Sha'Carri Richardson

The Games as a short play - on the track, the women's 100 prelims, four rounds: 'I'm doing my best'

The Games as a short play - on the track, the women's 100 prelims, four rounds: 'I'm doing my best'

PARIS – There are places that are out there in the Pacific Ocean, and then there is Tuvalu, which is halfway between Hawaii and Australia, a collection of three reef islands and six atolls. All in, maybe 11,000 or so people call Tuvalu home. That makes it the second-least populous country on Planet Earth, behind Vatican City, and the least populous country where English is an official language.

If you put the reefs and the atolls together, you have a land mass of 10 square miles. For comparison, San Francisco is, rounding off here, 47 square miles.

Tuvalu sent two athletes to these Paris Games, both in track and field, and when one of them, 20-year-old Temalini Manatoa, settled into the blocks Friday morning in her heat of the women’s 100 meters, she was shaking from adrenaline and excitement and, if we are being honest, fear. She was scared. She said so. It’s big out there on that track for a young woman from a very small place.

“I’m doing my best,” she said afterward, finishing in 14.04 seconds, a personal best.

The track Trials, perhaps the greatest run in sports: every day across 10 days, the dream

The track Trials, perhaps the greatest run in sports: every day across 10 days, the dream

EUGENE, Oregon – The 2024 U.S. track and field Trials came to a close Sunday with Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone winning the women’s 400-meter hurdles, and in world record time, 50.65 seconds. “Honestly… when I crossed the line,” she said, “I was, like, oh, snap.”

Sydney is a generational talent. She is so ridiculously good, almost two full seconds ahead of runner-up Anna Cockrell, in 52.64, she might well do in Paris in the 400 hurdles what most world-class female racers can only dream of in the open 400 – run in 49 seconds. Sydney is so good she has run the fastest time in the world this year in the open 400, 48.75 seconds. But she’s not going to run that in Paris. Only the 400 hurdles.

Sydney is so good that her 400 hurdles now is like a men’s 400 hurdles featuring Edwin Moses in the late 1970s and early 1980s. Edwin won 122 in a row. Sydney doesn’t race that often. Not hardly. Still, the point is the same. With respect to Holland’s Femke Bol, until proven otherwise, it’s not who’s going to win. It’s how much by.

Track and field has an 18-to-34 problem. It is not the long jump

Track and field has an 18-to-34 problem. It is not the long jump

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, Elaine Thompson-Herah. Last, and a call for context, empathy: Sha'Carri Richardson

First, Elaine Thompson-Herah. Last, and a call for context, empathy: Sha'Carri Richardson

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.

Track and field's racial -- if not racist -- reckoning is not just coming. It's now

Track and field's racial -- if not racist -- reckoning is not just coming. It's now

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.”