KARSTEN WARHOLM announced he is bypassing the indoor season because of an “uncertain coronavirus situation.”…
The Brooks Beasts have gotten stronger in the 800, signing former NCAA runners-up Devin Dixon and Laurie Barton, plus Isaiah Harris, OT 4th-placer last year…
BYU’s NCAA cross country champ Whittni Orton has signed with adidas…
Emily Infeld has departed the Nike Bowerman TC, but has not yet revealed her new coaching/sponsorship arrangements. “I’m leaving on good terms, confident I did everything I could to make this situation work,” she says. “I know I still have more running in me and need to approach training differently.”…
Aliyah Whisby, the LSU alum who finished 11th in the OT long jump, has moved to Barcelona to train with Cuban legend Iván Pedroso…
Kenyan Hellen Obiri has signed with On Athletics and will be training in Colorado under Dathan Ritzenhein, apparently in preparation for a move to the marathon. Visa problems have apparently delayed her journey to the U.S…
French sprinter Mouhamadou Fall is moving from El Paso to Florida to train with Dennis Mitchell’s group…
Miler Craig Engels’ career got a major boost when Nike signed him to a 9-year contract extension…
Veteran French sprinter Jimmy Vicaut has left coach Rana Reider and is being mentored by Italian Marco Airale…
Sifan Hassan is doing a training stint in Namibia, reportedly because the country does not require a COVID test for entry…
Jaws dropped when it was announced that Yalemzerf Yehualaw (30:14) and Gemechu Dida (27:22) had blistered unbelievable 10K times at the Great Ethiopian Run, held at 2408m of altitude. Organizers later revealed they had a timing-system problem and winning times were corrected to 31:16 and 28:23…
That COVID relief money the federal government sent to the nation’s schools to help them mitigate effects of the pandemic? A school district in Kentucky used it to resurface two of its tracks…
The NCAA has given the green light to smaller meets, as part of its C19 response. Now the minimum number events for a meet to count as a qualifying meet is 5 per sex (it had been 10)…
WADA has reported that testing worldwide in all sports is starting to come close to pre-pandemic levels. Last year there were 27,254 doping samples taken, compared to 168,256 in ’20 and the pre-pandemic high of 305,881 in ’19…
WADA is urging federations to take advantage of secure (and free) long-term storage of samples at the International Testing Agency’s storage facility in Switzerland. That way samples can be retested as the technology improves…
The CEO of Athletics Canada, David Bedford (not the former British distance star), has stepped down after complaints of sexually graphic exchanges on Twitter…
Kory Tarpenning, a 2-time U.S. Olympian in the vault, has been sentenced to three months in federal prison after being found guilty of failing to report $1.9 million in income and wages over 5 years while he lived and worked in Monaco…
WA was the big winner in an evaluation of how various sports federations grew their social media presence last year. WA saw a 101% rise in combined followers across the six major social media platforms…
Brazil is planning to host the Pan-Am Junior (U20) Championships. The meet moved and delayed from its original setting in Chile last October. Tentative dates are June 04-05 but no host city has been named. USATF is not planning to send a team…
South Africa is scheduling a World Championships Trials for late May in addition to it earlier national championships, in an effort to send a team that is better peaked for the Worlds…
Coach Lance Brauman is big on Shaunae Miller-Uibo’s getting faster. “She’s run 48.36 now and we both think she can run even faster,” he says of the 2-time Olympic 400 champ. “The plan is to run in the 47s and maybe take a legitimate shot at the World Record.”…
Sha’Carri Richardson is featured in a short documentary, Sub Eleven Seconds, which premiered at January’s Sundance Festival…
Brigitte Foster-Hylton, who won World 100H gold in ’09 for Jamaica, is now making her name in pro tennis. She’s already won 2 of her first 4 tournaments…
The Asian Indoor Championships, set for Kazakhstan on February 11-12, have been delayed a year because of COVID…
The Canadian Indoor Championships, originally in St. John February 19-20, will be delayed to March, yep, because of COVID…
Canada is trying its own version of a pro track league this summer, with 4 teams and a total of 128 athletes. They will compete in 8 events over a 4-meet circuit…
Breaking the 100m (328-1) barrier is his main goal says German javelin ace Johannes Vetter: “it’s just a matter of time and patience.” He’s training at home this year because of C19: “The most important thing is still not to get infected. To protect yourself and those around you as best you can. I can do without a 2-week quarantine, let alone an infection.”…
Run Equal, a group started by St. Michael’s College (Div. II) coach Molly Peters, has submitted a petition to the NCAA calling for the men’s and women’s standard distance in cross country to be equalized at 8K. “Requiring women to race shorter distances is gender bias and sends an unmistakable message, intended or not, that women are not as capable as men,” says Peters, who has enlisted the support of high-profile runners Joan Benoit Samuelson, Lynn Jennings and Kathrine Switzer…
A psychological study has found that silver medalists have more long-term unhappiness than anyone else on the podium. However, a recent auction proves that the silver can be worth a lot. The winning bid in an auction for the medal that Daniel Frank of the U.S. won in the 1904 Olympic long jump went for $82,000…
Eilish McColgan had intended to run in the Valencia 10K, but had to withdraw over a vaccination complication. She had gotten her first two doses overseas, then had trouble getting the booster in Britain. “It was making travel abroad a bit tricky.”…
In the annual ranking of IOC members by Twitter followers, Seb Coe ranks as the highest trackster at No. 10 (118,800 followers), far behind the 7.2 million boasted by Spain’s former NBA star Pau Gasol in No. 1…
Egypt has announced it plans to bid to host the ’36 Olympics; if successful, it would be the first African nation to host a Games…
Ingebrigtsen Family news: father Gjert has stepped down as coach because of an unspecified medical condition leaving his three star sons to train themselves. Meanwhile, Ingrid, their younger sister (1500 PR 4:42.04), has retired at age 15…
With the spotlight on various high-level abuse cases, UK Athletics says that it will be reviewing all sex-related decisions in which a permanent ban did not result. It has warned that more lifetime bans of offending coaches could be the result…
New Mexico coach Joe Franklin is big on the new track inside the Albuquerque Convention Center, saying “This one is probably the best track in the world.”…
Olympic 200 silver medalist Christine Mboma ran her first-ever 100 in January, clocking an 11.25 into an 0.4 wind. “I was just trying out something new. Time will definitely tell if I will continue.”…
The recent controversy over a transgender swimmer at Penn has spurred the NCAA to immediately put into effect new guidelines on transgender athletes. The organization, in effect, punted, and each sport will now follow the guidelines set by its national governing body (in track’s case, USATF)…
The refusal of the IOC to challenge China’s humans rights abuses prior to the Winter Games didn’t go well with many Washington politicos, and bipartisan legislation has been proposed which would strip the IOC of its tax-exempt status in the U.S…
The NCAA has updated its COVID guidance, now saying that having had a documented case of COVID in the 90 days previous is equivalent to being fully vaccinated…
The USA Track & Field Foundation is now giving out maternity grants. The first 4, worth $4000 each, went to Ce’Aira Brown, Molly Huddle, Elvin Kibet and Shannon Rowbury. Brown gave birth to a son in November. The other three are expecting later this year…
The NCAA’s new Name-Image-Likeness (NIL) rules that were supposed to let student athletes make a little more money on the side? Works better for men, as it turns out. Early data on all sports is showing that 67% of the money is flowing to male athletes…
Former Villanova runner Jerry Bouma has released a book on the school’s glory days in men’s track. The Villanova Track Story: 1966-1981: Touching Greatness, Forever Together is available on Amazon. We’ll have a review in next month’s issue…
When he was at LSU, Cyril Grayson ran on 4 NCAA-winning 4x4s (2 in, 2 out) and clocked 1:49.35 for 800. Though he didn’t play football in college, in early January he caught 6 receptions and scored the game-winning touchdown for the Tampa Buccaneers against the New Orleans Saints.
The WA Scoring Tables — not for the multis, but the ones that compare disparate events — have been revised. The biggest change is that the scoring now takes into account the explosion of faster road racing times thanks to supershoes. Letesenbet Gidey’s half-marathon, the biggest recent outlier, has been docked 45 points, for instance (from 1326 to 1281 points). Bizarrely enough, the track 5000 & 10,000 did not change…
Lamar distance coach Andrew Sweeney points out that never before had 50 collegians broken 8:00 for 3000, but in just the last weekend of January, more than 50 did. Can you guess why? ◻︎