“TrackTown Still On The Fundraising Treadmill”
A July 30 editorial in the Eugene Register-Guard opened by saying, “Passing the hat isn’t an approved track & field event. It ought to be.” The paper goes on to say that “with the clock ticking” TrackTown appears to be $15 million short in what it hoped for from state government…
Arantxa King, the ’10 NCAA long jump runner-up for Stanford, has been elected chair of the athletes commission for the NACAC. The 28-year-old Bermudan is a lawyer these days…
Notable club signings: Vanessa Fraser, 4th in the NCAA 5000 for Stanford, has joined up with the Nike Bowerman TC; Northern Arizona alum Andy Trouard, the NCAA 3K champ indoors, has joined the Oregon TC Elite; triple jumper supreme Keturah Orji is the first field athlete on the Atlanta TC’s elite team…
The men’s long jump qualifying at the European Championships saw the debut of a system that projected a laser line in the sand for athletes to shoot for…
BIG TREES COMING: As controversial as the plans are for the new Hayward Field, we have to admit Eugene is going to look fabulous in several hundred years. As part of the plans to get ready for the ’21 Worlds, over 2000 giant sequoia trees are being planted throughout town. (Since we’re in the record business, note the oldest known sequoia is 3500 years old.)
The U.S. Sub-4:00 Club Continues To Grow
With 28 additions to the list so far, 2018 is now the most productive year ever for Americans to break the 4:00 mile for the first time. Overall, the elite (OK, increasingly less-elite) club now has 521 members)…
The IOC has extended its longtime partnership with VISA for another 14 years, to 2032…
Some 42 years after moving to Kenya’s upland town of Iten and coaching generations of Kenyan legends, Father Colm O’Connell has had a street in the city named for him.
It Didn’t Stay In Vegas
’13 world high jump champ Bogdan Bondarenko has admitted that he got married sometime in the last year in Nevada’s wild-life central to triple jumper Irina Pimenova; he only came public with the news after they had their first child…
The IAAF has removed Karim Ibrahim from its Council. No explanation was forthcoming other than a statement that the Malaysian official was “ineligible.” He was accused in a German documentary of covering up doping in his homeland…
According to a USADA survey of 900 athletes, nearly 40% say they’ve only been drug-tested 5 or fewer times in their careers. The data was not broken down by sport…
The USTFCCCA has named its high school coaches of the year: Alex Armenteros, girls coach at St. Thomas Aquinas (Ft. Lauderdale, Florida) and Tom Loy, boys coach at East Canton of Ohio…
55 years. That’s how long Al Cantello—a former WR setter in the javelin—coached at Navy before announcing his retirement this month. ..
Most statues are made to order. Not so with an 11-foot bronze of Billy Mills, which New Mexico sculptor George Rivera crafted with the hope of placing it outside the Olympic Stadium in Tokyo in ’20. Now he and supporters such as hurdle great Edwin Moses and former USATF head Ollan Cassell are trying to convince the Japanese to say yes. Minor reality check: as awesome a hero as Mills might be to American fans, why should he take primacy over so many other ’64 gold medalists?
You’re As Old As You Feel
Shalane Flanagan tweeted about her experience doing speedwork with her younger Bowerman OTC teammates, “Age is just a number until you try to sprint with 25-year-olds. Then you really are old.”…
Chicago is the scene of a legal tussle between environmentalists and the city, which is moving a track in Jackson Park to make room for the Obama Presidential Center. A judge ruled in August in favor of the city…
Two-time NCAA long jump champ Kate Hall, who has left Georgia a year early to return to her home state of Maine, has taken an assistant coaching job at Div. III St. Joseph’s College…
Ukraine doesn’t mess around with fashion critics. A middle-distance runner criticized the national team outfit the federation had given him and earned a 6-month suspension for his input. □
