raised a question I hadn’t considered. A significant amount of the report makes sense only after accepting the idea that winning Olympic medals is the ultimate raison d’etre for USATF. I noted this assumption and moved on, but not everyone accepted it so easily. Does this motivation come from the USOC and/or the USATF charter? (Probably.) Is it the right way to be approaching the sport? Good question. It leaves out questions of participation, public health, integrity (it’s tricky to balance an overriding imperative to win medals with an anti-doping message) and even sponsorship.

Refining that last question: assume that Project 30’s goal is to maintain USATF’s future. This requires sponsorship and broadcast rights agreements, both of USATF and USOC. What will bring more sponsors to both organizations? Do sponsors chase the prestige which is assumed to come from winning lots of medals? Or do they follow consumer attention, which may or may not be predicated on winning a lot of medals?

Or is this a national pride issue? I’m sure there’s been some academic research on this point.

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.