A prologue to a review of the U.S. National Outdoor Track and Field Championships
The performance gap between the best teenagers and established pros has been narrowing across events for years
In the 2002 U.S. high-school outdoor season, fourteen boys broke 9:00 for 3,200 meters, including those who ran the equivalent of sub-9:00 for 2 miles (3,218.7 meters). In 2007, twenty-five boys reached that level. In 2012, twenty-seven did it. In 2017, the number was forty-two. In the just-concluded 2022 season, eighty-two boys joined the club, which, according to Milesplit’s database (the source of all these figures), currently hosts 539 members. This means that 15.2 percent of the boys who have ever run under 9:00 for 3,200 meters did it this spring alone.
In 2002, five girls broke 10:30 for the same distance nationwide, including, as before, converted 2M times. Molly Huddle’s 9:57.59 made her the lone sub-10:00 performer for the spring. The 2007, 2012, 2017 and 2022 totals were 18, 41, 48, and 87.
I didn’t look even this deeply into other events, but a sampling of a few of them suggests the same pattern exists across disciplines. For example, the seventh-best girls’ 100-meter-dash time in the nation in 2002 (11.73) was equal to the 23rd-best 2012 mark, and wouldn’t have landed in the top fifty in either 2017 or this year.
It shouldn’t take someone familiar with track and field to infer two things from these data: One is that elite kids have been redefining what it takes to be exceptional in high school for at least two decades, and some unidentified but significant external intervention amplified this trend sometime in the past five years.
We know what the technological development is—racing shoes so good that even the engineers behind Nike’s ZoomX technology had to be amazed when the formula of constituents fell into place with such resounding force. The word “superspikes” is as assured of eventually falling out of regular use as any game-changer, but for its remaining time in the regular pundit rotation, it will continue to appear mostly as a necessary dilution-term so that all historical context isn’t lost at once, e.g., “Yenew Yeblewet stopped to tie her shoes with 5 meters left and lost the race, but still ran 2:16:24—only seven seconds faster than her pre-Vaporfly best, but still a PR.” Also, the number of boys who have broken four minutes for the mile in the past two years would no doubt have been lower without the added technology.
But it’s instructive to accept that the pool of high-school superstars has been expanding for many years without any “outside” help.1 This phenomenon probably explains most of the triumphs by comparatively young competitors at this year’s Championships, along with a few of the surprise qualifiers for Worlds who seconds and thirds over the long weekend.
I think that this is simply the result of more kids starting serious, well-guided training and racing at younger ages than was common into the late twentieth century. Only in the 1990s did it become typical for American middle-school programs to approach the level formalization of the high-school programs they feed. Compare the top-ten ninth-grade boys in the 3,200m in 2002 to this year’s list:
The number-ten mark in 2002 wouldn’t have placed within the top forty this spring. Obviously, whatever is happening depth-of-talent-wise with a given year’s ninth-grade class plays a major role in what the overall national rankings look like three years later, which in turn affects the NCAA talent pool, which is obviously by far the major source of top American distance talent (immigration plays a role as well).
Every human is born with a certain ceiling on his or her running ability over any distance. There is nothing I am aware of that suggests that training one’s way to that ceiling over a shorter time frame is a bad thing for any athlete’s career. It by definition means that an athlete who starts quite young may never set another personal track record after the age of 24 or 25. But this doesn’t mean that this athlete can’t compete at essentially this level, while honing his or her big-competition skill set, for a good eight years or so. (It’s possible to start at around age 18 and still run just as fast as you ever would have, maybe by age 28, like Paul Tergat. But it’s not hard to see why it would suck if everyone with extreme running talent wound up inadvertently hiding this gift until adulthood.)
I explored this idea in a post last April. Such theses will always get pushback from people who can cite kids who started off with a bang at 11 or 12 and ended up washing out for various reasons, most of them more mundane than unhappy. But if you forget about the casualties and just focus on the inevitability of more talented kids training harder as young teens creating stronger national teams down the road, it looks like an instance of a collective machine functioning really, really well. Besides, I’m not talking about generating a nation of Brad Hudson types who are intent on reaching hundred-mile weeks while their singing voices still resemble those of the members of Menudo.
At the Outdoor Championships, some of the best-ever athletes in their events were doing things like showing up 18-year-olds during 200-meter races (Noah Lyles) and expressing clear finish-line gratitude at a second-place finish and a glimpse of the 20-year-old winner’s vulnerability (Ajee’ Wilson). Erriyon Knighton and Athing Mu are historic talents, but it seems like we* keep using that word so frequently that we’ve* become unsure what constitutes a true prodigy anymore. And there were some unexpected impacts from collegians (counting those who technically finished their collegiate careers in advance of the Championships as well.
I’ll get to the details by the end of the week, but I think the phenomenon reviewed here will continue to scuttle national-championship form charts (electronic ones, of course) at every big U.S. meet. I will also speculate that the massive and apparently growing phenomenon of foreign elites with international experience in the NCAA ranks makes American collegians better racers sooner, if I can find a way to have not just already done so.
Except for banned drugs, which at least some kids are surely using, even if only few near the very top of their event(s) may be. As common as extreme academic cheating has been proven to be among people who can afford whatever they need, there can be no doubt some families are sparing no expense or modality in the pursuit of securing athletic scholarships—the value of which rises disproportionately every year.