Flashes of Panic

A lot of the more rabid running fans in the U.S. make a big deal of NCAA championships. You just have to look at the crowds tearing around the course at the cross-country nationals to get a feeling for it, but the non-stop braying on several message boards provides some quantifiable evidence.

The thing is, many of the contenders for individual NCAA titles aren’t even North American. Saskatchewan native Simon Bairu gave us some good quotes after winning the men’s title, but Simon was also pumped up for the victory of his team. On the other hand, very few reports from nationals have run quotes from the women’s winner, Johanna Nilsson, a Swede running for Northern Arizona. This was Nilsson’s second individual title (she won the indoor mile in 2002,) and her older sister, Ida, won a steeplechase title in 2004, but it was pretty clear that while Johanna liked winning, she didn’t take the title itself terribly seriously. Here’s a quote from the Terre Haute Tribune Star, the only ones I’ve found to mention this:

“I’m not going to sit here and say cross [country] is not important,” she said with an embarrassed smile at one point during her post-race news conference, but it was obvious she’d enjoyed her track success—including being national indoor mile champion in 2003 and national runner-up at 1,500 meters last spring—a lot more.
 “To win is always fun,” she concluded, still seemingly embarrassed by the attention. “I just don’t know if it means that much.”

But the Tribune Star implies that it’s just cross-country that Nilsson isn’t impressed by, not NCAA competition in general. So, here’s a quote from a conversation I had with New Zealander Nick Willis after he won the indoor mile title last February:

“It was nice to win an NCAA title, but I don’t think I would’ve lost any sleep if I’d retired never having won an NCAA title. It is a big deal to be over here, but coming from another country, you’re not brought up with the whole national championship idea. It’s always the big-scale things.”

All of which leads me to wonder, why do so many fans make such a big deal out of NCAA titles when even many of the champions don’t appear to take them that seriously? Shouldn’t we be looking beyond the NCAA, like the New Zealanders, and focusing our athletes on World Championships and Olympics?

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