EUGENE, Oregon – Track and field is not football, the American kind. But it happens on the track that falls happen. That is, in racing, people fall down. Sometimes at critical moments. Sucks.
The thing is, just as in football, as the timeworn saying goes, it’s not that you fall – it’s how you get back up.
Football coaches will tell you, endlessly, it’s a matter of character.
Which brings us, amid the U.S. Trials for the 2024 Paris Games, to Athing Mu, who fell earlier this week in the women’s 800 meters, and is not going to get the chance to defend the gold medal she won in the event in Tokyo three years ago.
Sucks for her.
All the same, falls in the women’s 800 – happen. Falls in track and field – happen. Athing Mu does not deserve special consideration – not hardly a 1,964-word story in Sports Illustrated, posted Friday, in which her coach, the famed Bobby Kersee, and agent, Rocky Arceneaux, argue that maybe the U.S. system for picking top-three for the Olympics ought to get a new look yet nowhere in these 1,964 words is there but a sole mention of the winner, Nia Akins, who three years ago here at Hayward, at those 800 Trials, fell to the track in the merge, clipped in contact with – Athing Mu.
“It’s time for the U.S. to change,” Arceneaux tells SI, and no, because exactly the sort of political leverage he and Kersee are seeking to exert is why the American system is the way it is – line it up, top three on the day of the race go to the Olympics.
It’s unforgiving.
It must be.
Are falls on the track different than three field event fouls, which means you’re out? Brooke Andersen, the 2022 world hammer throw champion, and Laulauga Tausaga-Collins, the 2023 discus gold medalist, fouled out of their competitions here. They will not go to Paris.
No pressure campaigns are being waged in SI and in cascading sycophantic media on behalf of these two worthy champions. Why not?
Let’s be forthright: because these sorts of campaigns are 100% what the brutalist nature of the Trials is designed to put an abrupt stop to.
Win, you’re in. Otherwise, see you in four.
Podium, 2024 U.S. Trials women’s 800: bronze, Juliette Whittaker; gold, Nia Akins; silver, Allie Wilson // photo courtesy USATF
In essence, Kersee and Arceneaux are asking that Mu — the Tokyo race made her the first American woman to win 800 gold at the Olympics since 1968 — get star treatment.
They want the race to be re-run.
This is, in a word, ridiculous.
In Tokyo Mu was 19. She has raced inconsistently since – she won the 800 here in Eugene at the 2022 world championships – and made plain her interest in, among other things, fashion. Back again in Eugene for the Trials, the SI story discloses, she is coming off a torn hamstring. They’re suggesting that maybe, maybe, she might be better by Paris. That’s not the way this works here, dudes. Everyone knows the rules. Not to get all political about it but the Trials are one of the best (not gonna say last) exemplars of meritocracy in American life. 1-2-3, you go. Fourth, sucks. You fall, sucks.
The Trials are not the sort of situation where someone might, say, score 4.8 points per game and have a cardiac situation and still find himself drafted in the NBA. No nepo babies.
No one here gets special treatment. What – Mu’s team says all eight angles of NBC’s footage missed the key viewpoint? From outside the track? Which, they say, would show who caused contact?
What is this, the Zapruder 800? Credit to any and all for creative jailhouse-type lawyering. But no.
USATF turned this down, and twice, and a reasonable observer would say this:
It has been observed frequently that Mu has a long, loping stride. Typically, this means it’s not the safest strategy for her to run in a pack.
In her best races, fitness-wise, at the break she bursts like a gazelle to the rail. In this race, she drifted. In plain English, we are talking the difference between peak and just plain good, and it’s not unreasonable to argue the fall is entirely her fault. Sucks.
To the notion – advanced in the SI piece – that the “system” needs changing even if the race isn’t re-run: again, ridiculous. The U.S. track and field team wins the most medals at the Olympics, Games after Games after Games. The “system” works just fine.
Wayback machine: Lolo Jones, 2008, that ninth hurdle. She clipped it, it cost her gold. Should they have re-run that race? Ridiculous. Fast forward to Friday: Jones, now 41 years old, ran 14.86, last in her heat. All the same, she is moving along to the semifinals because so many women scratched in the event.
Jones said she too has had a lingering hamstring problem:
Jones, after Friday’s race: “I was in the 13s and I was on pace to run 12 seconds and I just got injured and it’s an injury that’s not due to old age. It’s an injury I get all the time as a hurdler. I just got it four weeks before the Trials. Then I got it again two weeks ago, and then my leg cramped up on Saturday and then I couldn’t get over yesterday, so, long story short, this was a huge win.”
Applying the logic in the SI piece:
Should they re-run the hurdles prelims so we can all see if Lolo Jones can go faster?
This is why these things are, to repeat the word, ridiculous.
Beyond, falls are a thing in races involving Athing Mu. She knows this. Everyone knows this.
Last year, at the world championships in Budapest, Mu – running in glittery blue spikes in the third of three semifinals – got twisted up, sideways, facing the wrong direction, after contact early on the last lap with South Africa’s Prudence Sekgodiso.
Mu recovered and finished second in that semi, moving on to the final. Mu was so favorably taken by what happened that she re-posted the Art But Make it Sports interpretation of the event on Twitter/X.
Sekgodiso, for the record, got up and finished last, 13 seconds behind.
There was no campaign that she had been wronged.
This year, by the by, Sekgodiso has – so far – the world’s third-best 800 time, 1:57.26.
Akins’ winning time here in Eugene, 1:57.36, is No. 4.
The top two: Britain’s Keely Hodgkinson, 1:55.78, and Kenya’s Mary Moraa, 1:56.71.
Look, everyone knows falls happen. How do you react to them?
In 2016 here at the Trials in the women’s 800, Alysia Montaño got tripped into a somersault on the last turn. Asked then if she would protest, Montaño said, “What good would that do me?”
Here in the prelims of the women’s steeplechase, Angelina Ellis took a hard fall going over one of the barriers. She got up. She finished. At the finish line, she leaned – earning the last auto-qualifying spot. In Thursday’s finals, she finished 11th, in 9:28.19.
In that Thursday steeple final, coming into the homestretch, Olivia Markezich, the 2023 NCAA champion, was in second place. One more water jump and one final barrier and – Paris.
But no.
Coming out of the jump, her left leg buckled. Then, clearing the final barrier, she fell. Just that fast, she was in sixth. She got up. She finished – in a personal-best 9:14.87. Even without the top two women in U.S. history in the event – 2017 world champion Emma Coburn and 2021 Olympic silver medalist Courtney Frerichs – the final featured nine of the top 18 women in American history. Tokyo Olympian Val Constien, who had ACL surgery a year ago, won in 9:03.22.
“You never know what can happen in the last 200 of a steeplechase,” Markezich said afterward. “Someone could fall. I never thought I would fall.
“You never think it’s going to happen to you. But it does.”
It does, and it takes someone with stand-up character – like Olivia Markezich – to suck it up and, amid the disappointment, say it’s no fun to be within mere seconds of reaching the dream.
Only to fall.
Since Athing Mu fell Monday night, Bobby Kersee has spoken on her behalf. So has Rocky Arceneaux. In Tokyo three years ago, here in Eugene two years ago, Athing Mu was beautiful to watch in victory.
After winning in Tokyo, she told the website Olympics.com: “Anything I put my mind to, I can achieve. There’s no one that can stop me doing anything besides myself.”
Since Monday, meantime, we have yet to hear a single word from Athing Mu.