2021 Olympic Trials perspectives and event-adjacent frivolities

Also, reflections on this project during a brief lapse in the dispensation of dumb

I assume that people don’t read these deliveries to catch up on race results per se, especially the outcomes of races they’ve already watched on television or competed in themselves. My sense is that new readers—meaning anyone who has found the place after I moved it from Blogspot last summer—are drawn mainly by what I have to say about other people’s ideas, activism, and Internet cavorting, and that this is especially true when the ideas are asinine, the activism corrupt, and the cavorting gelatinous and resource-thieving, all of which are now near-daily occurrences. Old-timers prefer the wonky, running-centric stuff. More on people’s demonstrated reading preferences below.

Concerning not just the Olympic Trials but major meets generally, I’m surprised at the number of stand-alone and corporate media/para-media outlets that basically copy and paste agate meet results, dropping in a “This was especially amazing” here and a “This is his first Olympics” there in an apparent effort to provide distinctive verbal seasoning. This strikes me as a waste of creative resources for people who cover running full-time, yet an obligatory arms race of sorts whose underpinnings I appreciate. While I find a lot of these actors are equally troubling for various overlapping reasons, this doesn’t mean they view each other as allies. Someone who’s already paying $8 a month to support The Homer Runs from Hemorrhoids Podcast probably won’t be at all likely to have another $8 to spare for the “Doping Doesn’t Exist” newsletter, both of which cover almost the same thing in appropriately Wokish, exclamatory, and self-congratulatory ways.

Anyway, the just-completed 2021 Olympic Trials (full results; YouTube videos sorted in reverse chronological order) were the most exciting of the ten of these protracted summer dramas I've watched unfold since 1988, only one of which I’ve seen pieces of from the stands. And while the wait between productions was long and torturous this time, the unmistakable feeling of being energized from a faraway perch in the audience came from a motley cast of characters—some precocious and others long in the tooth—outshining expectations, either in making the Olympic team or in all likelihood giving their final post-race interviews as active or competitively relevant world-class athletes.

I like the familiar feeling the first broadcast of any Olympic Trials brings, even if part of that merely means seeing the same peacock logo on the same network featuring a lot of the same longtime voices. And because the overall structure of network track-and-field broadcasts of track and field have taken on the same general flavor for decades—obviously, the addition of countless cameras and timing devices, some attached to athletes, has changed the caliber and amount of available information, but I’m talking about what the announcers generally say—it’s fairly easy to pinpoint important changes to top-level running culture by identifying terms that would have been completely foreign to track and field, and in some cases the world, at this time five years ago.

With that somewhat in my pleasantly unsettled mind, I’ll take the lazy way out and cobble together some observations in the form of bullet points.

• My podium picks were a disaster; I failed solidly with a raw score of 17/30 across the ten events. Several of my omissions were blatantly stupid and founded on rooting specifically against heavy favorites from the Bowerman Track Club—the same psychological process Shelby Houlihan supporters have invoked to declare her innocent, but with the motor reversed. The only event I "swept" was the women's steeplechase. I had no goose eggs, but that would have been had to achieve without literally throwing darts at the entry lists. Donavan Brazier’s wobbly 800 final was probably the most glaring flop; Jenny Simpson not making the top three may have been inspired the most widespread sigh among longtime fans.
  

• Lady Gaga had supposedly been commissioned by the Clean Sport Collective to perform on day one of the track events slathered in pig offal, with plans to serenade the entire Bowerman Track Club with an a cappella rendition of "Poker Face." But this never materialized, and the excitement was confined to the actions perpetrated by the athletes themselves.
  

• I haven’t done any kind of real review to confirm this, but there had to be more under-20 competitors, or at least high-impact competitors, on the track in 2021 than in any previous U.S. Olympic Trials or standard national championship. Cole Hocker, who turned 20 this month, defeated Matt Centrowitz in a lovely 1,500 meters (an outcome I sense most longtime observers found deeply satisfying) that must have looked like a contest between a veteran and a fossil to 18-year-old Hobbs Kessler, who didn’t make the final but was hardly a disappointment. True NCAA freshman Nico Young made the 5,000-meter final. Wisconsin senior-to-be Roisin Willis, who ran 2:00.78 at age 16 this spring, reached the semifinals of the 800 meters while competing against the most potent set of half-miling American legs in history.
  
  But 17-year-old Erriyon Knighton’s 19.84 to earn him third in the 200-meter dash was the most magnificent of the performances turned in by athletes who were not yet alive when the World Trade Center towers stood unperturbed in New York. That would have been a sea-level world record until 1996.
  

• NCAA 200-meter champion Joseph Fahnbulleh wasn’t at the Trials, but it bears mentioning (my excuse for introducing random things) that he ran three years of cross-country in high school in Minnesota. Most kids with his kind of speed are doing something more athletically marketable in the fall. His fastest 5K was only 20:43, but he probably had a reasonably sound kick, especially against kids running 6:30 pace entering the last tenth of a mile. I'm trying to imagine him running downhill in a crowded field without maiming somebody.

• Some of the doofuses mentioned frequently on Beck of the Pack can and do skillfully cover track when not rallying behind some kind of nonsense (or against something good); as the past couple of weeks reveal, some of them can’t even when it’s on their minds. Alison Wade’s recent newsletters offer comprehensive reviews of the women’s races, showing how much of the sport she knows. But she also had to veer into this:

  

  I wrote about Schwarzman and the USATF Foundation in March, wondering why his philanthropy had gone widely unnoticed. Maybe it’s better if no one notices.
  
  Wade has a habit of trying to stain or exile philanthropic people in running she dislikes, no matter how made-up her reasons for disliking them are or how demonstrably beneficial—and necessary—their work is, in a sport she knows hungers for athlete funding.
  
  This seems consistent with the combined logic of these two positions:

  

  Maybe the idea is that it’s okay to discuss body parts that can easily be given a new color or halved in size, but no others.
  
  Solid sports marketing, all of it.
  

• Related: The next few weeks should be an especially lively circus of topic-swiping between content providers who weren’t focused on the bigger sports picture as the Trials unfolded because they lack the background and imagination to generate original, substantive content on the fly.
  

• Sydney’s McLaughlin’s 51.90 in the 400-meter intermediate hurdles felt like the most impressive on-the-track effort of the Trials. At 21, she was probably inspired by all of the underage talent on display as a reassurance that she still has a few good years in her yet.

  McLaughlin's 51.90 drops the gap between the women's 400m IH WR and flat-400m WR from 9.58% to 9.03%, still higher than the men's gap of 8.71%. Amazing it's even that close considering how obviously dopetastic Marita Koch's 47.60 from the Pleistocene is.
  
  Imagine a German woman outrunning Athing Mu by 15 meters in a 400 on Mu's best day, and the scramble that would immediately unfold to burn down whole chemistry labs in Munich and Berlin, their operators knowing they had grossly overplayed their pharmacological hand.
  

• Speaking of Sha’Carri Richardson, track now has its own Dennis Rodman, which I mean as a compliment and beyond the ink and flamboyance. Rodman is largely remembered by casual fans as a high-profile showboat, when in fact he was not only the best defensive rebounder in NBA history but a psychotically hard worker in practice when he had his head squared away. Richardson is maybe the best sprinter the U.S. has ever seen.
  
  I’ll go ahead and grab hold of one of many available third rails here, and suggest that after watching interviews of the winners of the women’s 100-meter and 200-meter races, I don’t see how it makes sense to perceive people first and foremost as members of ethnic groups rather than as individuals. Richardson and Gabby Thomas are both dynamite personalities for different reasons, and I’d rather see them flourish in the years to come in accordance with the personal flame each brings rather than be repeatedly called to represent a greater fight they may not agree with at particular levels.
  

• And speaking of ridiculous and unattainable world records, here's one genuine injustice driven by this reality that the Wokish seem to have missed, but must be a conversation in sprint circles: The men's 100m, 200m, 400m and 800m WRs have never been put out reach in my 37 years of running, whereas the women's have been essentially unattainable since 1988.
  
  This means that at meets where WR bonuses are offered for WRs, for at least three decades, women specializing in those disciplines have for practical purposes had zero chance at this bonus. "Doping" as we know it vs. the unchecked Iron Curtain anabolic age is no contest.
  
  Even if you throw out doping-invalidated marks by Tim Montgomery and Justin Gatlin, the men's 100m WR has been broken 10 times since the 1988 Seoul Olympics, itself the site of sprinting's first famous drug spectacle. The women's 100m WR has not been broken once. In that same period, the men's 200m WR has been broken four times, the 400m WR three times, and the 800m WR six times. Many of these records rightly blew wise minds. The corresponding records for the women have been broken zero, zero and zero times.
  
  Obviously, what to do about this, if anything, gets dicey in a hurry: Who gets the new marks and on what reasoning? But this is the kind of thing that should make loudmouths protesting phantom injustices take notice. I mean, it may be a spell before we* see a 3:54.98 or a 14:22.
  

• I’ll have more to say about the aftermath of Houlihan’s “ban reveal" shortly. For now, Nathan Imhoff’s video about Burritogate employs the skepticism of an honest thinker from the perspective of a general running fan, sports dad, and probable meat-ingester.

  On a related note, it’s plain that Nike’s smokescreen has worked very well even on friends who at least casually follow track and aren’t dumb about PEDs in sports. The average wrong idea looks like this: No one, even the AIS, questions that the nandrolone did in fact came from a burrito and there were only trace amounts of it anyway.
  
  Both of these ideas are resoundingly false. And the success of this misinformation campaign would not have been possible without the energetic support of both the running media and the greater media collapse that has enabled and legitimized the ruination of its integrity. Nice job, dumbasses.

• I was on my feet for a number of these races, shouting like a four-year-old playing a video game for the first time with some level of panache. But as I was immersed in those races, I understood that, regarding this or any large-scale meet, nothing will ever compare on the nails-biting scale to watching the 2004 women’s 1,500-meter final from Florida, where I’d met two of the women who wound up making the Olympic team in that event months before.
  

I have lots more to get to thanks to a piling up of my own research notes and an ongoing increase in reader suggestions and pieces of information. And for the first time I’m having to decide if things I receive merit actual investigation, an extra level of work and an additional invitation to unpleasant blowback.

Most of the feedback I get comes in the form of replies to the e-mailed versions of posts. This is understandable for two obvious reasons: One, people who sign up to get this stuff, rather than following a Web link, are probably more interested in anything I write than random visitors; and two, most people would rather fly under the radar with some of what they have to say.

The posts that get the most visits here are, unsurprisingly, those that comprehensively rip apart someone or something. I’ve had several of these get more views than did the two Podium Runner articles I wrote that Letsrun linked to from its front page. But the ones that get the most genuine appreciation are the ones that don’t necessarily intend to sway or polemicize in any way, but instead reveal how this and other sudden cultural curiosities affect me as just one more oft-addled citizen who recognizes avoidable and damaging mistakes when he sees them, and agonizes regularly over the unlikelihood of this campaign of stupidity-bombing—Wokism, a sick joke of a corporate media environment, and other lies from on high—ending soon.

This is how the world operates. If I wanted to maximally popularize this bloglike enterprise, I would promote it far more aggressively than I have. I long ago ascertained that the people I most want to be aware of my work are indeed aware of it, and, this being a niche subculture and industry, it’s not an extensive list. But if I really wanted more subscribers and higher numbers in the metrics I occasionally scan, I would operate the place like a far more strategic Substack user.

I am pleasantly surprised at the number of people who already read and consistently comment on my articles, much less pay me to churn them out. But if I had the entrepreneurial drive to match my compulsion to point out intentional journalistic and other malfeasance, I would focus on one type of sweeping, cynical-but-restrained NOT SO style of outburst and seed it everywhere allies were likely to find it. I’m glad I am not constituted this way, and even more glad that this is a compelling side project rather than a desperation grab at paying the rent, with dramatics to match.

Still—and this sounds like hubris and probably is—I feel an obligation to the running community to write about things others might like to but cannot owing to some combination of an understandable fear of material consequences, an absence of editorial freedom, and a basic lack of insight. Despite having no conceivable people left to offend in the running world, in Wokish times, it’s very possible that this blog could ruin a lot of opportunities and partnerships down the line, a possibility I have soberly evaluated and discarded as irrelevant. Also, while I’m not one of those “I have a silent army” sorts, anyone should be able to understand why some of the people who fully or partly support what I am doing here are loath to say so even to me. But many have, and they’re people whose input matters.

It’s interesting—and vital—that when I approach something like setting up a training plan for an everyday road-racer, this process bears no relationship in my mind to either the world of elite running or the turd-choked pool of chaos into which the running media has performed an ungainly cannonball dive without bothering to even hold its nose. This is automatic, however, not the result of practiced compartmentalization stemming from a desire to keep repugnant subjects at a psychic distance.

Nevertheless, I have to hope that all of this mucking around in the sewers of running doesn’t eventually lead me to neglect too much of the important things happening in the sunshine aboveground.