Track and field

Four case studies: athlete mental health

Four case studies: athlete mental health

Athlete mental health is a real thing. To be clear, no one is suggesting otherwise.

It’s intriguing to explore the intersection in recent days of four separate episodes that bear on this fascinating topic.

Any therapist will tell you that matters of mental health are subjective. That is, they’re in the headspace of the person who’s dealing with them. All the same, that person — for purposes of this discussion, an athlete, and more specifically, a professional athlete — lives and works among us. That means there’s some significant measure of objective if not common-sense reality.

In Belgrade, a rivalry in the men's sprint, and let's get it on

BELGRADE, Serbia — There are four big track and field championships this year: world indoors, world outdoors, Commonwealth Games, Europeans. For a sizeable number of top athletes, these world indoors are, for lack of a better description, the baby of the four, the junior rider.

In any year, but particularly this one, it would be rare to see the kind of showdown that took place Saturday night in the marquee event of these world indoors, the men’s 60 meters. In Lane 5, the Tokyo Olympic champion in the 100 meters, Italy’s Lamont Marcell Jacobs. Was his run last summer a fluke? In Lane 3, American Christian Coleman, the 2019 100 world champion, the 2018 60-meter winner, the world record-holder at this distance at 6.34 seconds. He could not challenge Jacobs in Tokyo. He was sitting out, grounded by a whereabouts violation.

Rarer still is the race that lives up to the hype.

This one did.

Track and field has a problem. His name is Steve Prefontaine

Track and field has a problem. His name is Steve Prefontaine

Track and field has a problem. His name is Steve Prefontaine.

This week, the lead-up to the 114th edition of the Millrose Games in New York, arguably the world’s most prestigious indoor track and field meet, marked what would have been Prefontaine’s 71st birthday.

Yet again, social media lit up with gushing tributes and grainy videos of Prefontaine races.

Track and field’s problem is, to be blunt, with the ongoing fetishizing of the Prefontaine legacy.

Time for Shelby Houlihan to come clean

Time for Shelby Houlihan to come clean

Two things ought to happen now that the Court of Arbitration for Sport has issued a technically detailed but, in the end, common-sense ruling in the matter of Shelby Houlihan, the American distance runner, banning her for four years for nandrolone — through January 2025 — while thoroughly rejecting the ridiculous burrito defense.

One, Houlihan ought to come clean.

Two, all the journalistic sheep who wanted to believe, who maybe still want to believe despite the overwhelming evidence against Houlihan, that there was no way, just no way, a white American distance runner affiliated with the Bowerman Track Club could test positive — all these people, and the readers they misled, ought to take a crash course in Doping 101 and the things people will say and do, meaning anything and everything, to avoid getting busted.

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.

Context and empathy, please: Richardson very unlikely to run at all in Tokyo

Context and empathy, please: Richardson very unlikely to run at all in Tokyo

Sha’Carri Richardson is not going to run in the women’s 100 meters at the Tokyo Olympics. That race is at the start of the track and field competition at the Games.

For that matter, she is very unlikely to run in the women’s 4x100 meter relay. That relay is run near the end.

“We have not focused on the relay,” her agent, Renaldo Nehemiah, said Friday afternoon in a telephone interview. “I just felt that was not healthy for her to get excited about possibly being in Tokyo. I felt it would be a shock and a surprise. Her sights are going to be on the Prefontaine Classic,” on August 21 back at Hayward Field in Eugene, Oregon, a World Athletics Diamond League meet.

Richardson’s 30-day marijuana-related suspension does far more than seemingly take one of the brightest young U.S. stars out of the Tokyo Games, which begin July 23.

It also highlights the need for context and empathy — and a renewed appreciation for athlete mental health — when bright young talents, burnished on the star-making machinery of television as the next big thing, are revealed behind the scenes as human beings like the rest of us, in this instance, a 21-year-old young woman desperately grieving the loss of her mother.

In this context, it also highlights the way that USA Track & Field, under the leadership of chief executive Max Siegel and chief operating officer Renee Washington, have again, indeed relentlessly, stepped up to provide precisely such empathy and athlete support — in direct contrast to the way such matters might have been dealt with in the past.

A $270-million spaceship in remote Eugene is not how to grow track and field in America

A $270-million spaceship in remote Eugene is not how to grow track and field in America

EUGENE, Ore. — Maybe you are one of those people who believes that Paul McCartney has been, you know, dead for all these years.

Maybe you believe that Britney Spears has thoroughly enjoyed every minute of the 13 years under the conservatorship that has controlled her life and money.

Maybe you believe that the Houston Astros were just learning new syncopation skills when they were beating on garbage cans.

If you are one of these people, or maybe you just belong to the Cult of Running and don’t want to listen to logic and facts, then maybe you believe the new Hayward Field here in Eugene is the lynchpin to a revival of U.S. track and field. And you likely believe, too, that this week’s U.S. Trials, which are essentially a dry-run for the stadium, are a precursor to next year’s track and field world championships that will change everything for the sport in this country.

Wadeline Jonathas, and this reminder: each event means *three* Olympic qualifiers

Wadeline Jonathas, and this reminder: each event means *three* Olympic qualifiers

EUGENE, Ore. — If, like most of America, you watched the women’s 400 here at the U.S. track and field Trials a few days ago, and your takeaway was Allyson Felix and her cute daughter, Cammy, and Quanera Hayes and her cute son, Demetrius, and the way the new moms celebrated finishing 1-2 with their kids on the track, Wadeline Jonathas would like you to know that she finished third and she matters just as much, and, for real no knock on anyone else, but if you could tear yourself over this way, you would see the very essence of what it means, really, to be an American, to make it in this country, to represent the United States, red, white and blue, all of that, in the 21st century.

Wadeline Jonathas — Wadie, please — is an immigrant from Haiti. She came to the United States when she was 11. Became an American citizen when she was 17. She didn’t even start running track until she was 16. Didn’t take up the 400 until she was 18. She’s now 23 and going to the Olympics.

Everyone has a story. This is the lesson of Wadeline Jonathas. In her case, it borders on the is-this-for-real? Answer: it’s 100 percent real because there’s so much more to it. At 15, she was homeless. They should make a movie out of The Wadeline Jonathas Story. “One day,” she said with a laugh.

The Trials, and the change all around us

The Trials, and the change all around us

EUGENE, Ore. — Change is a, perhaps the, only constant in the short time we have to draw breath on Planet Earth.

A day like Monday served as a reminder of how each and all of us is living through a powerful current of change, amplified and accelerated by the pandemic. There is no going back to the way things were.

And that’s OK.

Because it’s OK to consider, for instance, a new way, or ways, of things. In particular, ways sport can help us see differently.

Sport is a prism through which we often can find constructive dialogue about things that sometimes can prove too fraught otherwise. These possibilities drew Monday into sharp relief, underscored not only by racing at the U.S. track and field Trials here at Hayward Field in Eugene but by events in Washington and across the world.