MY HEAD’S ALL ASWIRL. Decades ago a U.S. Olympic coach spoke those words to me — caught off guard because it was January, he had a college program to run and I was cold-calling him with questions about a Games 6 months in the future. His turn of phrase stuck in my brain.
What’s got my noggin swirling is an Olympic Games about to start and a dazzling Trials concluded less than a month ago. It’s hard to point in a quadrennial cycle to any other 2-month stretch, give or take, that’s quite as electric as the 1-2 punch of these meets. I say that even as an inveterate track & field guy, who mildly resents all those other Olympic sports watering down our moment in the sun. For fewer distractions, tighter focus, give me a World Championships every two years — and starting in 2026 WA’s planned Ultimate Champs to send to the showers the buzz kill of “off years.”
I love, though, that in an Olympic summer our sport gets a touch more love and attention. This summer the track & field t-shirts and hats I wear elicit comments. e.g., grocery store checker to wife and self as he eyed my Trials tee: “You gonna watch the Olympics?” It was fun, if self-congratulatory, to answer, “We’re gonna be there!”
This is a brief window in time where one even learns casual acquaintances follow our sport with more enthusiasm than you’d guess.
Exhibit A for me this summer: A couple, call them Jess and Joe, I chat with occasionally over a beverage at my local. On last meeting they were praising Sprint: The World’s Fastest Humans, the Netflix series that’s enjoying a heartening run. Sure, Jess & Joe confessed they were binge-watching Sprint in a dash to reach the finish before the release of Receiver, a Netflix NFL offering of the same type. Nonetheless, warms my heart to see track delighting general sports watchers, gives one hope crossover appeal can grow.
For me, August 2, in-stadium day 1 of the Paris party cannot get here soon enough. I’m one fired-up track nut.
Yet I also carry the gimlet-eyed bone-to-pick track nut gene. Why, for crying out loud, did World Athletics find need to make its standards-plus-rankings “Road To Paris” qualifying scheme so impenetrably hard to understand?
Back in 2017 when WA first floated its rankings concept, head man Seb Coe proclaimed, “For the first time in the sport’s history, athletes, media and fans will have a clear understanding of the hierarchy of competitions from National through to Area and up to Global events, allowing them to follow a logical season-long path to the pinnacle of athletics’ top two competitions.”
Is that what this is? At the Olympic Trials some T&FN Tour members asked how Olympic qualifying works. On stage at a tour dinner with deca great and TV commentator Dan O’Brien. I took first crack at an explanation.
Mea culpa. From the start I dove too far into the deep weeds on the weight given to various competitions for WA rankings and the observation that targeted Olympic field sizes varied from event to event. Dan had had enough and grabbed the mic.
“You’re not explaining it very well. It’s pretty simple, they’re aiming for 30 qualifiers per event and…” Not to pick on O’Brien. I absolutely respect what he’s done in this sport and for this sport. But the target field size for the 100 is 56. It’s 40 for the 400 hurdles, 32 in the field events, You get the idea.
If O’Brien was off the mark, who isn’t? Where’s that “clear understanding” for fans?
There’s no room here to cite chapter and verse. But an example: on WA’s Road To Paris web page there’s asterisked verbiage that begins “** In case of a wild card…” There are no wild cards for the Olympics. That’s a World Champs thing. Granted, a web editing oversight. But c’mon!
Worse, however, is that those field size target numbers comport not at all with the head counts on WA’s Paris “entry lists” released in July. The mantra we’ve heard all along is 3 per nation max per event at the Games. Yet the women’s 1500 targeted for 45 has 52 entrants. And 4 Americans among them, with Sinclaire Johnson, who’s not on USATF’s roster, listed ahead of Emily Mackay and Elle St. Pierre.
Johnson, and others like her, I’m told, are alternates. Alternates? On an “entry list”? Couldn’t WA at least asterisk them like those “wild cards”? Mountain/molehill, maybe. But we’ve got to make this sport more understandable. Feels like that shouldn’t be hard to do.
