Flashes of Panic

~7:30 AM, Sunday 2 April, Fukuoka

The “mixed zone” here in Fukuoka is unlike that at most track meets. There’s no fence separating the athletes from the press; rather, it’s an area open to both, through which the athletes must pass to return to their warmups and their team area. On the plus side for the athletes, the crush of other athletes and media makes it easy to get lost in the crowd and sneak through. On the plus side for the media, if you mark your athlete well, you can actually put yourself between them and their warm clothes and extract quotes before they flee. I spoke to none of the Americans yesterday, and I’m not sure what I missed.

The rest of this isn’t going to make much sense if you haven’t seen the results.

Goucher, obviously, was the highlight, and his sixth was probably the best U.S. finish since Ritz’s medal in Ostend ‘01. The team result was impressive, though not the best we could’ve hoped for; the African teams were exceptionally strong. Aside from Goucher, our guys ran well, just not as well as they needed to, and not a few members of the European media are pointing to their performance as evidence that a non-African team can, in fact, get into a very competitive race (Bekele called it his toughest short course victory,) and perform well—an argument for not giving up, in fact.

The senior women’s long course team, again, was good but not great. Blake Russell ran courageously for eleventh, and would’ve been an asset to the scoring of any team except the Ethiopians. As a marathoner, though, she simply doesn’t have the raw speed possessed by most of the Ethiopians. (Don’t ask me to extend this analogy to Lornah Kiplagat.) Katie McGregor was running well for three laps, but she was invisible on the fourth, which didn’t help us as the Japanese pulled through to an unexpected third-place finish, and those points in the middle where she had been running were the difference between us and the Australians. There were eleven points between the Japanese in third and the U.S. in fifth, and at halfway through the race we had team medal potential. Colleen De Reuck gets extra points for running intelligently, strongly and fearlessly, even if not as fast as she once did.

The junior girls… well, they were just never there. They were buried by the end of the first kilometer, and they didn’t make any big moves in the later stages. From where I was, they looked pained and demoralized. I hope the boys do better today, but I’m not holding my breath. How do we compete with the African seniors when our best runners get so humiliated by them as juniors?

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