World Athletics Championships notes: Days 5 and 6

The "Hayward Magic" chatter mysteriously tapered off midweek

Since the 2022 World Athletics Championships are now approximately seventy percent over and this is my third installment of championships notes not counting the third one, it might be helpful to include a link to the meet’s timetable and results, which I often helpfully omit in my “coverage.” I have thus far assumed that anyone eager or at least willing to read these notes already has at least one open browser tab pointing to a page on the World Athletics website. Failing that, I reckon, most readers are here more for the dyspeptic perspectives than for the skinny.

In reality, a recent dive into my site metrics tells me that most people have begun to exclaim “Not this shit again!” upon receiving another of my newsletters, at which point they fling said message unread into the electronic garbage hod, then promptly close all running-related tabs for the remainder of the day just to be safe.

Day Five

Women’s 200-meter semifinals: Whenever I see that all three (and it could be up to four) Jamaicans who have entered a given Olympic or World Championships sprint event are poised to make the final, I remind myself that the country’s population is roughly the same as metro Denver’s, and barely a third of Greater Boston’s.

Shericka Jackson and Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce—who needs to retire soon because typing her name is cumbersome—easily won their heats, while Elaine Thompson-Herah, who should be off to the world of pro-wrestling erelong, was third in her heat and advanced to the final on time.

Track and field would be missing a great deal of whatever character it retains without Jamaicans and their style, which somehow combines zealous self-decoration with charismatic executive restraint. I love watching them compete, men and women both, however triumphantly augmented by putatively off-limits potions their linear acrobatics may be. It’s the storied and palpable absence of anxiety and unmistakable joie de vivre in this crew, cycle after Olympic cycle, that fascinates me and makes me wonder what’s really wrong with native Caribbean Islanders.

Abby Steiner of the United States qualified for the final as well. This woman is indefatigable. That makes sense; she was a bonzer soccer player throughout high school and through one year at the University of Kentucky, from which she graduated in May.

Check out Steiner’s personal bests from this spring:

Looking at the bottom mark has me concerned about Steiner’s upper-body development, or whether both arms were in slings when she performed the throw. I can throw a softball almost twenty feet in any direction, and I exercise my rotator-cuff muscles only sparingly when not throwing food at the television. Alternatively, did anyone check to see whether the “softball” was smooth and made of steel? Anyway, once she officially turns pro, she’ll surely be directed toward the weight room by sharp-eyed strength coaches.

Men’s 200-meter semifinals: I haven’t decided whether NBC is mostly revealing the obvious differences between Noah Lyles and Erriyon Knighton as it covers their apparently burgeoning friendship, or whether the network is mostly creating it. Either way, the two couldn’t be more different. Lyles is a born performer while remaining desperately task-oriented; Knighton, apart from being only 18, is painfully shy, deferential to the point of not being able to meet the camera or his interlocutors with his eyes. And Knighton, despite his precocious acquisition of ultra-rapid personal bests and the laurels to match, presents himself as always having something to prove no matter how well he most recently performed, which seems a necessary trait in a world-class athlete.

The final, which both Lyles and Knighton reached with ease, will be last night and will surely have been a half-lap race for the ages.

Men’s 1,500-meter final: Jakob Ingebrigtsen of Norway, no longer a wunderkind but a fully adult Scandinavian laboratory experiment, has threatened to make this event boring by always being in precisely 3:29 shape and always running a series of 56.0-second laps, plus a kicklike acceleration in the final 200 meters, to get there.

Ingebrigtsen’s first three laps on Tuesday: 55.90, 56.14, 56.24. But Jake Wightman, who quietly laid down a 1:44.18 800 meters earlier this summer to complement his first sub-3:30, became Britain’s first 1,500-meter world champion since Steve Cram won the gold medal at the inaugural 1983 edition of the meeting.

Josh Thompson of the United States finished twelfth and last in 3:35.57, but for him to even reach the final given his outdoor personal best of 3:35.01 was impressive. Eleven men hauled personal bests of 3:32.00 or faster into Eugene, and Thompson hadn’t broken 3:36 this season until the semifinal round at these Championships.

Men’s 400-meter intermediate hurdles: There is no better event for fading in the final 100 meters than this one, and it happens even to the best at some point. But Norway’s Karsten Warholm, whose 45.92 in Tokyo last summer still makes no sense and may have been the product of a sophisticated simulacrum, died the most miserable homestretch death I have ever seen in an elite athlete, and it’s always a titillating shame when they go out that way.

I trust a sub-46.00 result from a “no superspikes because let’s play fair” type about as much as I trust Rosie not to fart after I slip her some sesame chicken, and no one can be in that form more than once or twice. But that was one impressive rigjob the other night; it looked like someone on the infield had yelled “Since you’re headed that way!” at Warholm and tossed him an invisible dorm fridge when he still had three hurdles to clear.

If Warholm later claimed injury—said information being available online at the time of this typing, but only to the motivated—don’t believe him. He went out like a bat out of Christ and paid dearly for his burly extravagance. It happens; ask Johnny Gray or anyone Gray has coached, notably Duane Solomon.

Day Six

Women’s 5,000-meter semifinals: The announcers spent several minutes discussing the height of heat-one pacesetter Eilish McColgan. They didn’t do this just to remark on the fact; at 5’ 11” (according to sources), she’s not that tall. But for her height, or anyone’s, she has a magnificent back-kick. I know this, because I’m almost 5’ 11” and I never horse-kicked anyone at 71 seconds a lap—I just got tired and fell benignly off the pace in my characteristic shuffle, interfering with no one and nothing besides my own flagging ambitions.

McColgan’s height has come up on webcasts before. In at least one case, thanks to the then-recent yammering of “What can I do for attention now?” Chris Chavez and “Who can I blame, and ideally sue, for my failures now?” Mary Cain, professional runner Allie Ostrander was explicitly afraid to even bring up McColgan’s height at all:

I’m still kind of amazed at the way the unofficial “no body talk!” mandate originating in a dumb Chris Chavez tweet, soon emanating mostly from a Mary Cain Instagram post, and persisting since despite how awkward it is to maintain such a policy…the “no bodies” thing leads to foreseeable dialectic absurdities. Apparently, even height is a verboten quality to discuss. During the Sound Running Invite women’s 5,000 meters over the weekend, Allie Ostrander, who wasn’t racing, observed that while she knew about the proscription on body-chatter, she was jealous of Eilish McColgan’s height. It is now standard to go well out of one’s way to identify athletes only via their racing kits.

Fortunately, NBC announcer Leigh Diffey is not a slave to any of this bullshit and has probably never heard of Citius Mag or Sound Running. He explained exactly why McColgan, who has a natural inclination to push any lagging pace, is well advised either to stick to this strategy or run in lane two, or else her legs are a constant threat to become entangled in another jogger’s. In other words, by announcing the race deftly and naturally, Diffey imparted wisdom while demonstrating by example that trying to eliminate the element of physique variation from track and field is the sole purview of wall-eyed, self-aggrandizing brown-nosers like Chavez, chronically damaged white-girl goods like Cain, and whoever is dumb enough to listen to either of them about how we* should publicly communicate ideas.

All three Americans qualified for tomorrow’s final, giving me one net athlete to root against. (Karissa Schweizer and Elise Cranny run for the Bowerman Track Club, so fuck ‘em both; but Emily Infeld, having left the group in January, offsets the presence of one of them.)

Men’s 800-meter preliminary round: Remarkably, no Americans even reached last night’s three-race, 24-runner semifinals in this event; ay first, it seemed that Jonah Koech had advanced out of the fifth of six heats, but he proved to have illegally cut someone off, heroically preserving the U.S. two-lap goose-egg without running slowly. I’m so accustomed to multiple American men reaching the final in global 800-meter championships that I realized I would be bored during the semifinals and would probably head out and go running myself as they were being conducted. (I didn’t.)

Women’s discus throw: Diffey at one point called Valarie Allman, who took the bronze and has more fun throwing that UFO around than anyone has any right to, “huge.” She’s listed by sources as being 6’ 0” and 155 pounds. That strikes me as incredibly light for her event, but I would have guessed that she was no taller than 5’ 7” based on her quickness, especially after NBC’s revelation that she is a former competitive dancer. But I suppose being tall and having the deceptively snappy and coordinated movements of a shorter person comes in handy in some sports.

Anyway, I’d guess that the word “huge”—though not pronounced with a leading “y” in an obnoxious New York grunt—was enough to cause a few Wokish bungholes to attain the clenched position upon reaching the ears above. Maybe most people can tell that Valarie Allman would be delighted to be called huge, because in context, she’s not.

Women’s 3,000-meter steeplechase final: Emma Coburn going with the leaders through an aggressive opening kilometer wasn’t necessarily a sign she’d soon be in trouble. But as soon as she started ceding ground, it was clear she was in for a nasty night. As many great races as I’ve seen Coburn run, I’ve never seen her bounce back once she starts to slip back in the field. And 2:57-2:58 on a warm evening is a gamble even for someone in low-nine-minute shape.

Coburn has seen her fastest days in this event, and the same is probably true of Courtney Frerichs and Colleen Quigley. I don’t expect this to happen, but Elinor Purrier was a steepler in college, when she wasn’t close to the runner she is now, and I bet she could make a serious run at the American record and a sub-nine-minute clocking in this event. If she doesn’t, some juiced-up specimen from the BTC—perhaps a member of the current roster, perhaps an incipient add—will get there first.