Track and field

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.”

Critics of USATF again belie their racial if not racist animus. Enough

For more than nine years, since Max Siegel became chief executive of USA Track & Field, this space has pleaded for civility, dignity and respect in the way people in and around the sport talk to and with each other.

Too often — far too often — the rhetoric is otherwise. It has proven not just unconstructive but inflammatory.

Siegel, along with chief operating officer Renee Washington, are the only two Black executives in the U.S. Olympic landscape.

After all these years, it’s difficult if not impossible to believe there is not a racial — if not racist — undertone to the criticism. Because the substance if not the tone almost immediately turns angry and destructive, as it has in the latest crisis to beset American track and field, the doping ban handed U.S. middle-distance standout Shelby Houlihan, adjudged liable by the Swiss-based Court of Arbitration for Sport after testing positive for impermissible levels of the anabolic steroid nandrolone.

2022 worlds: how not to grow track and field in the United States

2022 worlds: how not to grow track and field in the United States

We take you back to the halcyon days of 2015, when Eugene, Oregon, that college town in the middle of nowhere, was abruptly awarded — without the usual formal competitive bid process — the 2021 world track and field championships.

The United States has never staged the track worlds. The international governing body, then called the IAAF, now known as World Athletics, has always been keen to have it in the States. The soon-to-be-outgoing IAAF president, Lamine Diack, and the president of USA Track & FIeld, Vin Lananna said the stars aligned, Lananna calling the awarding of the 2021 championships a unique “one-time opportunity.”

Diack is now under house arrest in France, the focus of a criminal inquiry into a wide array of track- and Olympic-related matters. U.S. Justice Department officials, meanwhile, are reported to have taken an interest into the awarding of the Eugene bid.

But wait.

The whole idea of staging the track worlds in Eugene, per Lananna especially, was to grow the sport in the United States.

Some perspective, please

MONACO — The headline in The Times (the one in London) a few days ago proclaimed, “Lord Coe’s plan will lead to slow death of athletics, says Olympic champion Christian Taylor.”

Uh-huh.

Track and field is not dying, not even a slow and unremarkable death, because the triple jump will not be featured on television. You can take that to the bank.

This story, like so many others recently, underscores a trend, particularly as it relates to track and field, that would be particularly distressing if it wasn’t so transparent. The American and British media in particular in recent weeks have been filled with story upon story summoning the spirit of Chicken Little.

Redefining the notion of women's distance running

Redefining the notion of women's distance running

DOHA, Qatar — After all the noise the past few days over Alberto Salazar, finally, Sifan Hassan was free Saturday night to run.

She ran hard, she ran fast, she ran angry. She ran to make a statement and history.

Wow, did she make a statement — that the four-year doping ban handed Salazar late Monday was not going to be a distraction, that she was here on a mission and, people, get out of the way. 

What Sifan Hassan did here at the 2019 IAAF track and field championships may be nothing less than redefine the way we think about women’s distance running.

The first track championships in the Middle East

The first track championships in the Middle East

DOHA, Qatar — Like the sun rising in the east, some things are entirely predictable. 

1. Some number of athletes, particularly those from Europe, bitching about conditions at a world track and field championships. Observation: ’It’s hot.’ (Captains of the obvious!) Followed by hyperbole: a ‘disaster.’ 

2. The see-saw relationship with the press and track and field’s governing body. A few days into a championship, the press writes sky-is-falling stories. (Empty seats! It’s hot! A catastrophe!) The authorities naturally feel compelled to push back, IAAF president Seb Coe telling Associated Press in a story posted Wednesday that the complainers need to move along. 

“Can I just be a bit blunt about this?” Coe, elected here to a second four-year term as head of track and field’s world governing body, asked rhetorically. “The athletes talking about externalities are probably not the ones who are going to be walking home with medals from here. I have much, much bigger commitments and visions for our sport than to turn and head for home because we take an event into an area that poses problems.”

These 2019 IAAF world championships, now heading into the final weekend, seem destined to mark one of the most complex — and yet one of the most intriguing — legacies of any major championship from these first years of the 21st century. 

No Semenya: Uganda's Halimah Nakaayi, in 1:58.04, wins women's 800

DOHA, Qatar — It was 10 years ago already that Caster Semenya announced herself to the world. Just 18, a virtual unknown from South Africa, she won the women’s 800 meters at the IAAF world championships in Berlin. 

Since, the Semenya story has captivated, educated, intrigued, inspired, enraged and so much more, a debate over on, the one hand, the worth of every single person on Planet Earth to not only be who she or he is but the best she or he that he or she can be matched against, on the other, the fundamental question of what is fair tied up with the obligation of international sports authorities to be fair to everyone, not just someone.

There is no right or wrong in the complex mosaic of issues presented by the matter personified by Caster Semenya and, as it turns out, others with what has come to be called “differences of sexual development,” including the two other medalists in the women’s 800 at the Rio 2016 Summer Games, Francine Niyonsaba of Burundi and Margaret Wambui of Kenya.

To reiterate, there is no — speaking figuratively — black or white here. This is a matter subject to interpretation. It is all greys. This is why the debate, the politics, the posturing has been — is — so ferocious, and from so many sides. Just to pick one of many, many comments on the matter, this from U.S. racer Brenda Martinez here in Doha: “I’d rather race against an intersex athlete than a drug cheat.”

It’s also why Monday night’s championship final at the IAAF 2019 world championships marked either the end — 10 years later — of the Semenya story in track and field or, perhaps, a pause, just another  chapter, now amid a contentious legal process before next summer’s Tokyo Olympics.

Christian Coleman, and recasting the media narrative

Christian Coleman, and recasting the media narrative

DOHA, Qatar — The day after 23-year-old Christian Coleman became The Man, king of the 100 meters, the biggest deal in track and field, he was still the same guy he had been, always was, a grounded and sensible young man from a great American family.

As he made the rounds Sunday at the Team USA hotel, this was the Coleman ‘entourage’: his mom, Daphne, who holds a Ph.D. in education and is an instructional coach in the Atlanta schools; his dad, Seth, who is the media relations manager for the Atlanta public school system; an agent; and a manager. 

Where was the wacky scene so long associated with Usain Bolt? Where was the commotion? Where was — all of that?

People, don’t misunderstand. 

Christian Coleman is not Bolt, and the time has come for everyone to understand that is a good thing. 

The time is also now for everyone to understand that Coleman has been nothing but a good dude, and that the media narrative that has enveloped him to a significant degree over the past several weeks — totally unfairly — needs to be recast, particularly because Coleman’s victory Saturday at these IAAF 2019 championships arguably makes him the face of track and field heading into the Tokyo 2020 Summer Olympics.

Christian Coleman has something to prove -- and proves it, in 9.76 seconds

Christian Coleman has something to prove -- and proves it, in 9.76 seconds

DOHA, Qatar — There really wasn’t any doubt Saturday who was going to win the men’s 100 meters at these IAAF world championships.

Christian Coleman was it, in a runaway.

The only question, especially after Coleman came out blazing sub-10 in the prelims and went sub 9.9 in the semis and in that race ran hard for only 85 meters, was in what time and by how much.

Coleman, who burst onto the scene two years ago with a world championships 100 silver, dominated the late Saturday night final. He literally did run away with it, in 9.76 seconds, fastest in the world in 2019. It was his personal best time and the sixth-fastest in history.

Justin Gatlin, the London 2017 gold medalist, the man who dethroned Jamaica’s Usain Bolt in Bolt’s final championship 100, scraped into Friday’s final after coming in third in his semifinal. Incredibly, he then took second in the championship run, in 9.89. Andre DeGrasse of Canada got third, in a personal best 9.90.

Four more years for Coe, and first female VP in 107 years

Four more years for Coe, and first female VP in 107 years

DOHA, Qatar — So much to unpack from two hours of voting here Wednesday at the IAAF congress, so let’s get to it:

1. Seb Coe was unanimously re-elected as president. He gets four more years.

In 2015, Coe ran a tough race against Sergey Bubka of Ukraine. This time, Coe ran unopposed. 

He got 203 votes, out of 203.

This was a secret ballot. So for any of you who thought there might be even a single dissenter in a world body that over Coe’s first four-year term has seen multiple controversies — among them, the Russian doping matter and a legal dispute over differences of sexual development personified by the South African 800-meter champion Caster Semenya — think again.