Flashes of Panic

I feel like polling for Performances of the Year might be new this year. I sent my vote(s) a few minutes ago; to provide a baseline for discussion and spur you to vote yourself, here’s how I picked my ballot.

Men:

• Bolt, 9.69/100m: Oh, come on. How can I not vote for that. The man absolutely dismantled one of the toughest Olympic 100m fields ever assembled, backed off to celebrate 15m from the finish line, and still broke the World Record by .03s. Not voting for this race is like voting against Harry Potter and Winnie the Pooh. The toughest thing to decide: this one, or the 200m?

• Gebrselassie, 2:03:59/Marathon: This was one of those “first under 2:0x:00” milestones, which I don’t think should be ignored. I’m a longtime fan of Haile, and I wasn’t thrilled by his priority weighting between Berlin and Beijing this year. This record will get broken, but he will always have been the first. Remember it.

• Wanjiru, 2:06:32/Marathon: Having said that about Haile, I need to put my oar in as well for Wanjiru, who won the race which should’ve made Haile immortal—if he’d risked enough to run it. Wanjiru took all the accepted wisdom about running marathons in the heat, about running championship marathons, and even in some cases about running marathons at all, and threw it out the window. It’s hard to see the factors which play on who wins a marathon, and so I think it’s hard for most people to appreciate just how astounding that race was. If you consider marathons as a series of card games, Wanjiru put all his chips on the table with every single hand, and he just kept winning. At the end, as you can imagine, he’d won them all.

Women:

This was a lot tougher.

• Dibaba, 14:11.15/5000m: We sort of thought Dibaba might be done for, with this bizarre side-stitch problem she’d been having during the indoor season. This race ended that discussion and pretty much ended any talk of anyone else in the world running with Tiru this season. With a pair like Dibaba and Defar walking this record down like it was soft, this mark may not stand for long, but it should.

• Hellebaut, 2.05/High Jump: Not only was this an awesome personal performance for Hellebaut, it was a great demonstration of what a chess game the vertical jumps can be. Blanka Vlasic, who had dominated this event for dozens of competitions, made one little slip, and Hellebaut (and her coach) were canny enough and lucky enough to use the leverage that slip gave them and play it into a gold medal. It was a great competition to watch.

• Campbell-Brown, 21.74/200m: This is where I started to wonder about my choices. To be completely honest, I barely remember the women’s sprints from Beijing. This was quite a race, and beating Allyson Felix took doing, particularly considering the rough start Campbell-Brown had to her season. But honestly? I don’t even remember the race. So why did I vote for it? Campbell-Brown deserves something, I think. And the races I do remember—Kaniskina in the walk, Samitova-Galkina in the steeplechase—I’m just suspicious enough of, given the Russians’ recent history, to not want to heap laurels on them.

Which performances would you have voted for? (Which did you vote for?)

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