World Athletics Championships notes: Wrap-up
The endless camera angles and dazzling array of flash statistics in television broadcasts of track meets may be disincentivizing meet attendance
The 2022 World Athletics Championships, to which I dedicated four posts in a somewhat timely manner, ended a little over a week ago (results).
I could lie and say I’ve spent the last week scouring the Web for valuable postmortems about the event’s first trip to the U.S. and other contributory babblenuggets, research aimed at supplying a more cogent and informed analysis. In truth, I haven’t felt much like writing. There is no special reason for this other than a fluctuating and, overall, gradually diminishing desire to engage with any of the world’s moving parts, people and the fruits of their energies among them. I’ve become adept at taking hours to do things that should take me or anyone at most twenty minutes and being unconcerned with any issues this may cause. I can get away with being an antiefficiency expert for a while yet.
Of course, if I stay away from this place for even three days, it feels like a week. This time dilation may be amplified by a recent-onset tendency compose what feel like long, eloquent, ironclad, posts entirely in my head while lying in bed at 3 a.m. and not move a muscle to turn on the light, move a few feet, and start typing. Perhaps this is not torpor at work; maybe the superego knows best, and properly foresees the production of nothing but unctuous dreck during these post-crepuscular thought-spasms.
Had I not been watching track meets on television since the 1980s, I’d have been unable to appreciate the convenience and overall quality of the Internet coverage of this year’s World Athletics Championships. Some of this is grudging, like craving a throwback to a non-cell-phone universe while simultaneously understanding modern life would be kneecapped without the fuckers.
Those who were tweens or younger before Internet streaming and on-demand event replays became de rigueur will never know the vexation of missing a long-awaited race shown on live television for whatever mundane reason—a neighborhood power outage, falling asleep, an outbreak of COVID-18—and being relegated to seeing only short clips of the action. Until, that is, the arrival of YouTube and the technology to easily convert videocassette media filmed in pre-Mormon times to digital media, at which point pre-Internet meets I had missed in real time owing to ignorance or obligations like work and drinking began appearing online.
The Overton window in terms of announcing freedom has opened a great deal in some areas while narrowing to a sliver in others. It has never been an objective of network producers to emphasize how drug-soaked top-level endurance sports are. The late 1980s to late 1990s marked a period in which it was plausible to treat drug-cheats as pariahs, because even though insiders knew better, the roster of banned names was not yet long. But then came an EPO test, and the suspensions of A-list Americans such as Regina Jacobs, Justin Gatlin and Tyson Gay, eroding by force the illusion that doping was mostly a Chinese, Russian, or otherwise foreign phenomenon.
The solution on the part of broadcast honchos has been to suspend as much talk of athlete suspensions as possible. Whereas Ben Johnson was once openly vilified and flouted as a diabolical, Dianabolical exception to accepted adherence to fair play, announcers now focus extensively on “anti-athlete” starting-block technology while mentioning that DSD rules have “forced” someone to move up in distance without further explanation of the controversy.
The meet’s attendance was as bad as it looked on my screen, but realistically, how many people would ever be inclined to fly to Oregon to watch something they could watch for free (in comparison) on television, said medium offering increasingly detailed coverage regardless of whom NBC enlists as commentators? Hayward Field holds a lot of people in relation to the American track-and-field fan base, and if anyone expected the stands to fill up like they do for track and field overseas at the Olympics, they had miscalibrated their expectations.
I also think that the better the television coverage gets from a sheer technical standpoint—more moving cameras and camera angles, more fodder for stats geeks (real-time runner velocity, graphs of sprinters’ speed variation throughout individual races, and lots, lots more!)—the easier it becomes for someone on the fence about buying a ticket to meet some college or Instagram buddies to just tune in from home and have watch-parties or, for the especially reticent, texting-parties. And this is independent of ongoing “pandemic” concerns, which the running community seems blessedly un-hung up on; inflation, which affects everyone I know except for everyone who lives within a five-mile radius of me; and the bullshit being perpetrated by various airlines, which, after a $56 billion CARES handout, has included selling nonexistent flights and then cancelling them using the excuse of nonexistent bad weather.
Alan Abramson of 3 Wire Sports, who has spent a large part of his media career as a television analyst, produced several stories during the Championships lamenting the ways in which track and field continues to plop on its face into a puddle coupled to NBC’s eagerness to give it mudward pushes. I watched the whole meet on NBC’s streaming subsidiary Peacock, so I didn’t realize how much meaningful content never made it to television viewers. Abramson writes that younger would-be track fans may be difficult to attract even when already interested in live sports events, and that as long as shoe companies underwrite athletes’ financial futures in the sport, the sport will be hobbled. This is especially true if one of those shoe companies has the power to effectively negate the others while governing the sport’s governing body, USA Track & Field, as well as squashing who knows how many doping tests over the years.
The last two days of the meet included the men’s and women’s 5,000-meter finals. As some may recall, USATF elected to stage the U.S. 10,000-meter championship several weeks in advance of the U.S. Track and Field Championships themselves, the latter being the qualifying meet for the World Championships. The logic was clear—any American wanting to do the 5,000m-10,000m double at Worlds would get a big break between qualifying races. Both Grant Fisher and Karissa Schweizer of the Bowerman Track Club qualified in both events.
The obvious problem with this is that the World Championships themselves did not offer a similar break. Instead, the pattern was 10,000m, two or three days’ rest, 5,000m semifinal, two or three days’, rest’ 5,000m final. Fisher ran very strongly in both races, as did Schweizer—at least until the last lap of the 5,000m final, where a calf issue forced her to drop out. Schweizer was hurt for much of the last year and had major (hip) surgery. I can’t fault someone for being competitive enough to want to do both races, and given the financial incentives involved in making a World or Olympic team in a single event, why not try to double your money?
Given my established rancor toward the BTC and its coterie of known and presumed shitweasels, it would be easy to assume I was practically in schadenfreude heaven after the meet was over. Fisher was a threat to win the race or at least medal before getting tangled up with either the runner in front of him or the rail (maybe both) coming off the final turn. Sub-13:00 man Woody Kincaid just missed qualifying for the final after having to drop out of the U.S. 10,000m Champs at the Portland Track Festival pleading a cramp.
As it turns out, and as past experience has already told me, I don’t enjoy seeing athletes lose races thanks to injuries or stuff like clipping a rail. I would have to have something deeply personal against someone to want that to happen. And Fisher is disarmingly likable—I was floored that he seemed perfectly happy with his effort in the 5,000m despite the chaos 15 seconds from the finish line that may have cost him a medal.
Other notes:
I’m apparently not alone in really, really liking Noah Lyles. He and the ultra-reserved but declarative Fred Kerley could make a great straight-faced-man/fired-up-guy comedy team, much like Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert did before both men separately became worthless to the entertainment industry.
If I were truly an elitist, I would shitcan watching distance running and study the pole vault and the 100m/110m high hurdles.
As of 2008, it was already known that shot-putters don’t benefit from the use of anabolic steroids. At least according to shot-putters and their coaches, insiders who obviously know the real dope. The comments are akin to sprinters saying, “If we used PEDs, the men’s world record for the 100-meter dash would be under nine seconds.”
If Letesenbet Gidey would run a 10,000m track race with the same vigor with which she ran a 1:02:52 half-marathon last year, it might literally blow women’s track apart and speckle the moon with its guts and blood.
Just consider what the Letsrun boards would look like if the men’s half-marathon record portended, conservatively, a 25:45 10,000m. That’s the deal after what Gidey did last year, and it’s why I continue to rag on American dopers who are dumbasses about it while empathizing with their aims.
Someone—probably a Jamaican woman—needs to run 10.48 or faster in the 100-meter dash, breaking the 34-year-old world record. It’s a glamour event, and its record-holder is understood to represent the fastest woman who has ever lived.
I think the problem is that anyone who breaks Florence Griffith-Joyner’s record will face an unusual farrago of suspicions and open questions about doping; Flo-Jo never tested positive for anything, but no one from that era ascribes this to anything besides being protected by The Athletics Congress (USATF’s immediate ancestor, and a reportedly less-corrupt dinosaur than USATF is today). It’s probably better for women to just flirt with the mark for a while and win big races rather than split open that shit-filled coconut.