The problem with track and field is not the long jump.
To be honest, if you know who Miltiadis Tentoglou is, you are a real junkie and ought to be attending Track and Field Anonymous Meetings. With me, maybe.
The problem with track and field is that it is both anchored in tradition and traditionalists, and while traditionalists love the sport, and that’s all good, track and field is dying a very noticeable death with the audience it needs to resonate with, 18 to 34 year olds.
First and foremost, let us pay tribute to Elaine Thompson-Herah, winner Saturday of the women’s 100 at the Prefontaine Classic at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon. This summer, Thompson-Herah has cemented her status as one of the finest female sprinters of all time, if not the best.
In Tokyo, Thompson-Herah completed the two-time Olympic double-double, winning — again — the women’s 100 and 200, just as she did in Rio. Then, on Saturday in Eugene, she ran 10.54 to win the 100.
10.54.
This is the second-fastest 100 ever, behind only Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 10.49 in Indianapolis in 1988. It’s a bunch of other stuff, too — personal best (obviously); world lead (ditto); national, Diamond League and meet record (same) — but the important thing is that it’s only five-hundredths back of FloJo, and ETH, as she is known in track speak, is hot, and there are meets coming up, including in Lausanne, Switzerland, on Thursday, where she is already due to race, and it’s clear she wants 10.48 or lower.
That is one story. To be blunt, Elaine Thompson-Herah deserves far more credit than she is getting from the pack of journalistic sheep covering track and field. Way, way, way more.
EUGENE, Ore. — That didn’t take long. All too predictably.
Not even 24 hours after Sha’Carri Richardson sped to victory in the women’s 100 meters here Sunday night at the U.S. Olympic Trials, a British journalist posted to Twitter a note about Richardson’s coach, Dennis Mitchell.
In this tweet, this correspondent pointed out that it had been he in 1998 who had “exclusively” reported that Mitchell had been “let off a doping charge for excessive testosterone, which he claimed was down to drinking beer and having sex four times a day with his wife. ‘It was her birthday, the lady deserved a treat.’“
This note underscores the racial — if not racist — reckoning that track and field must confront. In the year after the murder of George Floyd, this tweet spotlights the undercurrents of the very thing that the British sprint champion Dina Asher-Smith so eloquently wrote about in a briliiant column published last summer in The Telegraph — the “layers and layers of ‘unconscious’ bias at best, and hate at worst, that affect [her] life on a day-to-day basis.”
