Flashes of Panic

I’ve spent a little time flipping through the stories from the Boston Indoor Games, which this year didn’t have a dramatic moment like a world record or Olympic champion upset. It’s interesting to see who leads with which race, and how they described the races. It looks like I did all right myself, since my editor made very few changes to my IAAF report, but the difference in the stories really highlights the range of knowledge in the press area and the time constraints under which the various reporters worked; the Reuters and AP reports are sharp, but have some errors in the details (i.e. Cragg’s history at the meet.)

The Globe’s reporters did well as they usually have lately. The Dibaba story is stellar, and does a good job catching the balance of celebration and disappointment in a very fast win which is only missing that “world record” label. I had a lot of sympathy for both Dibaba and Defar, who dominated their races but could too-easily be seen as failures because they didn’t set records; the Globe story avoided the word “fail” and captured the nearness and the disappointment of it.

Their two-mile report has extensive Mottram quotes, but doesn’t know that Ethiopia wasn’t part of the British Empire and therefore won’t be sending runners to the Commonwealth Games. (Apparently the Helsinki world champion, Benjamin Limo, would prefer not to be in Melbourne either, but you’d need to be reading Kenyan or Australian newspapers to know that.) That story does have my favorite new Mottram quote:

Asked about his anomalous appearance—a 6-foot-2-inch Australian in an event dominated by smaller East and North Africans—Mottram replied: “I’m not one to go with the trend. We’re trying to change it.”

There were some discussions at the meet about the strange case of two-mile pacemaker Geoffrey Rono, who took off at 1:55 800m pace to open a 17-second gap on the rest of the field—that is, the people he was supposed to be setting the pace for. He eventually dropped out after a 4:10 mile, having (a) done nobody any good, and (b) looking silly for dropping out of the race with a nearly half-lap lead. I was pulling for him to keep running and see how long he could stay in front, but sometimes rabbits have contracts that forbid such race-stealing.

Now Playing: Pearls from Mercurotones by The Buck Pets