BUDAPEST – What does it mean to be a winner in the men’s 100 here at the 2023 track and field world championships?
Not the winner. That’s easy. Noah Lyles won the race Sunday night in 9.83 seconds.
But a winner. When you finish dead last. And you are beaming with pride and wonder.
On the one hand, you are hardly Lyles. No, you come from remote islands in the Pacific Ocean. On the other, hold on, isn’t it the truth that you’re exactly the same? There you were, on the same track, running the same damn race. And for your part, you ran the fastest you have ever run, and at the world championships!
Isn’t that the whole point?
The track and field worlds are often described as the third most important sporting event on Planet Earth, behind only the Summer Games and the men’s FIFA World Cup. Only the Summer Olympics brings together athletes from more nations. Indeed, there are athletes, coaches, physios and team officials here in Budapest from roughly some 200 nations and territories.
Indisputably, they run the races and jump the jumps to see who wins. All the same, a gathering like this is also a coming together, a celebration of our shared humanity.
Since the dawn of time, perhaps no other footrace has served as the essence of that shared humanity as what we now call the 100.
You start here. You finish there. First one over the line is the winner. It’s the same everywhere.
Twenty-six guys lined up Saturday morning in the preliminary rounds of the 100. The big guys, Lyles and fellow American Fred Kerley, winner last year of the 100 in Eugene, and the Tokyo Olympic champion Lamont Marcell Jacobs of Italy, they drew a bye straight into Round One, Saturday evening.
The prelims were for the likes of runners from Guyana, Gambia, Macau, Turkmenistan, Tajikistan and more.
They ran four heats in the prelims, to see who would advance to Round One. Muhd Azeem Fahmi of Malaysia, in Heat 2, turned in the fastest time in the morning, 10.24. On Saturday evening, he would finish 39th of 55, in 10.26.
In all, in those four morning heats, there were supposed to be 29 guys. Ten would advance. Two, from Zaire and Seychelles, did not start. One, from Afghanistan, did not finish. That left 26.
No. 26: Tauro Tiaon, of Kiribati, in 12 seconds flat. A personal best.
Understand that 12-flat was a full 1.06 seconds behind the slowest qualifier, Brandon Jones of Belize, who crossed in 10.94.
No. 25: Ty’ree Langidrik, of the Marshall Islands, in 11.78. Again, a personal best. Way best – his prior best had been an 11.92.
Tauro Tiaon of Kiribati is all smiles after his first world championships
So, too, is Ty’ree Langidrik of the Marshall Islands
The Marshalls, between Hawaii and the Philippines, are a sprawl of volcanic islands and coral atolls, an independent nation since just 1986. The entire population of the country amounts to just over 40,000 people. There are 7,000 more in Niagara Falls, New York.
In the Marshall Islands, Langidrik said, they do have a track. It got finished four months ago. Before that? “Grass and mud.”
Settling into the starting blocks, Langidrik said, “I told myself I’m going to do my best.”
At the Tokyo Olympics, the Marshall Islands sent only two athletes, two swimmers. Now, maybe, just maybe, Langidrik, 25, sees a pathway to Paris next summer:
“Work harder.”
Kiribati is pronounced “Kiri-boss.” Independent since 1979, it is made of up 33 islands; 20 are inhabited. On those 20 live a total of nearly 130,000 people.
Tiaon, who is 19, is the only one here from the Kiribati delegation. OK, that’s not true. There are two here. Tiaon and the president of his federation.
“People back home are like me, with brown skin, and they are very friendly,” Tiaon said. “You are treated like a special person.
“It is so small,” he added about his nation. “A bunch of coral atolls. It’s in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. On the equator.”
In an effort to be helpful to the ladies and gentlemen of the press, the World Athletics media operations team prepares before each day’s competition a background sheet detailing facts and figures about each athlete in every event. For Tauro Tiaon, they literally had – nothing.
What did World Athletics know before the race of Tauro Tiaon in Lane 6? That he was 19. And from Kiribati. Nothing else
In Kiribati, Tiaon said, there is no track. Instead, he runs on “the ground.” His dad is a fisherman. He is a college student, studying sociology, and he really only has time to train two days a week, on Mondays and Wednesdays.
In the lead-up to these championships, Tiaon trained for three weeks in Australia via a program there that supports athletes throughout all of far-flung Oceania.
Which is why, on the one hand, he felt kinda-sorta sheepish about running 100 meters in 12 seconds. He was dead last, he knew it and, well, you know: “12 seconds was so slow. I’m not happy about it,” especially because he also has a hopeful eye on Paris next summer.
On the other hand, he also said with a smile, “It was, like, I mean, a different place. This is my first time at a major international competition. It was a big stadium. I felt nervous. I tried to run my best.”
And, he said, “I couldn’t believe myself. I was making it to Budapest. It was a great feeling. I’m – really proud of myself.”