The first two days of the USA Championships offered no major surprises, including the myriad shortcomings of Runnerspace

"Caveat emptor" should be USATF's operating motto

A quick review of Thursday’s and Friday’s national-championship track action in Eugene:

The opening rounds of the men’s and women’s 800 meters saw 19-year-old NCAA champion Will Sumner advance to Sunday’s final with apparent ease. Sumner. who just finished his (true) freshman year at Georgia, is in the same class of phenom as Donovan Brazier, who set the NCAA record in 2016 as a (true) freshman with a 1:43.55 and broke the American record in winning the 2019 World Championships 800 meters in Doha (1:42.34). Brazier has been on the shelf with a leg injury for over a year, but at 26 is only about halfway through his twelve-year contract with Nike and seems very eager to compete again, what with American college freshmen threatening to make global-championship teams.

Sumner probably won’t make the top three in tomorrow’s final, with Bryce Hoppel, Isaiah Harris, and Isaiah Jewett my picks to make the World Championships team (Clayton Murphy won’t make the team after an ill-timed second-lap move and will briefly make noises about moving to the 1,500 meters). But he might ultimately prove more durable than Brazier, which at this point unfortunately will be fairly easy.

The women’s 800 meters had too many Willises, Wilsons, and Watsons too keep track of, so I didn’t watch the opening round; the event lacking Athing Mu at these championships automatically makes it less interesting. It is sponsored by Prevagen, an over-the-counter memory-improvement aid with no demonstrated benefits, while the men’s 800 is sponsored by KT Tape, a product probably almost as useless as Prevagen but undoubtedly safer to apply to the skin and possibly to ingest, too.

The opening rounds of the 1,500 meters eliminated Cooper Teare but no other potential favorites on either the men’s or the women’s side. Matthew Centrowitz Jr., seven years after winning Olympic gold in this event, assumed Teare’s “Nike up-and-comers” place in today’s final.

Athing Mu set a personal best in her heat, but that was almost a given considering her lack of immersion in the event to date. Whether she struggled at all or completely cruised is debatable, but her sliding from first to third on the last lap couldn’t have given the under-raced Mu’s confidence much of a boost, even though racing for third was the most sensible strategy.

I have not been looking at the chatter of others, but I am sensing that the inclusion of a Huntington University athlete, Anna Wiley, in this event is upsetting folks given the sordid recent history of the program. To this I say, fine and good, but don’t we trust drug testing? If the woman has never failed a test, then crowd-convicting her of guilt-by-association could and should be applied to all members of the Bowerman Track Club, given that the BTC not only famously lost its top distaff runner to a four-year doping ban in 2021 but denied she’d done a single thing wrong.

Sha’Carri Richardson went undefeated in the opening round, semifinal, and final of the women’s 100-meter dash, looking quite confident and buff. The key for her in this meet, assuming she escapes it without a subsequent revelation of tainted pee, is simply not making any dumb mistakes. She’s running the same 10.71 to 10.75 performances she has since she was 19 four years ago, but if she avoids false-starting and pops a 10.70 in the World Championships final, she could win a gold medal.

At this point I should offer the information that I have been watching the USATF.tv/Runnerspace coverage of the meet with no audio whatsoever. This is not a choice, as my headphone jack broke off in the audio port of my PC a few days ago thanks to an unexpected and rapid shifting of position of Rosie combined with my inopportune positioning of my electronics. I will get around to solving this issue eventually, but I like that it is keeping me from watching too many videos, which I don’t like doing on a smartphone, and forcing small unexpected behavioral shifts in other areas. That’s an excuse for being lazy, but it’s also true.

Runnerspace is a wonder of technical futility. I needed to pay the $12.99 monthly fee to get access to Nationals, and despite Runnerspace having a credit card of mine on file, it would not let me use that card to pay. So I paid with a different one.

This was forgivable, but what happened during both 10,000-meter races on Thursday night was a serious problem. In the women’s race, the camera froze when the leaders had about 750 meters left and resumed functioning when the leaders had about 250 meters to go. I could see the clock working, meaning that the feed was fine. The same thing happened about nineteen minutes into the men’s race. This means that, unlike the issue with a frozen feed, the footage was simply never captured, and outside of those who saw the omitted portions of the race live, that racing is lost forever. There is no footage I know of. Not a tragedy but a serious bummer.

As for those 10,000-meter races, they went more or less according to form place-wise but were both startlingly slow. It was about 77 degrees American for the start of the women’s race and about four degrees cooler for the start of the women’s—prohibitive for anyone looking for a record, but not sauna-like. The reality is that most of the 10,000-meter favorites are doubling back in the 5,000 meters tomorrow, so conservative pacing was to be expected.

The lead women passed 29:01 on the clock (the women’s 10,000-meter world record) with about 1,160 meters to go. Elise Cranny wound up pummeling Alicia Monson into submission with a final 800 meters of 2:10 or so. Karissa Schweizer sliding back into fourth was something of a surprise, but because we* hadn’t seen her all year, we were ready for this at some level. Whether she is simply not fit or had an off-night is a guess, but only one option seems sensible.

The men’s race saw a corresponding failure, with a BTC star landing in fourth, one place from qualifying for the World Championships should all three runners who beat him (Woody Kincaid, Joe Klecker, and Sean McGorty) opt for the 10,000 meters in Budapest, decisions that in turn hinge on how the 5,000 meters goes. But unlike Schweizer, Grant Fisher was the man for a while, making a big move with about three laps to go. The leader went through 8K in 23:13.65, just outside Letesenbet Gidey’s women’s-world-record pace, and the clock read 26:11 (Joshua Cheptegei’s world-record time) when Fisher had about 900 meters to go.

There were a couple of other issues with the webcast, but I should have known about them. One was that, if you pause the live feed and resume watching, the video will cut out at whatever time the live feed ends. Runnerspace is pretty quick about uploading the whole production for re-watching, but because of this “feature,” I missed the finish of the men’s 10,000 meters.

Also, when CNBC (of all of NBC’s brands) is showing the meet on television, the USATF.tv/Runnerspace webcast only shows track events. For example, last night between 8 p.m. and 10 p.m. Eugene My Time, the coverage consisted almost entirely of the men’s triple jump. Again, Runnerspace uploaded individual videos of the omitted events shortly after the meet ended for the night, but this still sucks. But I can only blame myself, because once I realized what the deal was, I remembered the same partial blackout is always in effect under these mixed-coverage circumstances.