Some snippets of a fast-growing 2021 Olympics tale
You know you're having fun when picking a Most Valuable Viewing Moment is tempting after only a few days of competition
I have been writing a bunch, mostly at hours unusual even for me, and watching far more television than I normally do, also whenever the need strikes and always tuned to a channel sporting a Peacock logo. I have been trading YouTube video links and spastic peer-to-peer PED accusations and grandiose proclamations with other running nerds, all while fulfilling my modest daily chores and doing whatever else seems to advance my life in the necessary ways, including throwing a tantrum over losing a house key in the soil of a potted plant. (If you become bored, I strongly recommend hiking into the nearest available canyon with a rambunctious dog on the next cloudless morning and watching huffing tourists make unkind and flabbergasted remarks about the local altitude.)
These niceties have conspired to keep me from commenting here so far on the Olympic events themselves. So now and in the days to come, you can expect repeated episodes of cognitive diarrhea, wherein I spray at you what I have most recently taken in and processed, and do so without bothering to wipe (i.e., correct my typos) because the next torrent, while not precisely predictable, is surely imminent.
Note: Most of the links below are to race videos, not the usual junkola, so know that I put them here for a reason this time instead of as proof that not every one of my thoughts originates solely within my own head.
As is often the case, Jonathan Gault, whose primary view of the sport through a historical-statistical lens mimics my own, had commentary posted on the Karsten Warholm-Rai Benjamin 400-meter hurdles race for the ages before I even had a chance to even do the obligatory dives into the World Athletics databases. But like him and many others, I was curious what the performance Warholm, who recently went from 45.6 thousand to 34.7 billion unique Instagram followers, would look like if he’d achieved the same points total in a suite of other running events.
Relying on this calculator, I came up with this table, which really does speak for itself:
After Sydney McLaughlin shredded her own weeks-old world record of 51.90 in the same event with a 51.47 on Wednesday morning, it created startling parallels between the progressions of the men’s and women’s world records. When Dalilah Muhammad broke the women’s mark in October 2019 with a 52.16, it eclipsed a 16-year-old standard by 0.18 seconds. Now, in two remarkable swoops, McLaughlin has lowered Muhammad’s less-than-two-year-old mark by 0.69 seconds, and with Muhammad finishing second in Tokyo in 51.58, the world has now seen two women run 0.87 and 0.76 faster than any female ever had as of only 22 months ago.
This is a stunning small-group accomplishment, but somehow, a pair of men had just managed essentially the same thing in an even shorter period, and laid waste to an even older record in the process. As I mentioned in my last post in a slightly different framing, when Karsten Warholm ran 46.70 last month, it took down Kevin Young’s 29-year-old record by 0.08 seconds. By running 45.94 and dragging Rai Benjamin to a 46.17 at these Olympics, the world has now seen two men run 0.84 and 0.61 seconds faster than any human ever has as of only four-plus weeks ago.
Sifan Hassan, tripling in the 1,500m, 5,000m and 10,000m at these Olympics, is one of those athletes that forces sanguine pundits to offer one opinion in public and a more emphatic version of that opinion in private, whatever that opinion is. Even the most blinkered observers and faux optimists unwilling to learn from not just history but a never-ending present usually have the bleak sense to temper their “I really believe they’re clean” offerings with “until conclusively proven otherwise,” which renders the entire affirmation toothless by providing an escape hatch. Then again, these ideas are usually embedded in newsletters and social-media streams that are themselves toothless, or at least pointless.
I see no reason to disconnect my own public opinions from my privately held ones on this front, and I see Hassan as not so much a probable cheater as the subject of the most aggressive doping experiment in distance-running history. Almost nothing that she’s done in Tokyo, from her 67-57 closing laps of the 5,000 meters to her mandible-dislocating recovery after falling on the last lap of her 1,500-meter prelim, makes sense to me unless she’s not only being powered by illicit cocktails, but is confident of getting away with it. I feel the same way about Mo Farah, perhaps not quite to the same degree if only because that might not be possible. But even if one or both of these suspicions is correct, I’ll be surprised if the world ever gets official confirmation of either.
Obviously, I could extend the list by a dozen or more active names without blinking my eyes once, but that would constitute a joyless form of mission creep, and I’m not here to take a dump on people. I love everybody who lines up and tries, as well as the people with the courage to post boldly foolish ideas about those people and their races.
Olympic 800-meter finals have a habit of instantly immortalizing themselves more often than happens in other disciplines, and the women’s race on Tuesday evening added itself to that pantheon. This is a beautiful event, and I contend that the most beautiful running strides on the planet belong to world-class half-milers.
Athing Mu is just one of a suddenly considerable number of remarkable under-25, American talents, although for better or for worse, the U.S. is not alone in producing unprecedented young-adult athletics talent. I know a lot of it’s the shoes, but when people are running only one and two laps and physically abusing existing records without remorse (or blinking), technology—including doping, which has left no world record unsuspicious for decades—can only be applied as a hammer to these athletes’ progressions to a limited extent.
That’s only four primary bullet points, but I doubt readers can tolerate steady 3,500-word newsletters any more than I can stand the fact that I write them, and the last one was vulgar in its logorrheic excess. So, I will conclude this violent movement of my mental bowels with a few other Olympics-related things worth checking out:
Horses can dance. They really and truly can. Maybe you already knew this, but either way, it’s impossible to not be delighted and impressed by Olympic dressage.
The Crime in Sports podcasters, who also host an even more gawkworthy production called Small Town Murder, released an episode about Rosie Ruiz’s cheating escapades and other instances of antisocial behavior (there were many) at the 1980 Boston Marathon. They titled the episode Running from the Truth - The Amoralness of Rosie Ruiz, which means that either they noticed my “Running from the Facts” theme and decided to copy it, or neither title is especially clever. But Jimmy and James are extremely clever overall, and although their frenetic exchanges are alone are enough to carry the show, they always do their research.
One big takeaway: Although wrongly claiming to have won a major marathon and wrongly claiming to have finished X number of races in middling times are offenses carrying different levels of impact and visibility, it’s plain that the world has grown far more accommodating of cheating by everyday yahoos and in fact barely tolerates their critics, so long as the people doing the lying and cheating are sufficiently oppressed by melanin, adipose, and personality disorders. Ruiz was dragged mercilessly by every talk-show host and comedian alive—I was only 10, but the “immediate” lasted for years and Ruiz, who died in 2019, is still more of a household running name than most U.S. Olympic champions—whereas today, enough Wokish bitching and threats and bullying accusations of “You made that obviously long-unstable person take their life” are enough to drive a fellow like Derek Murphy into resigned submission.
A reader reminded me of a Real Science of Sport podcast episode from May that deals with a lot of the same issues pertaining to intersex athletes that I raised yesterday in this space. Ross Tucker offers helpful responses to the four or five standard Wokish arguments for allow transgender and intersex girls and women into events expressly designed for female-sex human competitors (and he deftly explains why this separation must be so if women are to have a place in Olympic-level sports at all).
I should follow more of Mario Fraioli’s Morning Shakeout links, but these tend to distract me from remembering to dislike practically every development in running, a conflict I am not constituted to regularly confront anymore. But I do enjoy the few minutes of unconscious head-nodding I engage in while reading something that makes sense of a farrago of developments I’ve also been trying to get my running-brain to accept en masse. Although Matt Hart gives Shelby Houlihan’s burrito excuse too much latitude, the rest of his piece from last Friday, which Fraioli linked to yesterday, is both provocative and hopeful.
I like Hart’s attitude better than my own, but I’m not yet convinced I should trade up.