A Brave, New World (Standard) ⏱️
Lap 274: Presented by Bandit Grand Prix
Presented by Bandit Grand Prix
The Bandit Grand Prix is this Saturday, May 30th at Brooklyn Storehouse. 3,000 racers and 2,000 spectators signed up. The Bandit team has pulled out all the stops to level up after last year’s epic event.
If you’re around this weekend, RSVP for a free spectator ticket and come cheer on racers from 21 countries and 45 states.
(Note: Spectators will be allowed in on a first-come-first serve basis. See more details on the official Eventbrite page.)
Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, & Kyle Merber
2027’s World Championship Standards Are Out—Will Anything Change?
The CITIUS MAG hivemind put together an incredibly detailed piece about the ambitious new auto-qualifying standards set by World Athletics for the 2027 World Championships. You can dive into the nitty gritty of the new standards and slight rule changes here, and if you’re a real track dork we imagine you will.
But the TL;DR is this: just about every event got a whole lot harder to qualify via time, and just about every athlete in the world isn’t gonna secure a mark necessary to ensure their spot at Worlds in Beijing next September.
This is because World Athletics wants to incentivize athletes to take its world ranking system way more seriously—if that’s the only viable path for you to compete at Worlds… yeah, you’re gonna adjust your schedule to slot in as many point-rich opportunities as you can and compete more often. Oh, and you’re not gonna be able to get your standard at BU or in Ramona anymore, folks.
We are a time-agnostic newsletter that has more than belabored the point that track and field is better when its best athletes actually compete against each other. In that these changes are presumably in service of achieving these goals, we are fully in World Athletics’ corner on this one.
But with every well-intentioned change comes a few negative externalities.
For instance, one change announced by World Athletics is that for a mark to count toward auto-qualification, it has to be posted at a Category C or higher meet. That means basically all NCAA competition—outside of Division One indoor and outdoor championships meets—won’t count. (They will for world ranking purposes.) Relatedly, one of the reasons so many American professionals compete in meets largely geared toward college athletes is that there just aren’t a tremendous amount of Category C meets in the U.S.
This will either send U.S. pros across the pond in droves to Europe for higher-level opportunities. Or it won’t. Travel to Europe is expensive, and in a country with sprint depth like the U.S., there are certainly World Championship-caliber athletes not on massive shoe deals who won’t be able to swing it. This tier of athletes will keep hacking away at it within the U.S., and hope they are consistently great enough for their world ranking to do the talking.
It’s not fair that frequent, costly international travel is an expectation for athletes from North America—and even more so for those from much of Asia, Africa, South America, and Australia. But World Athletics likely recognized this problem, thought about it, and determined that it was offset by the positives of its rankings-focused system. You may not love the verdict reached, but you’ve gotta respect that WA loves its ranking system so much that all of its decisionmaking is looking to bolster its importance: “Yeah, this might piss some people off, but it’s gonna get the bigger names out on the oval more often.”
You’d hope World Athletics also contemplated another issue: that getting into higher-category meets is deeply political. There’s no qualifying system for most of them, so unless you’re a big enough name to singlehandedly impact ticket sales, it’s a matter of who you know, or your coach knows, or your agent knows, or your sponsor’s sports marketing team knows.
Again, the theoretical athlete getting the short end of the stick here isn’t a household name with a mantle full of global championship hardware. It’s the young upstart or the developing pro. To World Athletics’ credit, there’s been a push recently to shore up the availability of quality meets outside of Europe. You won’t get politicking out of track and field, but you can spread out the power into the hands of more players so that there are fewer people playing favorites.
We understand the calculus by World Athletics. As much as we love an underdog story, ultimately, it’s the stars that drive the sport—ours and every other. By and large, these changes aren’t likely to present major obstacles to 99% of the athletes who will win medals in Beijing. The new policies and standards should primarily encourage most athletes to skip out on the collegiate meets or low-key season openers in favor of actual professional competition on what we loftily refer to as “the circuit.”
But we can walk and chew gum and type a paragraph at the same time, and we’ll be adding to that list of multitasking now, by saying we’ll at the same time pour one out for the feel-good stories of third-place finishers at USAs who stormed down the home stretch out of obscurity to steal a spot on a global championship team, forever changing the course of their careers and lives, and inspiring generations of kids watching at home or in the stands. Professional sports are just that: professional. But the more professionalized and optimized they become, we do lose a little bit of the potential for that particular brand of magic.
That said, if we want track and field to continue to grow as a professional enterprise, then that’s one of the prices you pay. At their highest levels, sports are a celebration of the absolute best of the best—you’ve just gotta ensure there’s a pathway for that greatness to reload, and that young or unheralded athletes aren’t frozen out forever.
Tobi Amusan’s World Record’s Redemption Arc
The year was 2022 and the World Championships were in Eugene.
On day three of competition, the world leader in the 110m Hurdles, Devon Allen, was controversially disqualified from the final for having too good of a reaction time. His first movement came 0.099 seconds after the start of the race—the somewhat arbitrarily established human limit of reaction is apparently 0.1 seconds—and he was not allowed to advance on protest.
Hayward Field—old or new—is hallowed ground for American athletes. For the rest of the world, especially with a shiny new facility, there’s no culturally imprinted notion of it being special. Now, however, it was the international track and field community’s turn to come experience the magic for themselves.
On day seven, Shericka Jackson threatened FloJo’s world record running 21.45 to win the 200m. Maybe the Willamette Valley was a sprinter’s paradise after all, and not just a micropolitan area where distance runners can enjoy some low-humidity racing late into the summer?
On the penultimate day of competition, Tobi Amusan set an African record of 12.40 in the 100m Hurdles.
It was a small personal best by one-hundredth of a second and the fastest time of the day, though not enough for the 25-year-old from Nigeria to be considered the favorite… yet. Although she had an NCAA, Diamond League, and Commonwealth Games title to her name and finished one spot off the podium a year earlier at the Olympics, despite these accolades, Amusan wasn’t broadly talked about as a clear cut podium finisher.
On the last day of racing, Amusan stunned the stadium, dropping a 12.12 win in the semi-final to break Keni Harrison’s world record of 12.20, seemingly out of nowhere. The wind reading registered +0.9 m/s, well below the legal limit of +2.0.
Behind Amusan, across both semis, there were an additional five national records and 12 personal bests.
Was the clock broken? Was the track mismarked? Did they forget a hurdle?
While fans were actively still processing what they had just witnessed, and while the rumors and speculation began swirling, it was time for the finals.
And when Tobi Amusan crossed the finish line even faster than in the previous race, the rationalizations over how such a thing could be even possible were kicked up another notch.
Her world championship winning time of 12.06 remains unfathomable to many, even with the assistance of a +2.5 m/s that ultimately made the time not record-eligible.
Sprint races are not like distance events where athletes can call their shot well in advance, tuck in behind a pacer, and if appropriately fit, deliver. In sprints, there are too many factors that need to go perfectly right. And especially in a rhythm race like in the hurdles, seasons can change in the flip of a switch as steps can suddenly fall into place. What should have been a triumphant moment for all fans and pundits of the sport drew skepticism from those outside Africa.
There’s undoubtedly a Western bias in athletics journalism, and that was amplified by the then recent high-profile doping violation of Blessing Okagbare. Additionally, under the classification as a Category A nation, Nigeria was required to test its athletes three times in out-of-competition, unannounced tests. The federation’s failure to properly test 10 of its athletes prior to the 2021 Olympics, resulting in those athletes ineligibility for the Games.
However, Tobi Amusan had never failed a test and all her personal testing protocol had been met. But because of the country she competed for and because she improved so much, she was unfairly criticized and never properly celebrated by the global community.
The best time to really acknowledge how special Amusan’s string of races in Eugene was, was in 2022… in Eugene. The next best time is now. Her performance at Worlds is becoming more validated and accepted each season.
This past weekend at the Xiamen Diamond League, the Olympic champion Masai Russell broke her own American record to run 12.14 (+0.5) and claim the second fastest time in history. This was her third time under that previous world record of 12.20, a mark that has also since been eclipsed by Tia Jones. Similar to Tigst Assefa’s old world record in the marathon, the public perspective shifts once a performance is not as significant of an outlier.
Masai Russell looks poised to continue challenging 12.12 through the rest of this season. And second to Russell in China was none other than Amusan herself, who has already proven she can run faster, and appears to be rounding back into form. As the marks fill in and more eyes are opened, it is important to reexamine the treatment of the current world record holder. The victims of doping in sport are not limited to those who are beaten, but also to those who will unjustly be accused in the future.
(Here is this newsletter’s reaction to that race from 2022: “As the old saying goes, you’re only as good as your second best time—so she did it again. Less than two hours later, Amusan ran 12.06 to win the World Championships. Although the wind read a non-record legal +2.5 m/s, it certainly validated her hours-old world record run.”)
Make Regionals Mean Something 🙏
When it comes to the NCAA outdoor season, there’s plenty to love. The national championships are awesome. Most conference championships are awesome, especially when team titles come down to the 4x400m. Heck, even a few of the mid-season regular meets—Payton Jordan and Penn Relays come to mind—can hold their own on the entertainment scale.
However, the two regional meets sandwiched in between conference weekend and NCAAs are… not awesome.
The NCAA East and West Regionals …or preliminary rounds, or first rounds, or qualifiers, or whatever you call it… are treated by pretty much everyone like a necessary evil to muscle through.
Regionals are a pair of enormous four-day meets full of all the biggest collegiate stars who have to show up and compete. In theory it should be the second-most exciting meet on the whole collegiate schedule. But instead, the whole shebang basically boils down to “play it safe, don’t mess up, and finish top 12.”
For the athletes at the top of the list, there’s nowhere to go but down. For the athletes rising up from the lower ranks, qualifying for NCAAs is a thrill, but you’re ultimately just earning the honor of getting bounced in the first round come June. And for the bottom third of the fields, while qualifying for Regionals is a nice accomplishment, you probably already picked up a point or two at your conference meet, which likely matters more to you and your teammates.
The 10,000ms are particularly farcical. With only one heat in each region and no need to even glance at the clock, the whole affair morphs into a long, boring tempo workout where the only goal is to finish in the top 25 percent of the field. It almost never yields surprise non-qualifiers. It’s everything we hate about tedious championship round-running with none of the payoff. That’s all saved for the championship itself—which has its own rounds of qualifying for most events anyway.
And yet, we shouldn’t take it for granted that regional meets are boring. Cross country regionals are thrilling rides, with teams battling for the few auto spots then anxiously awaiting results from around the country to see how at-large points shake out. NCAA tournaments in other sports—most notably basketball but also football, baseball, softball, and others—include multiple rounds of exciting action that are worth watching before the real big championship rolls around. So how do we fix ours?
In short, something about Regionals has to mean something. Turning the whole meet into a qualified/not qualified binary makes it so that the only exciting outcomes happen somewhere between 11th and 13th place, while the stars are incentivized to do the absolute bare minimum. Teams (and the athletes that comprise them) need something else to run, jump, and throw for.
Unlike NCAAs and conference meets, there isn’t a team scoring element to the preliminary meet. On one hand, who cares? Teams still want to get athletes to nationals for the scoring potential they offer there. But on the other, you again run into the problem where the really good teams have no reason to do anything beyond the bare minimum to advance, not the maximum their talent and roster allows.
The first piece of the solution is easy: turn two regional meets into four. The “Final Four” branding of basketball is nearly as iconic as the NCAA itself, so why not borrow a nifty turn of phrase and the cache it provides? At cocktail parties in 15 years, 10k runners can say they “made the Final Four” in college and the only giveaway will be the fact that they’re 5’8” and still have a pronounced watch tan line.
More seriously, this tweak allows the selection process to remain the same, numerically, while encouraging more competitive performances, cutoff-wise. Instead of 48 athletes vying for 12 spots, you’ve got 24 athletes per event going for a mere six big-Qs. That leaves a lot less margin of error for sprinters shutting it down at 80 meters or jumpers retiring after four attempts, and a kicker’s race in the 5000m or 10,000m could easily turn into a bloodbath. It’ll keep the top guys on their toes and force them to go for broke, or risk allowing exciting upsets to occur at their expense.
But that’s just the start. Here at TLC, we’re increasingly seeing the value in the liberal and strategic use of wild cards. Track and field’s historic love for its meritocratic selection processes, while important in some contexts, can also be a weakness when the goal is drama. So here’s a tantalizing offer for the teams contending for every point at NCAAs: win your Regional, and you’ll be mightily rewarded. In addition to the prestige of beating all the other Northeast, South, Central, and West Regional schools, the team champion will be awarded one wild card entry into an open event and one in a relay of its choosing. You already qualified both a 4x1 and a 4x4? No problem—now you get a B team. It’s not hard to imagine a world in which the Arkansases or Floridas of the world could put two relays in the top eight and make a big difference in the national meet scoring.
The individual wild card could go to a talented, but fragile, athlete who got healthy late but didn’t have time to get a qualifier, or it could allow for ballsier doubles if your best 200m/400m or 1500m/5000m runner doesn’t have to run both events at both meets. “But, but, but— fairness!” teams will cry. In this instance, we’re willing to sacrifice a little fairness for a lot of intrigue.
Our other “run hard at Regionals” gimmick is similar in that it’s designed more to reward the top athletes for trying than the underdogs for overperforming. In events with both heats and finals at NCAAs (100m–1500m, both hurdles, and the steeple), the Regional winner should get an automatic spot in the national final. The top four athletes in the national final will all be extra rested, so it doesn’t create a totally lopsided system favoring one athlete, but in order to do so, they’ll have to give 100% or close to it two weeks earlier. Since few, if any, collegiate athletes are so good they can win a regional meet outright with a restrained effort, it’ll essentially require all the athletes who normally coast to run through the line in pursuit of that sweet, sweet bye.
There you have it: a three-step fix that’s deeply undemocratic, but potentially highly effective at increasing the number of exciting NCAA postseason weekends by 50%. Defenders of the status quo will hate it, but fans of quality racing will love it. And now track and field has a Final Four weekend to contend with every major sport. Let’s give it a shot.
The New Runner’s Guide To Bathroom Use 💩
There are a lot of new runners who have recently joined our great community thanks to mid-life crises or a desire to meet other singles in their neighborhood. As lifelong runners who toiled in the trenches (got made fun of for wearing running shorts as high schoolers in the early 2000s), we hold no resentment towards our new hybrid athlete brethren and sistren with much better bench press and squat PBs. If anything we welcome you! Perhaps a handful of you will cross the Rubicon from “frequent run club attendee” to “obsessive dork who contributes to the stellar open-rate of a weekly track and field newsletter.”
With that said, there are a few obvious signs that someone may not have gone through puberty as a member of the cross country team, aside from innocuous ones like being good at frisbee. The most glaring tell is a lack of basic bathroom etiquette on group runs. And because we aren’t gatekeepers and are genuinely glad you are here, here are 14 unanimously understood rules by lifelong runners about going to the bathroom on the run:
When someone has to pee you wait for them.
You can’t stop to pee in a group before three miles.
Pee breaks are at the top of hills, not the bottom.
If you break rules 2 or 3 that’s fine, but you forfeit rule 1.
Hold your pee until those coming the opposite way on the trail pass.
If someone needs to poop and they don’t have paper, then whoever does have some is expected to share.
It’s not littering if it’s a poop covered biodegradable sock.
If someone who needs to poop requires a physical bathroom then the route will change to include one.
If a poop is going to take more than two minutes then the pooper should encourage the group to do an out and back.
Fart in the back of the pack.
No poops at the Sedona track.
In the last 10 minutes before a marathon there are no rules, or laws, for that matter
You can’t stop your watch mid-race to use the bathroom and then pretend that’s your actual time or say things like, “if I didn’t stop to use the bathroom, then I would have…”
The decision to poop your pants mid-race is a personal one and shall not be judged, but you better be running a massive personal best if you go through with it.
14 rules? Phew! We know that’s a lot, and we don’t expect you to commit them all to memory right away. If you mess up in a pee way, not a poop way, that’s okay. You merely adopted the dark hobby… we were born socially stunted through our obsessive participation in it.
More News From The Track And Field World 📰
– ATHLOS will host its non-New York meet this fall in London on September 18th, at StoneX Stadium. The venue primarily serves as a rugby stadium, and is tucked away in far North London, ensuring competitors will experience the full spectrum of athletic arenas, ranging from “borderline pastoral” to “on a weird partially manmade island in the East River.”
– LA Track Fest was billed as the best assemblage of U.S. distance running talent this side of the Pre Classic, but we still got treated to an Ackeem Blake 9.99 100m showing and Michael Norman going sub-45 for the first time since the 2024 Olympic 400m semi-finals. Beyond that, the meet lived up to the billing: Brandon Miller (1:44.26) bested Abe Alvarado and Josh Kerr in the 800m; Vince Ciattei’s 3:33.41 was enough to put away a solid domestic 1500m field; New Mexico’s Habtom Samuel broke the collegiate outdoor 5000m record, winning in 12:57.22; Roisin Willis impressed in her New Balance Boston debut, winning the 800m in 1:58.08; Parker Valby made her professional outdoor debut via a 14:49.41 victory in the 5000m; and Great Britain’s Elise Thorner dominated the steeple, winning by over 13 seconds in 9:07.39.
– It being a stop on the Diamond League circuit, the competition in Xiamen was predictably exciting and the notable results, numerous. But if we had to pluck out a few highlights from the day, like say, for a newsletter, here’s what we’d note: Masai Russell broke the American 100m hurdles record (going 12.14) and now sits just .02 seconds behind the world record; Yan Ziyi, the teenage Chinese javelin star, launched it 71.74m—the second best throw in history; Shericka Jackson continued to impress on her comeback tour, winning the women’s 200m in a season’s best of 22.87; Peruth Chemutai won her second straight DL 3000m steeplechase, this time taking down rivals Winfred Yavi and Faith Cherotich in the process; Collen Kebinatshipi went 43.92 to take the win in the men’s 400m—he’s now the world leader over 400m and 100m; and Rajindra Campbell surprised a men’s shot put field loaded American talent (including Ryan Crouser) and won it thanks to a 22.34m toss.
– After last year’s wind-related cancelation, the 2026 Cape Town Marathon provided a dose of redemption for the race, which harbors World Major status ambitions. Ethiopia’s Mohamed Esa ran the fastest marathon ever on African soil, taking the win in 2:04:55, and his countrywoman Dera Dida claimed top honors in the women’s race, going 2:23:18. Meanwhile, Eliud Kipchoge counted this as a stop on his philanthropic world tour, and still managed to clock a 2:13:29.
– At the Ottawa Marathon, Elvis Kipchoge Cheboi, a man with an extremely cool name, broke the tape in 2:09:22, while the women’s champion was Abeba Aregawi, the 2012 Olympic 1500m silver medalist and 2013 World 1500m champ, in her marathon debut—she went 2:23:12.
– Perhaps the only community road race in the country where half of the local professionals compete in the “civilian race,” the Bolder Boulder 10K saw Rebecca Mwangi win the women’s elite race in 32:32, while in the men’s elite race, Patrick Kiptoo Kiprop prevailed in 28:37.
– Team USA has shared its complete and enormous roster for this summer’s World Road Running Championships. In the half, it’ll be Weini Kelati, Jess Tonn, Emma Grace Hurley, Ednah Kurgat, Molly Born, Carrie Ellwood, Annie Rodenfels, Conner Mantz, Wesley Kiptoo, Hillary Bor, and Ahmed Muhumed. For the 5K, it’s Karissa Schweizer, Courtney Frerichs, Drew Hunter, and Dylan Jacobs. And in the mile, you’ve got Addy Wiley, Gracie Hyde, Yared Nuguse, and Vince Ciattei.
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This one was full of zingers, namely the bathroom rules and my personal fave: "...the only giveaway will be the fact that they’re 5’8” and still have a pronounced watch tan line."