USATF Nationals wrap-up: U.S. distance squads for Worlds still not solidified, men's 5,000 meters features 4,000-meter warm-up jog
Watching with the sound off added a surprising amount of opt-in suspense
On Saturday, I posted some comments about the first two days of action at the four-day 2023 U.S.A. National Track and Field Championships (complete results), mixing in a bum prediction or two about the remaining races. The meet, which qualified three men and three women in each event for next month’s World Athletics Championships in Budapest, ended on Sunday, so most of the chum-chum below about the meet itself is no longer news, to the extent running actually generates any. I have compensated for this torpor by rising to a passive Letsrun.com challenge and casting fresh aspersions on people, two unrelated but equally enjoyable exercises.
Just as I had done on Thursday and Friday, I watched Saturday’s and Sunday’s events without the benefit of any noises made by the announcers or the fans at Hayward Field, as I have a broken headphone jack stuck in the audio port of this PC and plan to leave it there until it dissolves or is otherwise extracted by divine mandate. To amplify the effects of this pseudo-deafness, I decided to not “cheat” by looking up answers to any questions raised by the video feeding my eyes, such as “Why exactly is Sha’Carri Richardson wearing half a set of long johns for the 200 semis?”
Saturday’s finals for both men and women included the 400 meters, the 1,500 meters, and the 3.000-meter steeplechase. In the women’s 400 meters, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone uncorked the sub-49-second clocking most viewers probably expected, but missed Sonya Richards-Ross’ American record by 0.04 seconds with a 48.74, making SLM the tenth-fastest woman ever on a list rife in Eastern Bloc clitoromegaly sufferers from the late Cold War era. Britton Wilson, the 2023 Division I NCAA champion for University of Arkansas who had run 49.13 in May and turned professional in mid-June, wound up second in 49.79. Most of us, of course, would enjoy seeing Wilson turn the tables in on SLM in Hungary.
The men’s 1,500 meters saw Yared Nuguse lead almost wire-to-wire despite a modest pace at 800 meters (1:58.96), with the affable but fierce Nuguse fending off a challenge in the last half-lap from relatively unheralded Joe Waskom of the University of Washington. Cole Hocker, who has explosive speed but seems to be injured too often for fans to reliably count on it, finished third; the three men mentioned above will probably form the U.S. contingent at Worlds, although the newly arcane nature of entry (athletes no longer absolutely need to meet the Worlds qualifying marks thanks to an arcane points system).
The women’s 1.500 meters was the Saturday silent short film I was most interested in watching the entire week before. I assumed that someone in the race would make the pace fast enough to establish a gap on Athing Mu with a lap to go, but other than Laurie Barton’s token scuttle to the front on the first lap, that simply didn’t happen. In fact, all of the experienced 1,500-meter runners in this final let Mu, the ingenue, dictate the race exactly when they should have been moving around her—not so much to keep ahead of her kick, but to discourage her—she’s not used to being more than a meter or two behind, ever.
But with one lap to go, Mu was in the lead, her split of 3:04.18 putting her on pace to run 4:11.15. At this point it seemed almost certain she would win, if she cared to. And she almost did. But Nikki Hiltz shot by her on the outside and broke the tape at a national 1,500-meter championship for the second time in 2023 (Hiltz also won the 1,500 meters at USA Indoor Nationals).
I may have muted the sound off for this race even given the option of listening specifically to avoid listening to the announcers call Hiltz “they.” If she’s going to insist on genderless pronouns while competing solely as a member of one sex category—the one that’s about 11 percent slower than the other sex category at the top level—then why not at least refer to herself as an “it”? I’m happy to compromise here: I’ll give these clowns the blank-crotches part of the sham, but not the bad grammar part. So “it” it is (more on this/these/those below). This is more compact—neat, crisp—anyway.
Hiltz is not a villain but an avatar for forced sociocultural stupidities no sane person wants, and it’s hard to not to blame her personally when she’s nothing more than a rambling token placed to enact the kind of inorganic “disruptiveness” being unspooled everywhere one turns, a circus of blaring grief and flatulent “courageousness” that benefits of no one at all besides grifters like Hiltz, her media supporters, and a handful of quaking CEOs.
But she certainly earned the win and trip to Budapest, where she’ll be trounced by spindly Africans with far faster personal bests and a collective habit of manning up and surging when the pace up front becomes soporific. So if I could, I would offer her a brisk if awkward curtsy of acknowledgement, and ask her if she’s been specifically informed that, as a result of her elite corporate goofbag-icon status, she’s been effectively exempted from all anti-doping statutes, regs, and penalties. It’s an old, shopworn joke, and Dave Chappelle will always be booed off the stage for repeating it, but if Nikki Hiltz grew a goatee, no one would blink as long as she dyed it green.
In the immediate aftermath, it seemed that the race had been stolen by an underdog owing to the slow pace, but after her 4:18.38 mile last month, Hiltz—whose personal best in a 1,500-meter outdoor race is 4:01.52 from 2019—arguably had the best creds going in other than Heather MacLean (3:58.76 personal best). Elise Cranny opting for the 5,000-meter/10,000-meter double, Josette Andrews sticking with the 5,000 meters, and Karissa Schweizer choosing the same double as Cranny but bailing after the 10,000 meters subtracted three athletes with personal bests averaging 3:59.60 from the mix, but there was never a good reason to count on any of these three being in the 1,500 meters last weekend anyway.
In addition to Schweizer not having a good meet, her current World Athletics photo has me wondering if she is even the same person who ran 14:26.34 in 2020. Is it just me and my inability to discern the difference between a normal face and one with makeup applied to it, or is something off (or at least different) here?
Elle St. Pierre had a baby in March; Jenny Simpson seemed like she would be making national teams in this event forever, but even her time on the oval and her penchant for using it with utmost intelligence has expired. Nikki Hiltz was among the best in the field when the race was assembled, as that 4:18 proved, and she underscored this by winning, outsprinting Mu, a sub-50 400-meter runner in the process.
Letsrun has an interesting take on Mu, calling her a unique athlete in that no woman has ever excelled at both the 400 meters and the 1,500 meters at the world-class level:
The fact is, there is no historical precedent for someone with Mu’s 400m speed (49.57) having success in the 1500. Of the 105 women in history to have broken 50 seconds in the 400, only two others even have a 1500 pb listed on Tilastopaja: Ana Fidelia Quirot of Cuba (4:13) and Caster Semenya of South Africa (3:59), who is a special case considering she’s XY-DSD. The 400 and 1500 require such different skillsets that you are not supposed to be able to be world-class in both. Mu proved many wrong by showing today that she can be.
All correct, but there is at least one woman who probably could have run a sub-50 400 meters (and would have been world class at the event in her day regardless) who not only excelled up to and including the 1,500 meters, but held world record in both events as well as in the 3,000 meters. Someone with a stat line of 1:54.94 (#7 outdoors all-time, one place ahead of Mu), 3:52.47 (#8) and 8:22.62 (#19) would be strongly suspected of 49-and-change one-lap jets.
During Soviet runner Tatyana Kazankina’s heyday, however, Eastern Europe had plenty of steroid-charged women capable of beating Kazankina over one lap, even if sub-50 performances were still rare, and she was clearly meant for the middle distances anyway. But the only way I see someone with 1:54.94 speed not breaking 50 in an honestly trained effort is when that person couples that 1:54.94 to something like a sub-8:00 3,000 meters and a 13:30 5,000 meters, signifying a proclivity for the longer distances but an ability to run under 1:55 an aerobic power “alone.”
All such specimens are plainly men, but World Athletics ranks Kazankina’s 3,000-meter PR behind both her 1,500-meter and 800-meter PRs. Her dusty marks in the 800m, 1,500m, and 3,000m earn her 1,254, 1,267, and 1,234 points, respectively; a 49.99 400 meters is worth 1,208 points. I think it’s a solid case.1
I was not surprised Mu ran 4:03.44, with splits indicating she may have been able to break 4:00. Maybe I should have been, but I was too distracted by expressing disapproval of her coach. The 1,500 may be her absolute upper limit, but she is better at the 800 meters than she is at the 400 meters; were she capable of 48.5 in the 400 meters with the same 1:55.04 800-meter best, she might not be capable of breaking 4:10—she would then simply be a long sprinter who would struggle at distances above 1,000 meters no matter how many emphatic dietary and nutraceutical suggestions Bobby Kersee gives her. At the World Championships, she’ll run only the 800 meters and possibly a leg on a relay.
Anyway, a pair of 3,000-meter steeplechase races also took place on Saturday. Having devoted so many keystrokes and typos (some corrected) to the women’s 1,500 meters, I’ll make up for that by noting only that Emma Coburn, still only 32, made her ninth world-level team in the event, having qualified for six World Championships and three Olympic Games. But Saturday’s final marked the first time in nine tries that Coburn didn’t win a U.S. title en route to whatever Worlds or Olympic Games were next. She is no longer a 9:02 steeplechaser, and it seems like she’s been world-class for decades while looking no different throughout. But on Saturday she competed like one despite being outkicked by Krissy Gear.
Sunday’s 800-meter races were, above all, not fast. Former American record holder A’jee Wilson lost her “queen of the U.S. half-milers” status when Mu came along, but now she may be at the end of a fine career. The men’s race, meanwhile, went mostly according to form (mine and others’), with Bryce Hoppel, Isaiah Harris, and Clayton Murphy going 1-2-3 and 19-year-old Will Sumner fifth.
Sumner may not have made Worlds this time around, but he ended the weekend with an adidas contract, meaning he’ll forgo his final three years of eligibility at the University of Georgia. Soon, no one worth their weight in Bitcoin will be running for college teams for more than two years. Be this owing to more kids being world-class sooner or economic shifts, collegiate track and field—while no threat to gain close to the same visibility level of college football or basketball—is at least trending toward the same graduation rates. Within ten years, only the dumbest people in the country will even dream of going to college.
The women’s 5,000 meters was a carbon-copy of the women’s 10,000 meters, so if you want to know what happened on Sunday, just read what I wrote about the 10,000 meters but skip every other line or skim twice as quickly as usual. Cranny just doesn’t look or move in any clear way like an elite distance runner, but she gets it done and had loads of ATP in reserve when it was time to move.
The leaders of the men’s 5,000 meters went through 4,000 meters in 11:02.75, which is on schedule for a finishing time of 13:48.4—less than 17 seconds superior to the women’s world record and over 73 seconds slower than the men’s. Despite the fact that half of the field was prepared to, and did, run under 1:55 for the final two laps, Abdihamid Nur never relinquished the lead over the final two and a half laps, with Paul Chelimo and Sean McGorty second and third. McGorty may be the smoothest tall-and-lanky bastard ever to reach the level he has in the 5,000 meter and above; Andrew Wheating was even an taller, if not lankier, bastard, but never raced seriously at distances longer than 1,500 meters.
McGorty also made Worlds in the 10,000 meters on Thursday night, and he will probably qualify for Budapest /23 in both events despite not currently having the World Champs standard in either. He is reportedly considering giving up his 10,000-meter spot to Bowerman Track Club teammate Grant Fisher, the American record holder who was fourth on Thursday. But this is contingent on Fisher being healthy, and soon, as he skipped Sunday’s 5,000 meters with a femoral stress reaction of some sort.
In the women’s 200-meter final on Sunday, Richardson had one leg bandaged, or at least covered in fabric. She had shown up in the same get-up for the semifinal, and I guessed this was a precaution rather than another fashion statement. Richardson ran the second-best wind-legal time of her life, 21.94, after pounding out a 21.61 in her semifinal that was aided by a 2.6 m/s tailwind but would have been faster than 21.94 if legal. But Richardson was blown away by Gabby Thomas, whose 21.60 into a trivial (0.4 m/s) wind was a personal best by 0.01 seconds and enhanced her status as #4 in the world all-time.
Richardson appeared jubilant despite coming in second. Whatever the contributing factors, she really put it together for these championships.
Richardson seemed genuinely happy for Thomas, as the screengrab above suggests. But I would have preferred to see Richardson win.
***RUNNING-CENTRIC CONTENT STOPS HERE; DO NOT READ FURTHER UNLESS HIGH***
Thomas seems like a pleasant enough person and is wondrously hot, but her mother is a Wokish professor, yet another anti-academia academic who wants to scrap the “racist” Scholastic Aptitude Test and other indicators of brainpower.
I’m not holding my breath for the day Asian-American or Jewish-American professors start complaining in significant numbers about how much emphasis is placed on culturally biased tests like the SAT and everything else most American blacks suck at because, in addition to being mostly poor, they’re discouraged from even trying by idiots like Jennifer Randall who think colored people of color should be alternately deceived and coddled. (I know that Randall doesn’t believe any of this subsense and is just enjoying the racialist power trip. It’s a niche.)
And to return to another Wokish issue, Hiltz’s “identity”: To anyone eager to opine that “it” is dehumanizing toward “nonbinary” persons such as Hiltz and other voluntarily humanity-shedding weirdos, feel free to explain why this isn’t also true of “they.” This will never happen, because the only people who obey the “they” convention, sometimes even labeling it and related solecisms progressive, are unthinking, often fearful drones—social-media suckups, tribalist and misogynistic harpies, and a smattering of well-meaning but badly misguided and misdirected observers.
Someone made up a dumbass rule, and these folx, rather than question it, decided to perform the philosophical analog of crossing their eyes, jamming their thumbs up their asses, and joining the authoritarian herd in emitting insane and incoherent babblespeak about shifting gender science and other straight-faced, undiluted lies. The rest of us decided to ignore this crap, because, taking into account permanently sterilizing “gender affirming” surgeries, the increasing rash of violence perpetrated by trans or transoidal actors, and the continued disruption of girls’ and women’s sports spaces by lame dudes in bonnets with the tips of their peckers tucked neatly up their assholes to needlessly conceal the obvious, these gender wars and positions Hiltz agitates for are not harmless.
And anyone who has taken a paycheck from NBC to play along with their ESG rules is part of the problem too. (I don’t know who these people were for USATF Outdoor Nationals; I couldn’t hear them, their names did not appear on the Runnerspace webcast, and I prefer to remain agnostic to their identities at least through the World Champs.) In fact, everyone getting paid for doing anything in the sport while using the term “nonbinary” is part of the same broad problem, and, three years into the “official” BLM mega-scam era, “everyone” continues to do it. And they all have the same plausible but dismal excuse: No choice, someone handed down an order that looks like it was conceived by a six-year-old Adderall-smoker.
This is among the reasons I hate professional track or anything connected to corporations—the forced verbal spasms in response to socially backward polices framed as beneficial by demoralized spokespeople for gaslighting globalists with toddler-poop on what remains of their morose and pointless phalluses. I happen to like the proper use of language, even if I often communicate to the public myself in typo-rich screeds dingmarked by sentences missing entire clauses and boasting nonexistent words; I’m not going to change the rules for a bunch of BlackRock pedophiles and grim, gibbering interlopers and “disruptors” pretending—very, very poorly—to be fans of running.
Were the “nonbinary” thing a mere invitation, it would be one thing. But the joggersphere is riddled with anti-female Internet-warriors who have never had any power in their lives and just love being a part of ramming their antisocial, jackhole “progressivism” (men can be women on demand and conversely; white people suck; obesity is fitness and sexiness; denying biology is brave and scientific; lying and cheating is bold and winning) down others’ throats.
Whatever this stance gets me in life, lovely; the regulars have discerned by now that my respect for civilization in its current form evaporated many moons ago, never to return. This ongoing, floor-humping trash-festival has cost me and other normies enough already; it’s not going to strip away my creative license. Everyone knows the “nonbinary” identity is crap, but that wouldn’t bother me if not for the other lunacies being perpetrated nationwide by violent whack-jobs who claim to be transgender but are in the main simply unwell in some way.
I like that the site Olympics.com, rings and all, has a gushing bio of Kazankina specifying that she washed out of the sport owing to a doping controversy, then went on to get a degree in physical education and teach that subject while writing a flurry of scientific papers. You did what you knew, at least when told to, back in the U.S.S.R.