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.

It looks like the IAAF is doing their Athlete of the Year selections a little differently this year. In the past, as I’ve noted, they presented a slate of athletes and asked their panel of judges (there are about 1,500 names on this list, of which mine is one) for male and female votes, and also solicited votes on their website; this narrowed the field to a group of three “finalists,” with a much smaller group selecting the actual winners.

This year, the process has changed in two ways. First, it appears there will be no internet vote. (N.B. there has been no announcement; it may be that the internet vote still hasn’t opened, or will be opened for the finalists only.) This is fine by me; the website results were sometimes bizarre and only counted for 30% of the weight anyway. Second, the panel has been asked to select three men and three women, but we have not been given a list to select from. We are free to nominate pretty nearly anyone we want.

I am just cynical enough to think this is the Usain Bolt effect on the Athlete of the Year. Given one vote for one male, anyone who has been paying attention would have to be insane not to vote Bolt, and competition for the other two finalists would be fierce. Given three votes, we can put one on Bolt and look for two other likely candidates. With those names in the finalists, we can say, hey, Sammy Wanjiru did win two fast marathons this year. Kenenisa Bekele did win the Woolworth Double in Berlin. Tyson Gay did retain some semblance of competition in a sprint landscape that includes Bolt.

The women’s list is much harder to come up with, not because the performances have been poor but because there have been so many good performances. Who would you nominate?

USATF is following the lead of the IAAF this year. The IAAF has for several years included an online voting component in its Athlete of the Year selection process, with the online component making up about 10% of the decision. (Ever the optimist, I think this is meant less to minimize the opinions of true fans and more to avoid the need to rigorously police the voting against the kinds of shenanigans which are easily mounted on the web, but in the end it does make the weight of any single web vote effectively nil.)

USATF is encouraging visitors to its website to cast their votes for the Jesse Owens Award, and like the IAAF, they are giving the internet vote 10% of the total weight.

For the second year, I’m a panel voter for the Owens Award, but I intend to vote on the website as well, and I encourage you to do the same.

I’m voting twice because I am, as I’ve often explained, a “fan with a notebook,” and this situation gives me the chance to vote both sides of that personality. I can cast a “fan vote” on the website for the athletes I identify with most, and then cast my “panel vote” as a more dispassionate judge, if such a thing actually exists. (As a runner, I have to be comfortable with the idea of striving for a perfection I know I can never reach.)

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.)

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?

It’s official: Wilson Kipketer and I entered the same race, and I finished ahead.

They have a Media Race at the World Championships, usually an 800m. I gather this happens every time; this is only my fourth Worlds, and I don’t recall it happening in Seville, but I raced in Edmonton and Osaka. I had hoped to improve both my place and time over Osaka (9th and 2:18.8x, if I recall correctly) but I wondered about place when I realized how many sub-2:00 runners were entered here, including World Record holder Wilson Kipketer.

The field was indeed both larger (eight heats) and faster; I ran the fast heat in Osaka, but was in the second-best here. There were four men under 2:00 in the fast heat, with the winner in 1:55.19 (apparently a competitor at the French indoor championships last winter) and second in 1:55.67. Kipketer jogged.

Many of the same runners from my Osaka heat lined up with me this year. I had gone out too fast last time and vowed to follow a smarter strategy this time, so I held back a bit. I shouldn’t have. The leader went through 400m in 1:07.14 and split evenly to finish in 2:14.20. I sat 10th and passed four rivals in the third 200m, but the closing half-lap was very tough; I’d used too much making up ground after the bell. Four runners within a second of each other were like a wall in front of me, and I couldn’t close on them let alone find my way around. I wound up in 2:20.41. I’d say my tactics were OK, but my sense of pace needs work; a month ago, however, I wouldn’t have expected to run one 70-second lap, let alone two, so I’ll take what I can get.

In the composite results, I placed 13th overall, and the first American (again). Kipketer was 15th in 2:21.11.

Every World Championships has a number of TV ads which run before and after each session on the big screen. In Osaka, my favorite was a Mizuno ad in which a recreational runner out for a jog passes athletes meant to represent a series of Japanese marathon stars (Seko, etc.) and one who looks startlingly like Frank Shorter.

Here, my favorite is an adidas ad featuring marathon World Record holder Haile Gebrselassie racing a 200m against Tyson Gay. If you know Haile, and you know Tyson, you can probably guess how it goes from there.

There are some races which just won’t die. The protests surrounding the 1992 Barcelona Olympic men’s 10,000m final lasted for days before Skah finally collected his medal (to jeers). It looks like the women’s 10,000m here in Berlin may be just as complicated.

Here’s the situation: Linet Masai crosses the line first, ending an Ethiopian major-championship streak in this event going back to 1999 and winning Kenya’s first medal since that year. The results are published showing Meseret Defar in third, then abruptly withdrawn again. Later, they are republished to show Defar in fifth.

Meanwhile, those watching the video are chattering about the start. As is traditional, several of the starters were put in an outside start, expected to stay outside lane 4 until crossing a “break line” at the top of the backstretch. Normally, however, this “alley” is marked with small cones or flags; last night there were no markers, nor was the break line marked. The athletes starting on the outside broke for the rail less than 50m in to the race, and took the head of the pack.

If everything had been done by the book, those athletes–including Masai–would have been disqualified. But everything wasn’t done by the book; the alley was unmarked. Officials, apparently, decided to do nothing. The Ethiopian press, this morning, was fuming that the Ethiopian team officials declined to protest the results on the basis of the start; such a protest would have DQed Masai and Momanyi, the fourth-place finisher, and given Ethiopia a sweep of the medals.

I was speculating that if assassinating an Austrian archduke in Serbia could cause Germany to declare war on France, perhaps some missing lane cones could spark an Ethiopia/Kenya war if everything went wrong. We also wondered if the steeplechase barrier crew from Eugene was running the 10,000m start. But what options were left? Disqualify a third of the race, including the apparent winner? Or tell three Ethiopians that they are getting lesser medals (and lesser prize money) because they were beaten by two Kenyans who ran a shorter race?

The athletes should have been called back for a restart the moment the outside alley broke for the rail. When that opportunity was lost, there were no good options remaining.

I had dinner with the IAAF.org team last night, and we checked out our positions in the media tribune this morning. The stadium is, of course, gorgeous, an imposing classical temple from the outside, a soaring modern bowl on the inside. The royal blue track surface colors the whole venue.

We will be encouraging readers of the IAAF.org competition blog to submit comments and questions. I’ll promote some to the front page and answer them on the fly if things aren’t too busy; I may also answer questions without posting the question itself. I’m not sure yet how quickly I’ll be able to check Twitter.

Interesting news over the last week:

• The IAAF Congress passed a false start rule (or, more accurately, a no-false-starts rule.) I understand why the athletes complain–sometimes you just twitch–but there’s nothing that kills the drama of a sprint final like three or four false starts or so.
• I’m reading now that the World Cross is going to become biennial. This might be pragmatic but I don’t like it.
• The Jamaicans tried to withdraw four athletes. Then they withdrew the withdrawl, but only because Diack asked them. Honestly, even the Kenyan federation isn’t that pig-headed: when they yank a top athlete off their team, it’s done months in advance and the replacement is nearly as good. Obviously if Team USA wants to continue global domination, the forward-thinking route is for USATF to become more opaque and arbitrary in order to keep up with the Jamaicans and the Kenyans. (I’m joking, of course.)
• I can understand that an athlete who’s been injured as long as Paula Radcliffe might want a shakedown race before a championship-level marathon. I’m not sure why she chose a half-marathon one week before Berlin, though. A six-hour time change and, well, a half-marathon with only six days of recovery? Kara Goucher’s chances are looking better and better. (Mikitenko pulling out doesn’t hurt, either.)
• I tried to go to the Usain Bolt press conference yesterday, but I got bad directions online and couldn’t find the venue in time. Finding one’s way around in this city is like navigating by waves on the ocean; even Google’s maps show streets going where the satellite photos clearly show buildings (and buildings where there currently are none).
• The Local Organizing Committee is using the most underwhelming tag line in marketing history as the motto of the Championships: “Have a Good Time.” Seriously, that’s it. We asked one of their media staffers about it last night (after the beer but before the ouzo–long story) and he refused to offer his own opinion (good man) but did say it was chosen by a market research firm, which should tell us everything we need to know.

I’ve entered the Media Race, which is on Monday. Rumor has it that Wilson Kipketer is running, and saying he wants to run sub-1:50.

I’ve been too busy recently to comment on the pre-Berlin news; in fact, I generally still am, even though I’m seeing some stuff I wish someone would pick up on. (For example, the IAAF sent a press release today about qualifying for the World Athletics Final in Greece, and I did a quick skim of the current rankings. The U.S. women are really getting it done in the middle distances; they’re all over the top 5 in the 800m and 1,500m, and Jen Rhines is #2 in the 5,000m.)

I hope to have more notes from Berlin, but be aware of these sites:

• I’ll be writing the “competition blog” on berlin.iaaf.org. Pre-meet discussion suggested that readers will be able to submit comments and questions for me to “promote” to the blog page as well, so if this is true it will be much more interactive than previous events.
• I will have articles on the distance events on the Running Times website.
• If there’s anything too short for here and too offbeat for other venues, it may wind up on Twitter. (The IAAF competition blog may also be bridged to Twitter, but I’m not sure how many of these plans are actually happening.)