Flat Hills Road

I had actually considered not going to USATF Indoors, but I got an assignment. Here’s the result.

Running USA, of course, is only interested in distance runners. The schedule placed both men’s and women’s 3,000m finals and the men’s 1,500m on Saturday, and the women’s 1,500m on Sunday, for reasons beyond my understanding. This meant I made an extra trip from Amherst to Boston and back on Sunday to watch one race. I grumbled a bit about this to myself, but really the problem was the narrow scope of the assignment and nothing else.

(The trip wasn’t wasted, of course, because I did get to watch the 800m finals, which were pretty cool if not terribly competitive; I’m going to be interested to see what Katie Waits does in the outdoor season. And also, the men’s shot put final, which for the first time since I started paying attention to the event was won by someone not named Nelson, Godina, Hoffa or Cantwell. In fact, I think there’s a pretty decent corps of young putters out there ready to take over.)

I filed another story this weekend, a longer-term project for the Boston Marathon program. Due to its relatively-limited availability, I’ll post it here after the marathon in April.

Steve Hooker’s meteoric rise up the all-time indoor pole vault list (he was tied for #4 after Millrose, and stands alone at #2 behind seven Sergei Bubka marks after the Boston Indoor Games) begs a question: what’s the difference between outdoors and indoors when we’re talking about the pole vault?

Track athletes obviously see a difference in the physics of 200m banked tracks indoors as compared to 400m flat tracks outdoors. Adam Nelson pointed out that the composition of the indoor shot, which is generally padded to avoid damaging arena floors, changes the grip putters can get on their implement, and that the feeling of the ring under their feet is also different, but the marks between indoors and outdoors are not generally very large. (22.66m indoors, 23.12m outdoors.)

There are two significant differences between the indoor and outdoor pole vaults: wind and runway. Wind is the obvious change: sometimes there’s wind (and other weather) outdoors. There is never wind indoors, at least not of any significant magnitude. This means vaulters don’t have to adjust for conditions, a small but appreciable advantage. Runways are a little more subtle; indoor facilities sometimes (not always) have springy, elevated runways like the one the Boston Indoor Games organizers trucked up from Madison Square Garden for vaulting at the Boston Indoor Games last night. This can also be an advantage if the vaulter is used to the runway. Combined, then, it’s not too surprising that unlike nearly every other event, the pole vault WR is marginally superior indoors to its outdoor counterpart: 6.15m indoors compared to 6.14m outdoors. (Both, of course, held by Bubka.)

Hooker highlighted this Saturday night when he selected 6.06m as an intermediate height before approaching the World Record. It’s an arbitrary height indoors, smack in the middle of the block of Bubka which tops the all-time list. Outdoors, however, it’s a watershed: three men, Maksim Tarasov, Dmitry Markov, and Brad Walker, all at 6.05m marks outdoors. On a combined all-time list, then, Hooker is #2, with a lot of Bubka ahead of him, and that 6.16m height he keeps trying is the highest anyone has ever vaulted, period. There isn’t a distinction in his mind between indoors and outdoors.

Will the statisticians continue making a distinction? Hooker should have the Australian Record now, for example. Will the Australian track statisticians give it to him, or call him the indoor record holder? Considering there are no indoor facilities in Australia, and their domestic outdoor season usually happens during the European and North American indoor season, those lists can’t be terribly deep.

Are there other events where the distinction between World Record and World Indoor Record is meaningless? The men’s high jump records differ by only 2cm. The men’s long jump is off by .14m; the men’s triple jump is off by even more. The shot put is the only comparable throwing event. Women’s PV is about 10cm, both held by Yelena Isinbayeva; women’s high jump is only 1cm lower indoors than out, and the long jump and triple jump show about the same spread between indoors and outdoors as the men’s events do. The women’s shot put records are even closer than the men’s. But only in the men’s pole vault is the indoor mark superior.

I’m guessing that the reason behind this is not the conditions but the depth of competition. More top athletes have faced more and more challenging competition outdoors, over a longer history. I think indoor and outdoor field events are heading for convergence, and Steve Hooker may be at the front of the wave.

I covered the Millrose Games last night.

Of note: a British journalist of my acquaintance commented on the headline’s use of “scare” with a world record as the subject. (I didn’t write the headline.) I don’t have a problem with the personification (anthropomorphization?) of records, myself; in the past I’ve had them celebrate birthdays and get drivers’ licenses to illustrate age.

Also, for those who didn’t read the USATF release word for word, Adam Nelson announced that next year, when his wife has finished law school, they’re moving back to Athens, Georgia to open a yogurt shop. I guess that’s what you do with an MBA and a law degree. The name of the shop will be “MoYo”, because Nelson’s nickname as a child was “Mo”. But the name works even if you don’t know that, and even if Nelson is pulling our collective legs.

One of the things Adam Nelson talked about in our interview was the relative importance and position of the shot put among the athletics events, particularly in America. It was particularly interesting to hear him tell this, because he has been part of the renaissance of that event in America, starting at the 2000 Olympic Trials.

I included some of his quotes in the article, most notably his observation that to break through as an event in this country, you need to be breaking records constantly (think women’s pole vault) or have “awesome competition” which is what the shot put is currently delivering.

This is a point I think is often missed. The frequency with which Nelson, Christian Cantwell and Reese Hoffa compete with each other is unprecedented, I think, even in this sport. Even an uncharitable observer will put all three of those names among the top five in the world, if not the monopolizing the top three, and they go out and deliver a veritable event summit on a very, very frequent basis. Those three threw against each other more often in 2008 than Sebastian Coe and Steve Ovett faced off in their entire careers. It’s as though Asafa Powell, Usain Bolt and Tyson Gay met eight or ten times in one season.

It also doesn’t hurt that it’s the collective that dominates, not one of the three. The men’s 400m was boring when Jeremy Wariner (or Michael Johnson before him) was winning every race he entered. When LaShawn Merritt started beating Wariner, but not on a regular basis, the 400m got a lot more interesting. Which one would win this time? Same with the shot. Cantwell and Hoffa threw long in Europe last week, Cantwell longer than Hoffa, but Hoffa’s the Olympic champion. But Cantwell’s the indoor champion. And Nelson, well, he’s Adam Nelson, he’s been the diameter of a shot away from two Olympic gold medals. Which one’s going to get a grip on a good one tomorrow night?

Did you get a little excited there? Can you see why?

I suggested, and Nelson concurred, that this really sprung from the 2000 Trials. Nelson, John Godina (since retired) and C.J. Hunter (since booted from the sport in disgrace) made the team. Kevin Toth and Andy Bloom could’ve made it. I’m forgetting at least one other name. Six guys with a legitimate chance to make the team. The drama didn’t need to be manufactured, and the crowd in Sacramento recognized that.

Now add on the event itself. The shot is the heaviest of the throwing implements, and the circle it is hurled from allows the least movement of any of the throwing events, not that the spinning used by hammer and discus throwers would help putters much. Nelson describes the event as, “I’m trying to push a 16-pound steel ball as far away from myself as possible,” but that’s the reductio ad absurdum of the shot.

He also says the shot put is the purest strength event outside powerlifting. And yet he works on more than raw strength; he works on  speed, balance, form. He doesn’t advertise himself as the strongest guy, and when you compare him to a giant like Christian Cantwell, he doesn’t look it. He does say, and I’m taking this out of context in a way which makes it sound immodest, “I’m stronger and quicker than most of the people I’ve competed against.” (Emphasis mine.)

And quicker.

It’s tempting to look at the shot put as a sort of sideshow, feats of strength to amuse us while we wait for the World’s Fastest Something-or-Other. It’s harder to look at it as half a dozen or a dozen men performing a precise little dance they have been perfecting for over a decade apiece, and try to determine how the subtleties of each performance affect the precisely measured outcome, but ultimately it’s a richer experience. And while track fans may good-naturedly refer to themselves as “nuts”, it’s the fact that this sport features over a dozen such events, each of which may be observed just as richly, that makes it so fascinating.

On Monday, I sat down for an hour with Adam Nelson, the 2005 World Champion in the shot put. The first article from that interview ran this morning on the IAAF website.

Boiling an hour interview down to 1,200 words means things shrink a lot, so there’s a lot more to add which is not in that article. I’ll let you digest the story first, then start in with my notes.