I am certainly not the first, much less the only, scribe to address this issue. But for the moment, forget about who didn't show up at the inaugural USATF Los Angeles Grand Prix on May 26th. A lot was made of who wasn't there - Athing Mu, Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone - but in fact, headliners not showing up to track meets is an age-old athletics problem, a circumstance that reminds us how incompatible with a professional sport athletics truly is.
You can't tout your stars to sell tickets and viewership, then have them show up dancing in the stands rather than competing on the track!
I recently listened to a 2011 interview with Brit middle distance legends Steve Ovett and Steve Cram about why athletes in the 1980s, one of the glorious eras of middle distance running in history, didn't race against each other very much, and often competed in complimentary events in the same meet like the 1500 and the mile, but not against one another.
"Seb (Coe) was a wonderful speed-endurance athlete," said Ovett. "Most of his training was indoors. He was an exceptional indoor runner. Broke many records indoors. In my case, I was doing far too much distance work…So I was coming off very slow endurance work, and Seb was coming off very fast speed work. I didn't want to race Seb till I knew I was ready. And to be honest, it took me a lot of time to get ready after running 9 miles in the mud in cross country. So I wanted to make sure when I took the guy on, I was ready. Because if I didn't, he would've beat me every damn time because he was too fast for me, quite literally. But if he beat me when I was in my best shape, no excuses."
Simply put, the long-standing system in of track and field creates an all-or-nothing binary that steers athletes away from competition, and to hell with the fans. Based on crowd totals in LA - an officially announced attendance of 7,249, later said to be closer to 4,500 - evidently, the people chose the netherworld.
The entire track schedule - and its payoffs - is focused on major championships, not the regular season meetings. Accordingly, even brand new, highly touted meets like the LA GP in a major US market, which will once again be an Olympic venue in five years, can't fill their modest-sized stadium, can't guarantee the big stars, even when their coaches are the meet directors, and the governing federation is a presenting co-producer.
Here's the thing: if your system only pays people for winning but simultaneously penalizes them for losing - which is how the shoe company contracts work with their reduction clauses - guess what? Nobody shows up unless they are 100% ready, just like Ovett said. This system goes back decades!
That may protect the athletes, but it kills the sport for the fans because it encourages avoidance rather than engagement. Systems, my friends, create realities. And how would we gauge athletics' system working these days? Seems to be little more than an offshoot of the shoe industry.
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