Since Johnson’s retirement in 2000 though, his popularity and consequently the popularity of the sport has faded. Judging by the recent crop of young 400m runners, though, I think that is about to change. Just today, the reigning Olympic champion in the 400m, Jeremy Wariner, won the 400 at the World Championships, winning in 43.93 seconds. Not only that, but he became the first athlete to break 44.00 in the 400 since Johnson himself did it in 2000 and the eighth runner to ever break the barrier in history. And oh yeah, he’s only 21 years old. By contrast, Johnson didn’t first break 44 flat until he was 24, running 43.98 in 1992.

I’ve seen many of Wariner’s races now and he continues to amaze me. He always looks like he’s in control and I’ve never seen him break down at all during the end of a race. For anybody who has run 400m races before, you know what I’m talking about. It’s during the last 100m’s of the race that you can’t avoid the lactic acid buildup. Even professional runners succumb to this problem occasionally during a bad race. Wariner never does, at least not from what I’ve seen. It’s a product of great training, great discipline, and of course great talent (Wariner went to the same college, Baylor, as Johnson and he has the same coach). I think he may start to do some great things down the road and just may be that high-impact athlete that track and field needs to bring it back into the limelight of American attention.

It is easy for me to point a finger at one obvious factor in the cause of my problems: indoor tracks. Indoor tracks are smaller than outdoor tracks and have sharper turns, causing more stress on feet and the knees during workouts. To make matters worse, RPI’s track is not even 200 meters long, it’s a square (giving it four sharper turns instead of two more gradual turns), and it has a very hard rubber surface with almost no cushion. After workouts on that track, there was always a traffic jam in the ice bath filled with track athletes trying to ice down flared up shins, knees, ham strings and all kinds of other nagging problems. Last season, my knee problems plagued me throughout the entire indoor season, but as soon as we moved to outdoor tracks, they cleared up almost instantly. In fact, indoor tracks are so hard on the body, that many professional athletes skip the indoor season all together. Jeremy Wariner, for example, skipped his first indoor season as a professional purely for injury related concerns.

It is partially because of these injury-related experiences that I’ve had that Nike’s new shoe design is intriguing to me. I have heard of these novelties previously but this article on wired.com refreshed my interest. The new shoes, called Nike Free, are actually designed to make it feel like you are running barefoot. This may seem counterproductive and the opposite of what you would want to do to prevent injury, but ironically, it is not. The idea stems from the notion that your feet are actually biologically designed to be used without any shoes or other type of support. When you put shoes on to increase stability and cushioning, you are actually decreasing their range of motion, and therefore the muscles in the feet are underutilized. Running barefoot allows your feet greater flexibility and strengthens all muscles that are involved in the biomechanical process of running. In Nike’s research, they interviewed a track coach at Stanford that uses barefoot running as part of his training regimen:

“He said that it kept his athletes stronger and healthier, and prevented injuries,” recalls Tobie Hatfield, senior engineer for advanced products at the Nike Innovation Kitchen. “And since they were injured less, they could train more. He was sure this training was giving them an edge.”

At the end of last season we actually started to incorporate some barefoot running into our workouts. Perhaps the most beneficial and most crucial time to do that though, would be during the always dangerous indoor season.

Athlete	Country	2005	Personal
Battistel Florent	MON	49.59	49.59
Martini Glauco	SMR	50.86	50.86
Gandéga Boubou	MTN	49.52	49.52

Notice anything? I’ll give you a hint: my personal best in the 400m is 49.74, and I am probably best described as a very competitive NCAA Division III athlete. This means that professional level, world class events are probably not in my future (unless of course my name is Andrew Rock, which it is not). However, my time would put me right in the middle of these three supposed “world class” 400m runners.

Obviously I understand why these athletes with clearly very good, but definitely not elite level times are able to compete at the world championships. They respectively hail from the enormous countries of Monaco, San Marino, and Mauritania. So therefore in the hopes of representing as many miniscule countries as possible, the IAAF apparently accepted these three entries to diversify the pool of athletes and create as great an international flavor as possible. Now, this is not necessarily a bad thing, but it also locks out more qualified athletes from the competition. There are hundreds, if not thousands of athletes from other countries that have superior times then the three mentioned above including some from such powerhouse countries like the USA which could even contend for a medal. In all realistic possibilities, we all know that none of the above athletes have even a remote chance of making it to the second round, never mind medaling. Additionally, consider the populations of the above mentioned countries: Monaco: 32,409, San Marino: 28,880, Mauritania: 3,086,859. By comparison, the small town that I live in has about 18,000 people. It seems ludicrous that both Monaco and San Marino should be represented in a competition that has a field of only about 50 or so athletes.

I am not suggesting that quotas or whatever mandated requirements are used to diversify the representation of nations be abandoned. Instead, I think it is more reasonable to have blocks of nations considered on the basis of population. Thus, for example, Monaco and San Marino could be designated in the same block of nations that all have a population under a certain limit. Then a certain quota of athletes could be taken from these nations and therefore improve the quality of the overall competition. While the World Championships should definitely strive to represent all nations of the world as much as possible, it should also seek to maintain an overall level of fairness for all athletes that wish to participate, and thus not compromise the overall level of competition on account of national allegiances.

I understand that the pure entertainment value of the sport may not be nearly as significant as the three major sports that currently monopolize television and media coverage (I think there used to be four major sports but I only remember seeing three this past year). However, consider this year’s track and field world championships which takes place August 6-14 in Helsinki, Finland. Television coverage for the event is limited to essentially a one hour daily highlight show on the PAX network. The PAX network? Does anyone remember watching anything on that channel ever? It’s certainly not a mainstream television network and it’s definitely not a sports network. ESPN, which is supposed to be the worldwide leader in sports, doesn’t even pick up any coverage of the world championships of one of the ultimate sports. Instead they show hot dog eating contests and reruns of the same poker championships over and over.

Despite this lack of television coverage, there is one good thing about the world championships this year:

Track fans in the United States and U.S. territories will be able to watch, for the first time ever, an unprecedented 58 hours of live Webcast coverage of the 2005 IAAF World Championships in Athletics, plus archived footage and broadcast highlights. For $4.95, fans will be able to watch every day of competition from the World Championships in Helsinki, including every heat of every track event, as well as extensive field event coverage.

Apparently, a new sports network called the World Championship Sports Network is going to be launched this summer and they are offering complete coverage of the Helsinki event via live webcasts. This is a step in the right direction, but I still think that the public interest is there for major networks to televise more of the significant events that occur in the sport of track and field.

In the case of the Sydney games, the 4×400m relay pool consisted of: Michael Johnson, Alvin Harrison, Calvin Harrison, Angelo Taylor, Antonio Pettigrew, and Jerome Young. The problem with this selection of athletes is that Jerome Young had just previously been tested positive for steroids in 1999. Yet somehow he was exonerated and escaped the mandatory two year ban from the sport (I still don’t know how this worked). In any case, Young ran on the relay team in the first two rounds but did not participate in the final round in which the US won the gold medal. Nevertheless, he also received a gold medal for his work in the preceding rounds.

Of course now just recently the US Anti-doping Agency decides that Young should not have been exonerated for his positive steroid test in 1999 and thus all of his performances should be slashed from the books. (Note that he has since been tested positive again for steroids and banned from the sport for life). The result is that the entire gold medal winning relay team from the Sydney games were in jeopardy of losing their medals because of Young cheating.

The final ruling in this case is that Young would be stripped of his medal but the rest of the participants on the team would get to keep theirs. I suppose it really is difficult to make a fair decision in this case. On the one hand none of the other relay members were cheating and thus were deserving of the medals that they won. On the other hand though, the other relay teams in those races are just as entitled to those medals that Young helped cheat his way into earning. In the end I think the decision made was about the best that they could do.

My question, though, is why was Young selected for the relay pool in the first place? Especially if he had tested positive for steroids the year before?! And why was he exonerated for that earlier positive test? The whole story is a bit strange to me.