Flat Hills Road

I have a window here where I can mention my votes for the Jesse Owens award (and my reasoning) without being tempted to make it look like I voted for the winners (we don’t know them yet), or trying to change your minds about how to vote (because voting is now closed).

As I mentioned, I voted twice, once online like everyone else, and once in the journalists poll. (I’m still tickled to be asked to participate in these things, and a little distressed that our pool of “journalists” is so small they need to include me in order to get enough voters.) I used my online vote as a “sentimental” vote for the ones I liked most, or identified with most; the official vote went to the athletes I thought had best earned the award as it is described with their competitive results in 2009.

So that latter vote went to Tyson Gay and Allyson Felix. Felix was a tough choice over Sanya Richards; both athletes were double World Champions, winning individual events and running a leg on the 4×400m relay. Felix, however, delivered her third consecutive 200m championship, a truly historic accomplishment considering she was facing down two-time Olympic champion Veronica Campbell-Brown. I might have considered Carmelita Jeter with those two had she won the World title as well as her undeniably fast late-season times, but Felix and Richards came through in the big show, and I still think that counts for a lot.

You’d think that would put me off Tyson Gay, particularly with Christian Cantwell and Trey Hardee on the nomination list, but I give Gay a tremendous amount of credit for attitude and American Records. Like Jeter, Gay ran phenomenal marks late in the season, but I really voted for Tyson because he never once used Usain Bolt as an excuse. He ran hurt, and still ran faster than anyone other than Bolt ever has. He faced off with the most dominant sprinter in history and gave the best he had to make the races real races and not walkovers for Bolt. I think that effort deserves to be rewarded.

On the website, I cast my women’s vote for Jenny Barringer. Shalane Flanagan and Kara Goucher are great athletes, and the runs they’ve had in the past three years have been tremendous, but I have a suspicion that Jenny Barringer is the second coming of Lynn Jennings. (Or, more likely, the first coming of Jenny Barringer; she may be completely without precedent.) Nominally a steeplechaser, she ran PRs from 1,500m to 5,000m (including becoming the first of three–THREE–American women sub-4 at the shorter distance this year), dismantled a series of quality fields in the NCAA track championships, and is probably going to dominate the NCAA cross country meet this fall in a way no American woman has since Flanagan… and Goucher. Get on the Barringer train now, because she’s acting like she’s just getting started.

I don’t actually remember how I used my online vote for men. It may have gone to Christian Cantwell, who took the shot put gold back for the USA in a thrilling competition in Berlin, but it may also have been Trey Hardee, who put together one of the most dominating decathlons I’ve seen from an American in Berlin, and made it look easy despite his relative inexperience. The story at the U.S. championships was that with Olympic champion Bryan Clay out, the U.S. team in Berlin would be weak, but coming out of Berlin it actually looks like the Hardee/Clay duel in 2011 may be more interesting than anything that happens in Daegu–unless, of course, they both arrive in Daegu healthy and can deliver the way they both did in the ‘08 and ‘09 global competitions.

So that’s how I voted. We’ll see in December if I voted with the majorities.

(I’m still interested in hearing thoughts on the Athlete of the Year balloting–assuming Usain Bolt gets one vote, who do the other two go to?)

Update, November 19: Gay won, Felix did not. Here’s the announcement.

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.