And The Winner Is... ⏱️

Dec 04, 2024

Lap 197: Sponsored by Nike

Conquer Winter in Style: Best Men’s Sneakers from Nike Air Max.

Winter is here, and it’s time to elevate your look while staying warm and comfortable. The Nike Air Max collection is perfect for the modern man ready to tackle the season. From the edgy Air Max Plus to the versatile AM1, these sneakers combine style with features designed to keep your feet happy all winter long.

Whether you're tackling holiday shopping or celebrating with friends, these kicks are your perfect companion. Find your ideal pair and effortlessly elevate your winter wardrobe this season.

Treat yourself or a loved one to a stylish pair from the collection this holiday season.

Shop the Men’s Collection

Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, and Paul Hof-Mahoney

What Athlete Of The Year Tells Us About The State Of The Sport 🏆

Sifan Hassan after winning the Paris Olympics Marathon. (Photo by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto)

With the Oscars still four months away, you might have thought awards season was a ways off – but you’d be wrong. As if an endless cavalcade of medals, prize money, bonus checks, and popular adoration wasn’t enough, World Athletics also hands out a bunch of end-of-season awards to its favorite athletes at a lavish ceremony in Monaco (where was our invite?) every December.

This year, WA also added the appearance of democracy into the mix by crowning its “World Athletes of the Year” via popular vote – the big winners of which being Sifan Hassan and Letsile Tebogo.

Your first reaction very well might be – big whoop! A bunch of well-paid World and Olympic champions added one more accolade to the pile. But the World Athletics Awards and who wins them do say something interesting about the state of the sport and the direction it’s headed. Inherent in the process is a weighted comparison of different achievements (Olympic medal or world record? Championship skill or ability to run fast?). And the crop of awardees are, by definition, going to be held up as the face of the sport in the year(s) to come.

The awards process is opaque, to say the least. WA refers to its selection team as an “international panel of athletics experts, comprising representatives from all six continental areas.” Nominees are named in six categories – men’s and women’s track, field, and “out-of-stadium” – and then narrowed down to two finalists apiece, but the actual selection criteria and voting process is unclear. The inherent subjectivity, while frustrating when your fave doesn’t make the cut, is fascinating because it allows the results to reflect what World Athletics The Governing Body, our all-powerful rules-setting championship-administering overlords, values and wants to promote about the sport.

One of the clearest takeaways is that World Athletics is really leaning into track and field being a global sport. For all the bickering in various corners of the Internet about the America-centric bent to track and field coverage (particularly in the sprints), the nation that won more than triple the Olympic medals of any other in 2024 only ended up with one awardee, Track Athlete of the Year Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone. In fact, Team USA only had one finalist out of twelve after eight initial nominations.

Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone at the Paris Olympics. (Photo by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto)

The six main awardees were a pretty young crowd – Sydney is the veteran of the in-stadium crew at an ancient 25 years old, and even the marathoners are young for road runners (Hassan is 31 and Tamirat Tola is 33). Track and field remains a young person’s game, to be sure, but what this really means is that we could be seeing a lot more of these six faces over the decade to come. This is already Mondo Duplantis’s fourth year in a row being recognized as an Athlete of the Year – and he’s not going anywhere any time soon.

World Athletics also doesn’t seem to care as much about competing during the regular season as you’d think. Duplantis, Mahuchikh, and Tebogo were regulars on the Diamond League circuit, but McLaughlin-Levrone beat out the likes of Julien Alfred, Marileidy Paulino, and Faith Kipyegon to claim top track honors. In an era where we’re constantly hand-wringing about the sport’s historical over-emphasis on the Olympics and record-setting, WA had no qualms with handing out one of its precious trophies to the athlete who epitomizes “show up to Paris and set a world record and nothing else matters.”

The “out-of-stadium” honorees seemed to underscore that point, as the Olympic marathon champions won both awards in a year where many cases could be made for the world’s best marathoner. Sure, Hassan gets some bonus points for her audacious triple in Paris, but two of her three events were in-stadium and (presumably) not factored in, compared with someone like record-setter Ruth Chepngetich or world major podium mainstay Hellen Obiri.

We can also deduce a few other things World Athletics doesn’t seem to value highly – or know how to recognize properly. Beatrice Chebet set a world record, won World XC for the second year in a row, and was the only athlete to pick up two individual golds in Paris. But clearly the powers that be don’t really consider a 5000m/10,000m double to be as impressive as 100m/200m or any other combination. For all intents and purposes, it feels like the distance double is perceived as an easier accomplishment – despite necessitating 37.5 laps of racing.

World records clearly were considered big bonus points by the nameless selection committee, as high jumper Mahuchikh beat out three-time Olympic heptathlon champion Nafissatou Thiam. If there’s ever an event where you should get a pass for competing infrequently, it’s the multis, and if there’s ever an event where the ability to perform on a high level over multiple years should be considered, it’s the multis. So what do we have to do to get World Athletics to put some respect on Nafi Thiam’s name?!

None of these revelations should be particularly groundbreaking for longtime fans of the sport. We’re shocked – shocked! – to discover that WA cares too much about the Olympics and not enough about distance and multi events. But if you’re looking for somewhere to place a thumb on a scale to right some of the sport’s many imbalances, the awards process is an easier target than changing meet results or social media counts. The powers-that-be don’t have total control over what track and field fans, old and new, will care about any given season, but World Athletics has far greater ability than most to direct the public consciousness toward a particular kind of achievement or a specific brand of athlete.

So while it may feel silly to scrutinize a largely meaningless accolade, it’s worth taking a moment to think about what our governing body is trying to tell us about what matters most in track and field – and to think about whether those values truly reflect the best version of the sport it can be.

Repairing A Broken Circuit 🔌

Weini Kelati en route to shattering the American half marathon record at the 2024 Houston Half. (Photo by Johnny Zhang / @jzsnapz)

Last Thursday wasn’t just Thanksgiving– it was the 88th edition of the Manchester Road Race, a parade of 12,000+ runners that puts the Macy’s parade to shame and has a credible argument that it’s the most competitive turkey trot in the world. The unstoppable Weini Kelati took her fourth straight title on the 4.737-mile course in 23:14, a time that’s insignificant other than it’s the second-fastest women’s mark run on the course (behind, of course, Kelati’s own course record). Andrew Colley of ZAP Endurance took the men’s title in 21:07, outkicking Eduardo Herrera and Edwin Kurgat down the homestretch. Sadly, Colley just got married to fellow runner Tristin Colley (nee van Ord) in September, so he couldn’t replicate Morgan Beadlescomb’s viral proposal moment from 2023.

Nevertheless, as we returned from our own far-less-impressive trots and tucked into our first (but not last) slice of pumpkin pie, the Lap Count brain trust (with the confidential help of a few other members of the group chat) couldn’t help but chew on a lingering question: Why are there so many historic and cool road races in the United States that have no connection to one another and no blessing by USATF?

To be clear, there is a USATF road racing championship circuit. The 2024 iteration features nine road races of varying distances, each billed as a “X KM national championship,” plus the USA XC championship and the Olympic Marathon Trials. Existing road races of varying levels of prestige submit bids, which include a promise to pony up prize money, and USATF picks the winners.

Sounds great, right? In theory, yes. Except for a couple big flaws. One – some of the most prestigious road races in the country, like Manchester, are competed over their own unique distances and thus ineligible to participate. Unlike, of course, universally beloved and respected standard distances like 25km or 6km.

Just as critically, a race has to proactively approach USATF and submit a bid. The federation, by its own rules, can’t take it upon itself to name a national championship. But a lot of the best road races in the country have no problem attracting their own pro fields and popular interest – in short, USATF needs Manchester more than Manchester needs USATF. The inevitable result is that many national championships are held in the same places every year (like the New Haven 20k or the Gate River Run) and sometimes, there isn’t even a national championship held every year, like the nonexistent 2023 U.S. marathon champs.

With little attention, prestige, or athlete interest, it’s a system that’s become something of a joke and often raises complaints about how and when events are announced and communicated. There are valid reasons for keeping the status quo – including increased prize money outside of marathons, building up a stronger domestic-only racing scene, and drawing some attention to smaller races – but if the goal is for the U.S. Road Circuit to be something fans care about and actively follow, it’s safe to say that the system is badly in need of a shakeup.

The good news is the ingredients for a revamp already exist: every year, a significant number of popular, heavily spectated, well-established non-marathon road races attract top pros and hand out big prize money. All USATF has to do is lay its collective pride aside and flex a little dictatorial muscle – there’s nothing stopping the organization from simply naming a circuit of any races it wants.

And even better, we did the legwork for them! After poring through the history books and searching the country far and wide, we’re proposing a new USATF Road Racing circuit using the following events:

January: Houston Half Marathon, Houston, TX
March: Shamrock Shuffle 8K, Chicago, IL
April: Cherry Blossom 10 miler, Washington D.C. | Broad Street 10 miler, Philadelphia, PA
May: Bay To Breakers 12k, San Francisco, CA | Bolder Boulder 10k, Boulder, CO
July: Peachtree Road Race (10k), Atlanta, GA | Boilermaker 15k, Utica, NY
August: Falmouth Road Race, Falmouth, MA
November: Manchester Road Race, Manchester, CT

The result would be a seven-race series each year featuring four annual races and three races switching off even/odd years. Race distances range from 8 km to 13.1 miles and no two races are the same distance each year. Plenty of worthy races would, sadly, be left on the cutting room floor – but maybe after a decade or so they can work their way back into the mix, Sydney Marathon-style (or pitch us and/or USATF your favorites for inclusion now before it’s too late).

The big downside with this approach is that an American wouldn’t necessarily finish first overall in strong international fields – but that’s never been a problem for how we follow and cover World Marathon Majors either. Like the WMM series, a runner wouldn’t have to commit to all seven races to rack up points in the overall scoring, but the net result would be that finishing with top U.S. honors at, say, Cherry Blossom-Peach Tree-Falmouth would mean something: you’re the best American road runner this year. That feels like it’s worth caring about, alongside marathon rankings or national track titles – we just need a system that feels like it authentically determines the best in this category.

Ideally, the circuit could be both a place where road specialists like Kelati and Colley can shine alongside the likes of Grant Fisher or Conner Mantz as a distinct, but separate thing. And the clout of each individual race could attract talent from one arena to another. Hell, it already does, given the number of Chicago runners that tune up at Falmouth each year, or the 10,000m specialists who test the waters of longer distances in Houston. And history means something to fans and athletes alike. Most readers of this newsletter could correctly identify Falmouth as taking place in August, but without checking, how many could accurately place the USATF 20K champs in September? Until USATF proves it unilaterally has the clout to turn a mid-tier race into a national marquee, beggars can’t be choosers.

They say there’s no bad ideas in brainstorming. Moreover, there’s no bad ideas when the current system isn’t succeeding at what it’s trying to do. Road racing outside the 26.2 distance deserves its spotlight alongside the many other worthy competition formats; we just haven’t quite figured out how to make it happen yet. So why not try something new?

What Can We Actually Learn From A Race Like Valencia? 🇪🇸

Sabastian Sawe winning the 2024 Valencia Marathon on the men’s side. (Courtesy Maratón Valencia)

How about that Valencia Marathon?

For starters, Sabastian Sawe of Kenya totally delivered on the potential many Sabastianiacs saw in him. The reigning World Half Marathon champ and 58:05 runner doubled down in distance and comfortably won over a star-studded field. His 2:02:05 clocking makes him the fifth fastest marathoner of all time, behind only Kelvin Kiptum, Eliud Kipchoge, Kenenisa Bekele, and Sisay Lemma – who Sawe beat by almost three minutes on Sunday. Behind Sawe, nine other men dipped under 2:05… a time that was, at one point in the not-so-distant past, Really Good.

Just on the other side of the 2:05 barrier finished NCAA legend Edward Cheserek (2:05:24) – yep, King Ches is still out here, still representing Kenya, and still hacking away at it, and seems to have found his footing over 26.2. U.S. road circuit mainstay Biya Simbassa knocked nearly four minutes off his PB, going 2:06:53, good for a solid 17th place finish. There are now only three names ahead of Simbassa on the U.S. all-time list: Ryan Hall, Khalid Khannouchi, and Galen Rupp.

Ethiopia’s Megertu Alemu won the women’s race in commanding fashion. After she crossed the line in 2:16:49, about 90 seconds would pass before second place – Ugandan Stella Chesang – came through. It’s nuts, but it’s the world we live in now, that a 2:16 victory barely makes a ripple in the marathoning scene, but alas.

Megertu Alemu winning the 2024 Valencia Marathon on the women’s side. (Courtesy Maratón Valencia)

And in more good news for our American readership, rounding out the top-ten finishers was Sara Hall, who smashed her own American masters record, going 2:23:45. Molly Grabill carved three minutes off her former PB, finishing in 2:26:46. Sofia Comacho – who won the non-binary division at the New York City Marathon last month – executed one hell of a quick turnaround, and dipped under 2:30 for the first time in their career. And the 46-year-old Roberta Groner also ran under 2:30 to set a new American 45-49 age group record.

takes a big drag of a metaphorical cigarette But does any of this really matter anyway?

It’s not that the races were inherently boring, or that the Spanish city’s streets failed to propel runners to blazing fast times. It’s just that we feel like we’ve been here before… repeatedly.

It was another marathon that reshuffled the all-time lists, where the winners prevailed thanks to a deep field, good pace job, and favorable weather. After giving the victors their flowers and plucking out a handful of notable, further-back performances we’re left looking at a wicked fast results page that makes us feel nothing.

This wasn’t a time trial and it didn't necessarily play out like one – there was actual racing afoot! But it still feels like the stakes aren’t that high for an event that routinely attracts the top marathoners on the planet. (Even Sawe’s incredible 2:02:05 debut feels defined by what it’s not — the world record.)

As we’ve belabored weekly for years now in this newsletter, racing is what makes the sport special, not marks. Marathon results, and our discussion of them, need to focus more on place and time differential, rather than solely on time. Sisay Lemma ran 2:04:59 for 10th place. For just about every runner on earth that’s a solid day’s work. But Lemma is the defending champ and has been in the conversation for best marathoner of 2024. “Sisay Lemma - 10th - [+2:54]” tells a much more complete story. This was not a good race for Lemma! It was his lowest finish in a marathon in five years. If was probably a really good one for Sawe, but until he shows up and performs like this a few more times, it’s a stretch to call him the fifth best marathoner ever.

Pivoting now to giving World Athletics a gentle, affirmative nod. The move toward championship qualification via World rankings and away from time is still a bit wonky for just about every in-stadium event. But for the marathon, it’s great. We want to see a starting line made up of fantastic racers. People who win often, and do so by intimidating margins. Why not do away with automatic standards entirely in this one event and see how it goes?

All of this is not Valencia’s fault. It’s a well-produced race meeting a demonstrated demand. But maybe— maybe! If we change the way we talk about races like Valencia, we can change what fans and athletes value in a race, and ultimately change the sport itself.

What The Rest Of The Sport Can Learn From Collegiate Cross Country 🤔

Some of the top men’s field at the 2024 NCAA Cross Country Championship. (Photo by Mac Fleet / @macfleet)

By Paul Hof-Mahoney

In the hallowed halls of the CITIUS MAG group chats, I’m known as “Paulie Throws.” Whether it’s writing overly-long U.S. Trials throws previews that inevitably get trimmed for length or popping in for field event recaps on our post-Olympics show, I’m the guy reporting on every attempt of every event on the infield. But this fall, I decided to take on a new challenge: keeping up with collegiate cross country.

Now, I know it sounds crazy that a fellow Florida Gator didn’t closely follow the fall season during The Year Of Parker Valby, and looking back now, I think it’s crazy too! I quickly realized (and repented for) my ignorance while helping out with some research for a fun piece by fellow intern Audrey Allen comparing 1500m/mile and cross country success in the leadup to this season. Before even setting foot on a course, I was hooked.

I didn’t have to wait long to scratch my itch as I headed up to Tallahassee the second weekend of October to catch the FSU Invite. It was a very low-key race that ultimately ended up looking like an FSU-LSU dual meet, but my first taste of true cross country vibes was immaculate, giving me a glimpse of what I had been missing out on. Cross-country meets feel alive – a huge sea of tangled up bodies, teams moving through warmups as a fourteen-legged unit, coaches shouting instructions to their athletes from right there on the edge of the course – everything felt so connected and I was enthralled from start to finish. While at this race, I also had the lingering thought in the back of my head the whole time that it is so weird that the World Cross Country Championship is going to be in Tallahassee, Florida, of all places, in 13 months.

Next up on my calendar was the Big Ten champs, hosted by Illinois. A championship title on the line made the stakes – and the energy – way higher. Chasing the fastest collegians from the Midwest (and the not-so-Midwest) around a golf course for a little over 40 minutes was thoroughly exhausting, but I learned an important lesson: There is no greater bond between spectators in this sport than the one formed by huffing and puffing back and forth across a damp field on a crisp 45°F morning with the same pack of parents, friends, and fans.

After the meet, individual champs Şilan Ayyildiz, and Bob Liking couldn’t stop talking about their respective team wins- even though they had just earned the all-important one point finish. Ayyildiz emphasized that Oregon winning as a team was her main goal throughout the whole season. Even with coach Shalane Flanagan’s laundry list of accolades from her time as an athlete, her palpable joy and pride in what her team was able to accomplish in her first season as head coach of the Oregon women couldn’t help but make you smile.

It began to become clear what separates cross country from its in-stadium cousin. Cross-country is pure sports. There’s no specialization, there’s no chasing times, there’s no pacers, and you can’t win team titles on the back of one star. On the track, there are so many more opportunities for individual glory to outshine any team or brand logo on your chest, but all the beauty of cross country is the collective pursuit. To quote Providence’s Laura Mooney: “To do something as an individual is something, but to do something as a team is f*cking everything.”

Even though we didn’t grab a surprise 3rd-place finish ourselves, the CITIUS team still had a successful trip up to Wisconsin for Nationals. Not even a lost wallet on a hectic travel day could bring this weekend down. I think I’m contractually obligated to say that the highlight of the whole weekend was finally meeting Chris Chavez after working for him for 8 months, but in all seriousness it was an incredible meet that couldn’t have been scripted any better.

We’ve talked enough about what actually went down in Madison, but one moment that stuck in my head outside the results was about 90 seconds before the starting gun went off, when fellow CITIUS MAG correspondent Jasmine Fehr and I got a little too ambitious with how close we’d be able to get to the start line. As we frantically tried to find a way off the course so as not to get trampled by the pack, it was nearly impossible to find a gap in a solid wall of people five rows deep lining both sides of the opening straightaway. THAT kind of attendance, bumping right up against where the athletes were racing, is so hard to match in a collegiate track setting.

Paul and Jasmine just minutes before all the action (and chaos) kicked off.

From following around legends like Sonia O’Sullivan and Diljeet Taylor around the course, to watching Habtom Samuel lose his shoe with 5K to go then battle to a runner-up finish, to his jersey swap heard ‘round the world with NCAA Graham Blanks, the whole race felt like we were getting the best – and most accessible – version of track and field. While TV broadcasts of cross-country can be hit-or miss, the in-person experience is unrivaled.

If there’s some grand point to this reflective rambling, it’s that there are lessons for track and field to be learned from cross-country. Whether it’s bringing fans physically closer to the action (like an infield beer garden or on-track cheering during distance races), hyping up the team competition (who doesn’t love cheering for a 4x400m with an NCAA title on the line?), or simply throwing out the clock and focusing on competition (looking at you, Grand Slam Track), the things XC is doing right can be replicated and adapted. I’ll see you out on the grass next fall, and maybe in the meantime we can work together to bring that same energy to the throwing ring.

Rapid Fire Highlights 🔥

– With the Sharon Colyear-Danville Season Opener set to take place on Saturday, the men’s and women’s accepted entries have been posted. The top five men and women from last month’s cross country championship are all entered in the 5000m – Harvard’s Graham Blanks, New Mexico’s Habtom Samuel, Furman’s Dylan Schubert, Arkansas’s Yaseen Abdalla, and Oklahoma State’s Brian Musau; Alabama’s Doris Lemngole, Florida’s Hilda Olemomoi, New Mexico’s Pamela Kosgei, Stanford’s Amy Bunnage, and NC State’s Grace Hartman.

– At the Fukuoka International Marathon, Yuya Yoshida posted a decisive win (2:05:16) over the field of exclusively men, most of them Japanese, many of them very fast – 50th place ran 2:25:11.

– Meanwhile, at the 2024 Shanghai Marathon (which is vying to become another World Marathon Major), Eritrea’s Samsom Amare held off Kenya’s Titus Kipruto (an incredibly cool name) by just four seconds to break the tape; Meanwhile, Bekelech Gudeta led a podium sweep for the Ethiopian women, ahead of Sisay Meseret Gola and Tejitu Siyum.

– Noah Lyles made a lot of people angry by claiming in an interview with LetsRun that “no one cares about the 200m.” For a detailed and reasonable breakdown of both sides of Lyles’s latest controversy, Anderson Emerole is your guy.

– Jakob Ingebrigtsen will try for his third title in the last four years at the 2024 European Cross Country Championships this Sunday in Antalya, Turkey. A Norwegian sweep is possible as Karoline Grøvdal goes for her fourth straight title – not bad for a nation of 5.5 million people.

– Photographer Michael Steele’s shot of the argy-bargy at the end of the Olympic marathon between Sifan Hassan and Tigist Assefa was named World Athletics Photograph of the Year.

Interested in reaching 16,000+ dedicated runners and track and field fans? Advertise with us here.