Our Track And Field Wishlist ⏱️
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Compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder
Why Do We Have Two National Cross Country Championships? 🏆
2024 Sound Running Cross Champs (Photo by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto)
The holidays are a time for celebration and gratitude, so we’d hate to start this newsletter off on a negative note. But with so much… shall we say, room for improvement… in the sport that could be driven by powerful governing bodies, we’re going to do it anyway. Here’s this week’s old men yelling at clouds contention: the fact that the United States has one national cross country championship in December then another in January is wild.
First, let’s focus on the upside: Club Nats rocks. The USATF Club Cross Country Championship, usually held in early- to mid-December at rotating venues from Tacoma, WA, to Tallahassee, FL, is a beloved year-end celebration for a wide range of runners. The women’s open championship featured Allie Buchalski and Brooks Beast teammate Kayley DeLay outkicking the Hasz twins of BAA, but it wasn’t a track-only affair – 2:22 marathoner Emma Bates rounded out the top five just eight weeks after her 11th-place finish in Chicago.
The fastest finisher overall this year, men’s 10km champ Kenneth Rooks, has an Olympic silver medal in the steeplechase. Rounding out the field was Joyce Hodges-Hite of Atlanta Track Club, who at 87 years young, covered the master’s 6km course in 1:12:46. Literally no other race in the world celebrates that kind of range.
With 1,416 finishers across five races this year, it’s a real Goldilocks race – large and visible enough to be worth investing time and resources, but manageable enough that hundreds of cities and courses around the country could conceivably handle the burden of hosting.
But here’s the weird thing. Despite the big names up top, solid fields throughout, and it being a beautiful reflection of the dedicated running community at large, this final cross country race on everyone’s calendars each year is not the real national championship. No, that’s the other race: the USATF XC Championships, the next edition of which is scheduled for January 11, 2025 in Lubbock, Texas.
There are slight differences between the two: Club Nats runs 6km for women vs. 10km; U.S. XC features a junior race, etc., but if you’re looking at the USATF calendar and thinking to yourself, “hey, isn’t this redundant?” you’d be correct.
U.S. XC tends to be a much smaller affair, in part because it overlaps more directly with the indoor track season during a time when the top distance running talent in the country is fully locked in on track. Despite that, it also serves as a selection race for the World XC Championships in years when that championship is contested. (It was annual until 2011 then changed to biennial, then it got messed up by pandemic-related delays, but is now back to every two years: the next is in 2026.)
Club XC used to serve as a selection race for the Great Edinburgh Cross Country Festival, but that race went the way of the dodo in 2018. U.S. XC has individual prize money but no team prize; Club Nats currently offers team prize money alone.
So what would it look like to combine championships? Well, it would probably look a lot like Club XC with the addition of a handful of junior racers and a few more pros. The marginal costs wouldn’t be significant: in 2024, three of the seven races at U.S. XC had fewer than 50 finishers and all but one had fewer than 100. It would actually probably look a lot like Olympic Marathon Trials – a popular and proven championship format where the selection of six Olympians happily coexists with an entertaining and boisterous sub-elite race. And unlike road races, where permits, road closures, and police details can be a significant burden for a host city, cross country races are comparatively cheap to put on.
If nothing else, the American cross country season happens in the fall, dammit! And the national final should act as a satisfying conclusion to the racing year, not as a strange dangling appendage that doesn’t quite kick off the new year nor wrap up the previous one.
If there’s a compelling reason to keep two separate national cross country championships beyond maintenance of the status quo, let us know because we’re coming up empty. In the interest of focusing on the positive, let’s not think about this change as nixing the pro championship; we’re simply giving Club Nats the due attention and respect it’s earned. If the happy marriage of the two eventually turns sour, USATF can always split them up again – but until we’re proven wrong, let’s double down on a meet that people like and give them more of a good thing.
Our 2025 Matchup Wishlist 🎁
Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Keely Hodgkinson at the Paris Olympics (Photos by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto)
Dear Santa (who is real, and has subscribed to the Lap Count since 2022 with a 74% open rate!),
As far as weekly newsletters go, we feel we’ve been good this year. We delivered timely, relevant, and occasionally funny content to a readership that mostly seems to, well, tolerate us (and didn’t unsubscribe en masse when the TLC average mile time got a lot slower).
And as such, though very late in our request, we feel it’s totally reasonable to ask for the following things for Christmas – or for 2025, if you’re running a bit behind schedule. We know the elves are tired and the reindeer are ready to hit the showers. But these requests can’t be built in a toy shop anyways, and you might need to bribe some agents with milk and cookies.
What we want is something ephemeral and priceless. Something so conceptual you wouldn’t know how to shove it down a chimney if your life depended on it. What we want are some killer matchups during the 2025 track and field campaign.
Keely Hodgkinson vs. Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone over 600m. It’s been a while – at least since summer 2023 – since Sydney was truly pushed to the finish line in a race. It’s clear no one can do it in the 400m hurdles. With the growing number of sub-49 runners, it’s possible she’d meet her match over 400 meters, but if she focuses more on the flat event, it’d be hard to bet against her. But SML versus the Olympic 800m champion over 600m? Now that would be intriguing and could ignite the kind of fire under the world record holder that can only be lit by getting beat.
Fred Kerley vs. Noah Lyles over 400m. Noah Lyles hasn’t been shy about his desire to double up on Team USA relay spots… but before he knocks a 400m guy off the roster, he’s gotta prove he’s the best short sprinter for the job! And given that Kerley began his career in the 400m (and has an NCAA title, Diamond League trophy, and World bronze in the event), he’s the obvious choice.
Josh Kerr vs. Jakob Ingebrigtsen over 3000m. Somehow, this has never happened. The indoor world record holder over 2 miles and the 3000m/2 mile world record holder outdoors, who also may or may not hate each other, should race head-to-head over 3,000 meters. May we suggest World Indoors 2025 as a good venue?
Tara Davis-Woodhall vs. Katie Moon over 100m. Katie Moon talked about the potential of a pole vaulter head-to-head 100-meter race in an interview with CITIUS MAG this week, but wouldn’t it be even more fun to have two different Olympic champions on the runway take to the homestretch and see who comes out on top?
Gainesville All-Stars vs. Team USA over 4x100m. If there’s one thing Team USA can never seem to get right, it’s the 4x100m relay. And Paris was no exception. Team chemistry matters in the 4x100m, and the Florida-based training group that includes Grant Holloway, Pjai Austin, Erriyon Knighton, and Joe Fahnbulleh has the X factor. The quartet dropped a 37.67 at Florida Relays in March, which held up for the 7th-fastest performance of the year all through the championship season. If Fahnbulleh didn’t represent Liberia, we really should just give them the job – but beating an all-star U.S. team would be a fun consolation prize.
Arkansas All-Stars vs. Team USA over 4x400m. Similarly, it’s hard to argue that the greatest long-sprints program in the country couldn’t deliver a gold medal if international teams were allowed at the Olympics. The 2024 version of Americans Rosey Effiong, Kaylyn Brown, Brit Amber Anning, and Jamaican Nickisha Pryce could probably hang onto a Sydney-anchored Team USA, given that they ran 3:17.96 all alone at NCAAs, but throw a fully healthy Britton Wilson into the mix and it would be very, very close.
We know we’re being a little bit greedy here. We’ve already been promised Cole Hocker versus Grant Fisher in the 2 mile at Millrose. And with Grand Slam Track’s offerings starting up in the spring, we’re going to get some really great, head-to-head-to-head races all season long. But hey. A newsletter can dream, right?
What Track And Field Shouldn’t Learn From Basketball 🙅♂️
ATHLOS NYC 2024 (Photo by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto)
Gentle reader, please take a seat and halt operation of any heavy machinery. Engage in a little yoga breathing, count to ten, and do whatever else you need to regain your composure. Okay. Here it is. National Basketball Association television ratings are down.
It doesn’t mean the sport-viewing community and the basketball world love each other any less. It doesn’t mean basketball isn’t a great sport. And it’s not your fault! It just means some changes need to be made. But don’t worry. League commissioner Adam Silver, his hermetically sealed vault of MBA-credentialed growth and optimization wizards, dozens of executive VPs, professional consultants, and many others who live and die by shareholder value are on the case.
After days weeks months years of ordering in from Carbone, thumbing through slide decks, and staring at a white board with the word “SYNERGY” scrawled across it, these dangerous minds have yet to crack the code. In some ways – even from a track fan’s perspective – that’s deeply disheartening. With access to an unlimited money spigot, no shortage of middle-aged white guys with slicked back hairdos, and a product that, even at its dullest, produces zany and clip-ready highlights, the NBA can’t seem to crank the ratings-meter back to where it was during the halcyon days of the 1990s. If they can’t crack the code, what’s a scrappy underdog like track and field supposed to do?
For starters: we can internalize what hasn’t worked for the NBA and aim to avoid those same missteps. Sure, it’s its own $11 billion industry, but at the end of the day, pro basketball is really just a giant incubator for our far-more-important sport. So let’s dive into the seven problems the modern NBA faces that have direct track and field analogs.
They believe that more talent leads to a more exciting product.
One of the most tedious joys of being a basketball fan is that a large subset of said fandom insists – wrongly, but loudly – that basketball players were simply better 30 years ago. Were they more physical? Yes. Were there stars who would have been equally if not more successful if transposed into the modern league at their primes? Absolutely! But talent goes roster-deep: a bench player in the modern NBA, who’s probably 6’9”, can passably shoot the three, and has spent years reaping the physical benefits of modern exercise science – would likely receive significant minutes on any 1996 NBA squad.
The NBA now pulls athletes from the entire globe, so it’s not just the top players in America (with a smattering of Europeans) rounding out NBA rosters but the actual best players from each of the inhabitable continents. They are all massive. They can all shoot the lights out. Scoring is way, way up! The pace of play is a blur compared to two decades ago! In short, the league has plenty of Jakob Ingebrigtsens and Faith Kipyegons capable of rewriting record books in a Wavelight-assisted supershoe time trial.
More scoring means more fun, right? If we can just get to a place where every team sinks 18 threes a night, our little “ratings oopsie” will be a thing of the past! Just like how faster times and farther tosses and longer/higher jumps mean more interesting events, right?! Or maybe it just lowers tension and deadens our sensitivity to true greatness…
There’s been a flattening of strategies and styles.
The latest sports statistics all suggest that if you load up your roster with decent-to-good three-point shooters, your total points will be maximized if you just start indiscriminately launching from deep. So, of course, all 30 NBA teams run the exact same offense scheme, and every random Wednesday night game turns into a repetitive slugfest between interchangeable teams, one of which may be located near where you live.
In sports, it’s not enough for the outcome to be unexpected. How that outcome is reached matters just as much, if not more. Fans crave unpredictability – moments of tension and uncertainty, opportunities to gasp and nudge the person sitting next to them. It’s ultimately more fun to see Christian Coleman’s start matched against Noah Lyles’s finish than to watch nine identical race patterns play out side-by-side.
Noah Lyles and Christian Coleman at the 2024 U.S. Olympics Trials (Photo by Kevin Morris / @kevmofoto)
It’s hard to institutionally force competitors to change how they compete, even via rule changes. But one tried-and-true method is to physically alter the arena of play or criteria for success. This is hard for an entity like the NBA to pull off – do you let each home team draw its own court boundaries and set its own quarter lengths?
But for track, it’s simple: skip the rabbits or pacing lights and push for more interesting race formats. Racing at Franklin Field is actually pretty different than at Hayward Field, and that’s not even getting into street meets, cross-country, off distances, or many other options available and waiting for us to leverage.
They’re changing rules just to do it.
Innovation. IN. OH. VAY. SHUN. A buzzword so common it’s essentially lost all meaning. But it still sounds cool in a pitch meeting! Innovation can mean tinkering with a beloved product just so, to bring out the very best in it. But it can also mean letting a bull run through a china shop – you’re guaranteed a dramatically different outcome, but not necessarily a better one.
First, you change the in-game rules. “Innovations” like the Coaches’ Challenge, which allows NBA coaches to officially call into question the veracity of a call made by the refs. The refs huddle around a little television and stop the action dead to view a few key frames of footage from every conceivable angle to see if they got the whistle right. And we, the fans, are bored to tears because the flow of the game is totally ruined. Plus we’re deprived of something every sports-lover secretly craves: the ability to grumble about a botched call.
This is a problem the track and field community knows well. World Athletics’s own MBA brain trust thinks we can save the sport by turning long jump boards into takeoff zones, reducing field event series to a sixth-round do-or-die, and measuring pole vault attempts with lasers. Innovation without improvement is just rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic – either way, the ship is still sinking.
At the end of the day, there’s simply too much basketball.
Every NBA team plays 80+ regular season games. That’s after the five-ish preseason games they’re forced to suit up for. And if they’re lucky, a team will play some playoff games, too: at minimum four, at maximum 28. Plus, some guys have to slap on a fake grin and sleepwalk through the All-Star Game. It’s just too much.
Players’ enormous bodies break down over the course of this grueling season, so they get hurt or rest or just play a checked-out style of basketball: the ol’ “scheduled loss.” A lot of these guys don’t care most nights of the year. (It is a job after all. Are you giving it 110% for every email you send or brick you stack? If you’re a heart surgeon, hopefully the answer is yes, but the rest of us are just trying to get through the week.) Every once in a while, you catch a game where everyone is locked in and you’re reminded of just how beautiful and captivating this game can be. But if those games only come in May and June, what’s the point of January?
On this front, we’re only doing slightly better. There is an awful lot of track and field out there. It’s just that nearly all of it is akin to the preseason. We don’t have enough “good track.” But we’ve at least identified the problem and Michael Johnson is throwing money at it.
Even if you want to watch all that basketball, they don’t make it easy.
We’re lousy with basketball. We’re drowning in it. And the NBA presumably wants for people to watch all of it, Clockwork Orange-style, eyeballs forced open, so they can charge other companies a lot of money to sell us beer and insurance.
But they don’t make it easy. Do you have cable? Do you have your grandparents’ login info? If you do, that helps. But in this day and age, paying for cable is not enough. One must subscribe to a smorgasbord of buggy streaming apps and platforms to become the best basketball viewer one can be.
Oh, that’s right dear reader. You know this particular paragraph by heart. For a while, it seemed like we were starting to solve this problem, as more and more track and field content found its way onto Peacock, YouTube, or both. And then the Diamond League let the highest bidder stick its premium product behind a paywall, so we’re back to square one in 2025.
And star quality can’t be taught or bought.
It’s often said the NBA is a superstar-driven league. But what makes an athlete capable of transcending their domain of greatness to become a can’t-miss, cross-cultural icon?
Is it enough to be absolutely dominant at what you do? No. The best basketball player at the moment is Nicola Jokic, a man who looks like he’s about to cry during every media appearance because he is tired… tired of playing basketball… and he dearly misses his horses back home in Serbia. Is it enough to be hot? Again, nope. NBA League Pass subscribers have been peppered with SKIMS ads featuring oiled and shirtless MVP candidate Shai Gilgeous-Alexander for years now, and he’s yet to become a household name outside of households that subscribe to NBA League Pass. Is it enough to be devastatingly charismatic? Some good old fashioned charm goes farther than other qualities, but you need to earn your spot on the world’s radar before it can become disarming.
There are the lucky few who truly transcend, but in recent history that list isn’t much longer than LeBron James and Usain Bolt. And here, track and field is once again ahead of basketball: we’ve already had to grapple with trying to channel love for an individual into enthusiasm for a sport after a generation-shifting retirement, albeit with mixed results. NBC has spent a lot of time and money selling us Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone and Noah Lyles as The Next Big Thing, and while they’re among the small group of athletes whose names at least ring a bell with your uncle’s sister’s roommate’s barber, they’re not on Usain’s level yet.
It’s here that track and field is very both blessed and cursed to exist within the shadow of the Olympics. The Games themselves are the superstar. Every four years millions of fans willingly turn on their televisions to learn a whole new slate of names and develop passionate feelings about their favorite Paris 2024 figureheads… only to forget them entirely by September.
What we really need to improve is our storytelling.
Narratives, narratives, narratives. Narratives are everywhere. Narratives shape how we perceive colors, they impact how we taste food, and they inform how we feel about the current state of the National Basketball Association. Within the NBA, the narratives aren’t good. A lot of these are organic in nature. The public has grown tired of the same old BS, and there’s only so many times someone can be subjected to footage of Luka Doncic flailing around then flopping to the floor to pick up a couple foul shots before changing the channel.
But a lot of narratives are inorganic. The 24/7 news cycle needs to talk about something, and you can get paid a lot of money to scream “basketball is broken” in a corner of a SportsCenter splits screen every day for years. Many prominent members of basketball’s commentariat seem to hate basketball and anyone who plays it.
The proliferation of well-poisoning opinions like these is an unforced error. There’s a fine line between being constructively critical of a sport you love and mud-slinging for attention. Here in our little corner of the Internet, we believe there’s no point in condemning a problem without offering a solution, which is why we try to pair every TLC complaint with a free idea for a fix (Maybe we should start charging USATF to read the second half of every newsletter?)
So here’s our olive branch to the WA NBA bigwigs: take a beat, think about what made you love track and field basketball in the first place, and how you can get more people to pay attention to that stuff. How do relationships between teammates evolve? Where does improvement come from? How does a lesson from a regular-season loss lead to a postseason win? There are stories out there worth telling that, by their very nature, require investment from fans to follow from start to finish, and you folks have a really big and popular platform to share them.
Rapid Fire Highlights 🔥
– Up here in the northern hemisphere we’re starved for track events of significance and banging out treatises about what track can learn from the NBA. But down south, they’re in the middle of their damn outdoor season! Your 2024 Australian 10,000m champions are Jack Rayner (28:26.12) and Rose Davies (32:21.71).
– At the Kolkata 25K, Ugandan marathon record holder Stephen Kissa prevailed against a stout men’s field in 1:12:33, while the women’s race was won by Sutume Asefa Kebede of Ethiopia, who similarly took down some big names to win in 1:19:21.
– The American prep cross country season concluded this past weekend with Foot Locker Nationals. Elizabeth Leachman, a junior from Champion High school in Boerne, Texas – a San Antonio exurb with a surprisingly rich running tradition – won for the second year in a row. And in the boys’ race, your winner was Tamrat Gavenas, who attends Phillips Andover (the Harvard of high schools) outside of Boston. Gavenas will remain outside of Boston next year to run for the Harvard of colleges: Harvard.
– Julie Stackhouse, formerly of the University of Virginia and the Air Force Academy, has been announced as a new assistant coach for the Brooks Beasts.
– Both Olympic 100m champions will be heading to Boston on February 2nd of next year to headline the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix, as Julien Alfred and Noah Lyles have committed to racing the 60m at the World Indoor Tour meet.
– UK Athletics’s yearslong budget woes continue, as the British federation faces an 8 percent cut to the funding it receives from the larger UK Sport organization.
– In happier British news, Olympic triathlon champ Alex Yee, who’s also a sub-28 10,000m runner on the track, is planning to make his marathon debut in London next year with the goal of breaking 2:10.
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