Two weekend races determined a lot of American fates concerning the 2024 U.S. Olympic Trials and Olympic marathons

No matter what World Athletics does every Olympics cycle, USA Track and Field keeps the picture as muddied as possible

Despite annually producing a glut of supremely fast times, running chattering class doesn’t seem regard the Valencia Marathon on the first Sunday of every December as that big of a competitive deal. This could be primarily the result of Valencia not being a World Marathon Majors event, but for me probably stems mostly from being an American who is too blinkered to do anything but follow the American “running media” while continually remarking boisterously about the progressive degradation of almost every U.S.-based “running media” platform.

Once the New York City Marathon, which falls on the first Sunday in November, is over, most Americans rightfully enough declare the state of U.S. top-level marathoning to be static until the end of the year. This is because few Americans make appearances at Valencia (one exception I happened to catch is Jennifer Bergman, who ran 2:31:38 for 25th place last year). Given the strength of the field every fall, even if most of the top Americans weren’t contractually obligated or incentivized to run the Chicago Marathon (which in recent years has been staged on the second Sunday of October) or the New York City Marathon in the fall, it’s unclear what the race would even offer the best Americans, at least the best American men.

This year’s results demonstrate anew that—while London, Tokyo, and the big three U.S. marathons (Boston, Chicago, New York; Houston should really be in this class too) are places for elites to win a great deal of money, Valencia allows for super-fast times and probably has a drug-testing set-up as meaningful as the one up my own rectum.

The top 20 times—or really, the top N times, where N is any integer up to probably around 500—times were not only fast but reinforced how much closer the global pack of really, really good men is to the fastest man in the world than the pack of similarly accomplished women is to whatever woman enjoys planetary 42.2-km supremacy. The spread between male winner Sisay Lemma of Ethiopia, who rose to #4 all-time with his 2:01:48 (good for a gap of around 500 meters on Kenya’s Alexander Mutiso) and 20th place was 5:24 5:34, while the corresponding margin in the women’s race was 9:13.

The California International Marathon was also yesterday. When it was over, the almost-two-year qualification period for the 2024 Olympic Marathon Team Trials was—as it now is every four years thanks solely to CIM—also over. With Trials just nine weeks away in Orlando, Florida, CIM is an annual parade of sub-elite men and women taking their last shot at a Trials qualifier and understandably not focused on being at their absolute best in two months (although some of the Trials qualifiers from CIM will run personal bests in Orlando if the weather it favorable).

At the most recent Trials-last-gasp CIM in 2019, when the qualifying standards for the marathon (there’s also a half-marathon entry option) were 2:19:00 for men and 2:45:00 for women, 37 men and 72 women achieved the qualifying marks (I didn’t check to see how many were foreigners, but it’s not many). Yesterday, with the qualifying marks having been tightened to 2:18:00 and 2:37:00, 31 men and 15 women achieved the standards. Had the qualifying standards been the same as they were for the 2020 Trials, these numbers would have been 38 and 72.

I had to double-check this, but it’s true. The 2019 CIM saw 37 men and 72 women break 2:19:00 and 2:45:00 respectively, and the only difference in 2023 was one additional sub-2:19 male. But the quality of this year’s field didn’t remain this magically static throughout, as in 2019, only seven women ran under the current Trials standard for 2:37:00 compared to the 15 who got there yesterday.

The qualifying standards for the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics Marathon are 2:08:10 for men and 2:26:50 for women. A distance-running ingenue glancing up that image of the Valencia top 20 men and women’s times might think, “Aw, heck, that’s not so freaking hard.” Clearly this is the case for some country’s athletes, and American women are doing fine here, with 16 U.S. women having run under 2:26:50 since the start of last year on World Athletics-allowed courses. (USA Track and Field judges net-downhill routes like those used by Boston and CIM as acceptable venues for qualifying for the U.S. Olympic Trials marathon, but World Athletics does not.)

But only two American men, Conner Mantz (2:07:47) and Clayton Murphy (2:08:00), have run under 2:08:10 in the same span, with both doing so in Chicago two months ago. If that sounds lame, it really isn’t—it’s a quarter of the total of American men who have ever run that fast on World Athletics-permitted courses. Three of those men are African-born; the rest probably had upright-walking ancestors living there within the past two million or so years.

Each country is allowed to enter up to three men and three women in the marathon provided all have met the required standards of entry. Athletes can qualify for the Olympic Marathon without running the above-listed times as long as they demonstrate sufficient excellence in other ways, such as consistent high finishes at the six World Marathon Majors races (Boston, London, Tokyo, Berlin, Chicago, New York City), and achieve times of 2:11:30 (men) or 2:29:30 (women) during the qualifying period

World Athletics has established what appears to be an impressively baroque and incomprehensible points system, which a Letsrun article from yesterday tries to place in the context of USATF’s updated guidance on the requirements Americans marathoners face in trying to make it to Paris next summer.

Here’s part of this guidance:

It appears that both Mantz and Young are in as long as they merely finish the Olympic Trials and no more than one other man who finishes ahead of them runs under 2:08:10. if a third American man

The lack of an option for “chasing times” after the Trials is significant, as the qualifying period for the Olympic Marathon will remain open until early May, three months after the Americans-only races in Orlando are history. The text of the USATF document says that runners have to be “Qualified Athletes” at the end of the Olympic Trials, which means that no one slower than 2:11:30 or 2:29:30 will be considered for Toyko Paris even if central Florida experiences a mild windstorm on February 3 and the winning times at the Trials are 2:13:00 and 2:32:00 by absolute no-named with a high tolerance for airborne plant matter.

USATF seems to be trying to force fast Olympics Trials races, perhaps in the hope that this will wind up helping a third man make the automatic 2:08:10 Olympic Games standard. And no matter what USATF does, all of the men in the field have plenty of incentive to aim high. 2:06:06 guy Galen Rupp, after all, still has to be considered capable of 2:08:10 after his 2:08:48 in Chicago despite his personal best being over five years old, and Abbabiya Simbassa’s 1:00:37 half-marathon a year ago October makes him a sub-2:08 threat.

As the Letsrun piece explains, Scott Fauble, despite the results of Valenica knocking him out of the “Road to Paris 2024” top-65, will probably retain sufficient standing at the beginning of May to qualify for the Olympic Marathon. But if someone other than Mantz or Young winds with a time of 2:08:11 in Orlando, Fauble might not go to Paris even if he finishes second or third. At least it looks that way.

Another factor is that USATF—and there are many precedents—might just decide to make whatever administrative decisions it pleases after the Trials, or after the qualifying period for the Olympic Marathon ends in early May, and frame whatever decision it makes in way that conforms to the language in the images above.

It will be fantastic if some American man who has never run a marathon winds up running 59:45 in a debut half-marathon in Houston in January to break Ryan Hall’s sixteen-year-old American record by a second. This would signify potential to run 2:05 to 2:06 in the marathon, but I bet USATF would deny such an athlete a petition to enter the Olympic Marathon Trials weeks later.