Fading Into Anonymity

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In watching the Track and Field Olympic Trials this past week, I was constantly struck by the inordinate amount of attention dedicated to the sprint events. Tyson Gay's cramp in the 200 received more air time than the Men's 10,000 meter final, Alyson Felix's desperate desire to qualify in the 200 after failing in the 100 was treated as a national emergency, and NBC just couldn't get enough of those sprint heats, showing every last one of them ad infinitum.

I am a track fan. I enjoy watching pure speed just as much as anyone. So let's get that out of the way. But I love the pacing and dueling of a long distance race far more. There is a story to each race, and a sense of anticipation as the runners move closer and closer to the bell lap and inevitable sprint finish. But there doesn't seem to be much of a place for that on television these days -- not unless you want to fly off to Europe, where such races are shown in their entirety, not broken up by Up Close and Personal vignettes or a series of commercials that eliminate all but the first and last lap of a race. 

And while these may sound like the rants of a distance-mad viewer (they are), i believe that the roots of track and field's diminishment can be found in that point of view. A network like NBC will claim that viewers don't have the patience to watch a long race like the 5,000 or 10,000, preferring the blink-of-an-eye time span it takes to watch a sprint event: to which I say: b.s. You could run an entire 3,000 meter steeplechase in the time it takes to watch eight sprinters scratch themselves and settle into the blocks. And let's not forget that millions of Americans are happily losing themselves in hours of Tour de France coverage right now, some rising before dawn to hear the race called properly by Liggett and Sherwen (an aside: the evening commentary is execrable).  

So why the focus on sprints, at the expense of all other events (and thus the downfall of track and field, and overall diminishment of mankind and life as we know it in these fifty united states)? I think it's three things: 1) Shorter viewer attention span; 2) Up Close and Personal; 3) Us.

Let's break it down. Shorter viewer attention span is a no-brainer. We all know that the MTV generation lives in sound bites and paragraph bites. Everything is a quick cut or a flash. Try reading Men's Health sometime, and see how long it takes before their two-sentence info bites that pass as journalism drive you quietly insane. 

The second one, that Up Close and Personal thing.... I just have to believe that ever since programmers realized how much we love warm and fuzzy interludes, that the evolution toward their replacing actual competitive coverage was inevitable. Nothing sandwiches better between commercials than a 100-meter final and a three-minute background clip.

Finally, Us.  I just don't think that we, as an endurance community, care. We're out there doing it ourselves, running the trails and doing our Ironmans and swimming to Catalina. The connection between age-group endeavour and elite racing is non-existent, even though these are the events that spawned age-group competition. So when we watch track and field on television (or even the 800 and 1500 of the swimming Trials), there is a disconnect. I would go so far as to say that we don't care. Which is not to say we are uncaring. We just don't revel in the fact that track and field competition at the top level is age-group competition taken to its most outrageous competitive extreme. 

How do we fix this? How do we change things so that the Beijing coverage isn't just one sprint heat after another. I have no idea, but I'm open to your opinions.

Keep pushing... always.

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