World Athletics Championships notes: Days 1, 2, 3
We* shouldn't be surprised at the number of empty seats at an arguably extraneous Worlds centering on one man's ego
I subscribed to NBC’s shitty Peacock streaming service at the end of May, planning to keep it for a two-month period spanning the Prefontaine Classic, the U.S. Outdoor Track and Field Championships, and the World Athletics Championships before unsubscribing for good. That’s still the plan, assuming I can make it until next Sunday before forever averting my eyes and mind from all images and thoughts of Hayward Field, the athletic-stadium industry’s quasi-phallus-boasting answer to an aging prostitute who hasn’t yet realized she’s too old and work-weary for a new nipple ring.
I don’t find watching national- or global-level track-and-field meets as exciting as I once did regardless of where they’re held. Much of this is organic, as watching strangers or even familiars run laps on a screen gets old after a few decades no matter how much added proficiency a given crop of low-BMI goofballs imparts to the task. But the sport having become a special target of narcissistic joggers and social-media chublords, deranged misfits and blue-haired self-mutilators, cultural arsonists, slyly misogynistic old maids, careerist liars, fame-coveting grifters, proudly inept journalists, science-resistant self-declared science fans, cheap-labor-extracting jack-offs posing as beacons of publications maintaining “brand neutrality,” and pro-equity, pro-shared-outdoors types who slash their staffs and hoard expensive land in Boulder hasn’t helped my Outlook, Inc.
Also, you can find mostly accurate recaps of top-level running action on any number of sites. Just as CNN is, despite being a nonstop producer of reckless lies and artless spin, good for learning the need-to-know about the most recent instances of people being shot, blown up, or otherwise exterminated, Citius Mag and other semi-conscious Internet presences can usually convey times and placings without leading their blinkered readers even further astray.
I’m planning to issue three of these posts—notes about the 2002 World Championships. It’s taken me all weekend to do more than think about this one, and I’m seriously considering avoiding anything on the Internet produced after 2014 or so that doesn’t confine itself to intentional fiction. Keeping attuned to any one aspect of citizen life right now is like being at a zoo and having the sense that few others are aware that all of the employees and many of the animals are reeking of alcohol, and that pointing this out would provoke no rectification, only irritation.
But I was never explicitly promised a society that would always punish lying and reward proper thinking in reality-proportionate ways, even if it seemed reasonable for a long time that this would be the case. In that spirit, you were never promised a newsletter that would make you feel better about a single fucking thing.
Anyway, I wrote some stuff about events in which medals have already been awarded. This means no remarks about preliminary heats.
Day One
Mixed 4 × 400m relay: This was less exciting than a regular 1,600-meter relay, because whenever a woman received the baton, she appeared to be slowing the race down on purpose simply because female sprinters are visibly so much slower than male sprinters. I guess it was interesting to see this made unusually explicit.
Men’s and women’s 20K racewalks: The obvious part is that this entire discipline needs to be either amended or scrapped from global championships; up for debate is exactly what should be done to make walking for medals bearable both for the athletes and the spectators.
Most people who shit on racewalking are content to stop at how silly it looks, while its defenders retort out that elite racewalkers possess the same level of cardiovascular conditioning as marathon runners. I’ll just point out that the number of disqualifications and forced time-outs for refusing to stick to the rules suggests that most elite racewalkers are simply not interested in racewalking. They either prefer to run when they can get away with it or are incapable of establishing the difference between walking and running.
Imagine if every 24-athlete or so) Olympic10,000-meter final had about four disqualifications, all for running inside lane one on one of the turns, and around three DNFs. Imagine the field circling the track and every single runner trying right in front of the officials to cut onto the infield to save some time. You might decide, after a modicum of observation, that either these athletes were enrolled in the wrong Olympics or are simply more interested in racing each other over 9,950 meters than in going the full 10,000.
If racewalking is to be retained, it should become a single 20,000-meter track event with a steeplechase element. On every lap, every entrant would have to negotiate one 18-inch-high standard steeplechase barrier and one 18-inch water barrier. While clearing these, entrants would be allowed to break walking form, but all other infractions would incur an immediate disqualification in conjunction with some kind of on-the-spot shaming ritual, like being forced to strip and briefly twerk in the direction of the luxury spectators’ boxes. If you think any of this is more debasing than an ordinary 50K road walk in the middle of the summer, you may not be engaging yourself fully in the topic.
Day Two
Women’s 10,000 meters: Other than relying on Letsrun.com to ascertain each day’s schedule of events, I haven’t been looking at other websites during the championships; never in my life have I been less interested in other people’s perspectives on events I happen to be observing myself. But I hope that at least a few fans understand how easily a fit Letesenbet Gidey should win any 10,000 meter final she’s in if she’s in close to the form that earned her a 1:02:52 half-marathon this year.
1:02:52 is very close to 71.5 seconds per 400-meter lap of the track. It’s back-to-back 29:47 10Ks and then some. Anyone capable of such a performance should be able to hammer out close to 28:20 for a track 10,000m, even someone incapable of sprinting by any traditional definition. Gidey should have been able to simply run 70-second laps on Saturday until everyone but Sifan Hassan was gone, and then drop Hassan with five laps left.
Normally, the best American high-school male distance runner in any year would be able to wipe the floor with the best female 10,000-meter runner alive over 10,000 meters, and most likely in a half-marathon as well. Despite recent Newbury Park grad Colin Sahlman arguably being the best U.S. prep distance runner ever, he wouldn’t be able to keep up with a fit Gidey if she actually ran her hardest. She would drop him with ease by 8K. I don’t think Drew Hunter could beat her. She has to be under orders to keep some of her fitness contained, so as to not overly flaunt her and her countrywomen’s obvious juicing.
In any case, Gidey waited to move until a point everyone watching assumed was far too late to keep her in front, and Gidey made everyone watching eat shit, including NBC’s excellent announcer Leigh Diffey. I think that she’s just so fresh after a half-hour or running 4:55 pace that she compensates for a fundamental lack of speed by having an incredible amount of it in reserve. It’s a basic concept, but it’s rare to see so stark an example of its power in a race including the best long-distance runners on the planet.
Karissa Schweizer, who finished ninth in 30:18.05, became the first American woman to run the second half of a 10,000-meter race in under 15:00 and moved into third on the all-time U.S. list behind Molly Huddle (30:13.17, 2018) and Schweizer’s Bowerman Track Club teammate Elise Cranny (30:14.66 from March). I can’t decide which of them is more obvious in interviews about being a beneficiary of cheating, as their styles differ and Cranny, who as a Boulder County native has shitbag roots, seems less troubled by it.
Men’s 100-meter dash: Fred Kerley is likable and too hot a commodity to be sacrificed to the banned-for-doping list anytime soon. Then again, Tyson Gay had many of the same qualities. Within four years, at least three of the men who were finalists on Saturday will be serving or have served PED-related suspensions, because by 2026, three chemicals you haven’t yet heard of will have nicked the careers of various sprinters and made a few Italian “cycling coaches” rich.
Day Three
Men’s marathon: The times seemed surprisingly fast to me, perhaps because I associate the World Championship Marathon with the Olympic Marathon and the latter is usually held in very warm weather on a slow course. But they really weren’t that fast, given that 2:04:00 would now be considered a disappointing good-weather winning time in London, Rotterdam, Berlin, Dubai and elsewhere.
Galen Rupp was probably unhappy with his 19th-place 2:09:36 after hanging with the leaders for 30K, but he didn’t look unhappy as he finished, Perhaps he felt obligated to manufacture enthusiasm for the Oregon home crowd, or maybe he thinks it’s funny that he’s 36 and beat up and still apparently the best American male marathoner on offer even on a day when he pretty well crumples with seven miles remaining.
Men’s 10,000 meters: I’m every bit as checked out of life as I imply, but I was as enthralled by this race as I’d been by the women’s version a day earlier. Despite the lesson Gidey offered in “waiting too long,” I thought Joshua Cheptegei would be rolled by Selemon Barega. Cheptegei had others to worry about in the final 500 meters and kept them all at bay.
The BTC’s Grant Fisher ran a great race and was shut out of the medals into fourth place, related but distinct outcomes I accept with nearly equal enthusiasm.
Women’s pole vault: The winner of this event, Katie Nageotte, looks almost exactly like Shalane Flanagan would look like had Flanagan adopted the same post-running-career workout regimen as Ryan Hall. I can’t be alone in noting the basic similarities. I’d bet that Nageotte has a long way to go to catch up to Flanagan when it comes to unduly passing doping-control tests, though.
This is by far the best event in track and field, and nothing anyone does on the track or on the throwing field will ever come close. The combination of traits it takes to simply clear a height, much less excel, and not be afraid of the process continuously can’t be coached into existence. Why all women vaulters are knockouts is a seemingly unrelated mystery that sleuths are too busy drooling over to properly solve.
Men’s 110-meter high hurdles: I would bet that a certain fraction of Twitter users have complained complaining that Devon Allen was screwed.
Allen, who's leaving the sport to (try to) play for the Philadelphia Eagles of the National Football League—he’s been off the gridiron since 2016—was disqualified for leaving the blocks 0.999 [7/19/2022 edit: Bzzz! it’s 0.099] seconds after the gun. Any athlete who leaves within 0.10 seconds is charged with a false start for anticipating the gun, as human reaction time doesn't allow for anyone to respond to an external signal that quickly.
Anyone who says he shouldn't have been disqualified is an idiot and is not a serious sports fan. Such observers are likely to side with Shelby Houlihan, Wokish nonsense (especially double racial standards), and other currently voguish forms of sleaze.
It's not a controversial result, as some Wikipedia editor has already claims. It's a ballbuster, but no more controversial than a blatant false start everyone sees before the gun is even fired. So close a call may trouble the affected athlete and his fans more, but doesn’t compel a special review of the math or the circumstances. Anyone who took issue with the outcome presumably didn’t trust the timing equipment, the officials monitoring the equipment, or the rule itself. The rule might suck, but sprinters themselves never seem to complain. It was an agonizing (to some) but clear-but rules violation.
The guy also ran for Oregon, which is probably why he wouldn't leave the track promptly after he screwed up.
He's just going to hurt his knee now and have no sport to play at all, but I wish him well. Track people always get beat up on the football field. So do most football players, so they’re hardly special in this sense.
I haven’t felt inclined lately to externalize my own thoughts about matters of nominal public interest for an audience of more than two people. This isn’t because my thoughts are any darker or more afoul of the status quo than usual. I think I’m just running out of whatever fuel compelled me to start doing this in the first place. I could make a case for being sick of typing itself, as I prefer to not have a PC or phone within reach whenever possible these days. But that’s a shoddy excuse, because I can still type e-mails with aplomb.
If a reliable source informed me that the world will end tomorrow while denying me clues about the proximate cause, I’d have to cycle through at least six independent candidates capable of triggering this long-overdue event before settling on a half-educated guess of what will finally being the doom-hammer crashing down on this horrid and oversized collection if anxious and addled apes.
There will come a time, probably soon, when I stop doing this. Beck of the Pack is my one remaining public interface with the outside world, and I really don’t see the value in sharing my interpretations of either that world or whatever my latest bogus plans for self-enhancement or ego-repair may be. I dislike almost everything I see from and in other people, even if most are guilty of nothing more than being too stupid to understand when they’re being lied to by supposedly informed sources. This is not going away for mem but it’s not a first-world state anyone should pity, especially since escaping it is so simple and easy.