THE TURNING OF the calendar page is a time for reflection. Rightly so. While we at T&FN had our eyes glued throughout December to details of seasonal records, facts, figures and features for our 77th Annual Edition, two shepherds of the sport issued statements about where track & field is and where it’s going.
WA President Seb Coe held the latest in what has become his traditional series of video-call sitdowns with media members. As Coe is now racing through a campaign for the IOC Presidency, his message trod cautiously viz details of future initiatives. The IOC election in March may elevate him out of the current gig. His analysis was upbeat if a touch more general than in recent December commentaries. Look for more details in the February issue’s Last Lap section.
“It’s been a very, very successful year,” Coe said. “Look, as an athletics enthusiast, I would go so far as to say in athletics terms, it’s been one for the ages.” Could not agree more.
Coe saluted the World Indoor in Glasgow — “the most watched in the last five editions in Europe” — and the five World Athletics Series meets of 2024.
The WA President celebrated also “a momentum that has delivered in another one of our key areas of metrics, and that is extending the income streams, finding new income streams, and certainly the welcoming and introduction of new partners… an important message from the market.” Good to hear.
Meanwhile at the annual USTFCCCA convention, the collegiate coaches association’s CEO, Sam Seemes, gave a passionately blunt speech to the membership. “Our sports are under siege,” he declared. “Not in some distant future, but right now. The threats are real and they’re immediate.”
The near-final settlement of a class action lawsuit around payments to past and future athletes (mostly football players) is about to upset the apple cart of college sports. Non-revenue sports — talking to you track & field and XC — could stagger forward as walking wounded, at best, barring urgent and effective responses.
Here’s where I offer a personal opinion likely to earn some enmity from two sides. Either that or crickets. The silence of the latter feels just as likely because apathy and lack of vision for the bigger picture is what got us here. Seemes said as much.
I’ve interviewed and enjoyed casual conversations with collegiate coaches for long enough to know that — incredibly dedicated stewards of their programs and athletes though they are — by and large their hard-working concerns begin and end with recruiting, preparing their teams and running the gauntlet of crowded December-through-June competition schedules before going all-in on recruiting again in July. Then some of them coach cross country, short, sweet, intense.
Nonetheless, rapidly, these men and women I admire will need to expand their vision, become more strategic — and open to compromise for the common good, common survival, even if immediate short-term benefits for their teams are unseen. Failing that — well, I’m pretty sure Sam Seemes is right.
Now I drop the other shoe. It’s confounding to me how little appreciation WA and USATF show for what the NCAA provides. It’s the largest, highest-performing “farm team” for Olympians and medalists on the planet, bar none. Yet from Europe, still the heart of the elite circuit, one mostly hears, with no facts provided, innuendo and vague suggestions that something sinister must underlie the sparkling performances of U.S.-based collegians.
Yet the innuendo is conveniently forgotten when NCAA alums develop into medalists, celebrated heroes and heroines.
Back to Coe: “Clearly, Paris was a big moment in the year. It cemented our sport absolutely at the epicenter of the Olympic movement… There were 75 countries in Paris that got a top 8 finish. And that sort of, in a way, is pretty insightful when it comes to how hard it is to win a medal in athletics… There were 27 countries that won gold, 45 that won medals of one description or another, and an absolute cluster of world, area and national records.”
Back, not to Seemes, but to the collegiate sport he champions. Of the 126 individual-event medals available in Paris, 42 (exactly one-third!) went to alumni of U.S. collegiate programs — 13 of whom, just under a third, represented nations other than the U.S.
An even third (heckuva a Games for that portion) of available golds, 14 of 42, came home with NCAA alums.
As the collegiate sport reaches what should be a feathers-on-fire moment, it is long past time for Coe, USATF’s leadership and the USOC to shout from the house tops and move whatever levers they can to aid the “golden goose” they’ve heretofore mostly neglected even to mention.
They’d be monumentally short-sighted not to. Those TV numbers that are up in Europe and sponsor commitments globally? Even they depend, in part, on the collegiate development of stars like Glasgow hero Josh Kerr.
