Flashes of Panic

It may be time for Adam Goucher to become a house-husband.

There’s some curiosity about why Adam dropped out of the men’s 5,000m final with two laps to go on Monday night. The party line is that Goucher and his coach, Alberto Salazar, saw that the race was not going to be won in a time faster than the Olympic “A” standard, which meant that even if Goucher won—and it was clear by then that he wouldn’t—he wasn’t going to Beijing. So Salazar waved Goucher off the track to better save his energy for the 10,000m final on Friday evening.

Now, Goucher may actually have a better shot in the 10. I haven’t studied the start lists, but many of the athletes who should be able to beat him are banged up, already have marathon spots, or are otherwise showing their age. But he has two tasks in the 10, just like he did in the 5, and that’s both to make the top 3 (excluding the marathoners, who aren’t likely to go for the 10 the way Dan Browne did in ‘04) and to get the “A” standard. The second task is likely to be harder, no matter what the field, particularly if nobody else forces the pace and Goucher winds up being the mule for the field. (And I can’t imagine, given what Amby posted today, that anyone’s going to try to set up a Goucher-friendly race other than maybe Rupp or Rohatinsky, and they have priorities of their own.)

The fact is—and I hate to admit this, because he’s a few years younger than me—but Adam Goucher may be a bit old for the track. The dominant East Africans tend to be under 25. (Gebrselassie, a year or so older than me, is struggling to make the Ethiopian team in the 10,000m. Bekele is 23 or 24.) He may have a few years left in the marathon if that’s any good for him—conventional wisdom holds that elite marathoners peak around age 35—but the longer he hangs around, the harder it gets for him to find a race that plays to his strengths. He can’t keep entering the big races and hoping the door will open for him.

It may be time for him to admit that it’s his wife’s turn in the spotlight. (This has nothing to do with the fact that she’s better looking than he is.) There are loads of stories about Russian marathoners whose husbands give up competition and take over the support work, letting their wives train full-time; we inevitably hear the story after the wife has had a major breakthrough at a big international race. (Andrew Kastor might be a U.S. example, except that he was never national-class.)

It’s too bad Adam doesn’t do the cooking.