The year's best athletes

With the Olympic Games offering an extra incentive to athletes, 2024 year was exceptional in performances. So it was difficult to trim my lists down to just 10 names. And it was extra difficult in the case of women to decide who would occupy the top spot. So I propose an unusual classification. There are two best athletes of the year, Faith Kipyegon and Sydney McLaughlin. 

F. Kipyegon dominated the 1500 m like nobody else has ever done before. She established a world record with 3:49.04, better than the men's 1930 record of Jules Ladoumegue. And while she lost the 5000 m duel beaten by an impressive Chebet, she offered us (again) one of the best battles. 

S. McLaughlin won the olympic 400 m hurdles in an astounding 50.39 s, better than Lituyev's 1953(!) record. And she ran an incredible 47.7 s split in the 4x400 m relay. It would be great if she took a year to hunt for the 400 m flat world record. I am convinced that she can do it. 

And just as there are two athletes in first position I will also have two athletes in third, H. Thiam and S. Hassan. 

N. Thiam won her third straight olympic title in the heptathlon. With 6880 points she did only slightly better than in the Europeans where she had won with 6848 points, but had she jumped at her real potential she would have flirted with 7000 points.

S. Hassan attempted something that no other woman had dared do before, winning 5000, 10000 m and the Marathon. She had to contend herself with bronze medals in the two track events but won the Marathon in a gripping race, the issue of which was decided in the final sprint. I am really surprised that neither Thiam nor Hassan are among the finalists for the European Athlete of the Year trophy, while F. Bol makes the final trio, accompanied by Y. Machuchikh and K. Hodgkinson.

Past the three (well, four) year's best athletes I am giving the list of the remaining without a special ranking.

Y. Mahuchikh had probably badly timed her preparation, and peaked to soon. But, timing notwithstanding, she signed a new world record in high jump, improving with 2.10 m, the 37 years old record of S. Kostadinova.

If I had to choose one race from the whole olympic competition that would have been the women's 5000 m. All the more so, since last year's race at the World's was a breathtaking one. But this year B. Chebet took her vengeance winning ahead of Kipyegon and going on to win the 10000 m as well. 

After her indoor title I had great hopes for T. LaFond in the triple jump. And she delivered. She won the olympic title in great style and secured a place among my year's best. 

V. Allman is the only thrower to make my list. She had won olympic gold in the discus in Tokyo but then failed to win the world titles of '22 and '23. This year she was back with a vengeance winning a second olympic title.

M. Paulino has been dominating the 400 m for the last two years. She was second behind S. Miller-Uibo in Tokyo and again in Oregon, but she became number one last year in Budapest and in Paris added the olympic gold medal to her collection.

N. Kennedy shared the world pole vault title last year with K. Moon. This year she stood alone at the summit of her event. But with 4.90 m she does not have the leading performance this year. When are we going to see women over 5 m again?

J. Alfred was my favourite for the 100 m olympic title. And to tell the truth, for the 200 m as well, although I knew that she did not have the experience of G. Thomas over the distance. Be that as it may, she is the sprinter to follow in the coming years.

T. Davis-Woodhall added olympic gold to her world indoor title for the long jump. She is not just a great jumper. She has a personality that lightens up the field when she competes. And a great technician, something that I always appreciate.

I was waiting for a victory for K. Hodgkinson since the Tokyo Olympics. She had lost there (and again in Oregon) to A. Mu and when, in Budapest, Mu was not in top condition, she lost again to M. Moraa. Well this year she did it, winning the Olympic tile. And she is inching towards the haunted 40+ years old world record.

Turning to the men's year's best list my choice is none other but the one who topped the lists of the past two years: A. Duplantis. One cannot praise him enough. It is rare to have somebody dominate a discipline like he does (not even S. Bubka, despite his six world titles: his larger winning margin never exceeded 10 cm). He is definitely the best pole vaulter of all times.

R. Crouser occupies second place. While he does lose a competition from time to time and his world record is "only" 33 cm better than J. Kovacs' best, Crouser is the thrower who has revolutionised men's shot put.

M. Tentoglou occupies the third place on the podium. Although I was expecting a great jump from him this year, a jump that did not arrive (his 8.65 m in the Europeans is way below his capability) he is still the best long jumper of the last few years. And he shares with Duplantis and Ingebrigtsen a place among the finalists for the European Athlete of the Year trophy.

Speaking of J. Ingebrigtsen, I am including him in my year's best list despite the fact that he lost once more the 1500 m title. Breaking D. Komen's 3000 m record would have suffice in order to secure him a place among the best. I know that Ingebrigtsen wishes to break the 1500 m world record and I think that he is capable of doing this. However I have a crazy idea. When he started his career he was running the 3000 m steeple. And his technique over the hurdles and the river is not bad at all. So it would be interesting if he could take one year to go back to the steeple and bring the world record down to 7:45.

G. Tamberi missed out in the Olympics due to health reasons. But what he did in the Europeans would have been enough to get him a place among the year's best. It's such a pity that he was injured back in 2016 and lost precious years. He would have been the one to threaten Sotomayor's high jump record. 

The 10000 m is usually a race I follow out of the corner of my eye. Well not this year's olympic race. I was following J. Cheptegei, from the very beginning till the end. His race was one of the cleverest I have ever seen. The ethiopians did not have a chance this time and Cheptegei obtained in Paris the title that was missing in his collection.

E. Katzberg is just 22 years old. For a hammer thrower this is kindergarten age. And he is already olympic and world champion. His personal best of 84.38 m is among the best  performances of the 21st century. All of a sudden Sedykh's world record does look out-of-this-world any more.

Speaking about world records, it's the 74.35 discus world record of M. Alekna that obtained him a place among my year's best. That and his short-lived olympic record where he succeeded his father, Virgilijus, who had won the event in Athens in 2004. (Of course the olympic record was not registered in the end of the day, since Alekna lost the title to R. Stona for 3 cm).

J. Diaz-Fortún started by winning the European title (in a memorable fight with P. Pichardo) and went on to add the Olympic one. He is now the third triple jump performer of all times with his 18.18 m jump in Rome.

L. Tebogo was my rising star number one last year. And he confirmed the expectations winning the olympic 200 m final. He is now the fifth performer of all times over the distance. And he ran a great 43.03 s split in the 4x400 m relay. Given that he has the world best performance over 300 m, with 30.69 s, I wouldn't be surprised if, moving to the 400 m, he was the first to run under 43 seconds.

I reserve a place in my list for the hurdler duo G. Holloway and R. Benjamin. The former is the best technician over the high hurdles (but also a 8+ m long jumper) while the latter brought back home two gold medals from Paris, with a 46.46 s in the 400 m hurdles and the 4x400 m relay, which he anchored in 43.13 s.

The last entry in my year's best list is A. Nadeem. He won the javelin throw in the olympics with 92.97 m which makes him the 6th performer of all times. The only one ahead of him among still active throwers is A. Peters. (Well, this is not quite true. J. Vetter, 2017 world champion and with 97.76 m second thrower of all times is stil active. But his injuries are not allowing him to go back to his previous level: he was 6th in the national championships with a 73.16 m throw).

As every year I try to publish my list just ahead of World Athletics. As you have certainly noticed WA and myself do not see eye to eye when it comes to the choice of the year's best. It will be interesting to see who they are going to choose this year (but I expect serious divergences in the men's list). I will definitely follow this and report with details.

The blog is 11 years old

One more year went by and the blog continued its existence. As you know by now, the blog took birth once I had read the book by A. Juilland "Rethinking Track and Field" which gave me the idea to write about things that could (should?) change in the way we are doing athletics. Things that could make competitions more interesting and funnier. (And I must admit that Juilland's title was great, so I did not hesitate to steal it).

Writing the articles for the blog takes time (and requires inspiration) so I decided to pace myself and try to publish regularly without overdoing it. And also, because, I must at all costs avoid readers' burnout. Typically I set myself a lower limit of articles to publish in a year at around 35-40 (roughly three per month). Usually I manage to do better than this. The one thing I cannot control are the views I get. They are, up to a certain point unpredictable, but not totally. This year for instance I obtained a jump of several hundred views of my article "Understanding the Paralympics" just when the Paralympic Games were starting in Paris.

But to tell the truth when one looks at the history of views it is not clear what is really happening. 

Where do those peaks come from? While there was definitely some correlation of this year's  increased views with the Olympics I am not sure that would explain everything. (It would be fun if Google trained its LLM model on my blog. I asked Gemini what happened in the women's 800 m in the Amsterdam 1928 Olympics and, alas, got a non-committal answer. So much for the hope of the blog becoming famous through AI). Be that as it may, the blog is inching towards 300 k views, for 450 published articles. Of course, not all articles get the same number of views. Some like "The javelin controversy" or "Pole vault: before and after" are highly attractive. Others have to contend themselves with just a handful.

The question I ask myself every year is where do we go from here? And at this point I cannot resist the temptation of telling a joke involving detective Monk. If you haven't seen the tv series involving the obsessive detective I recommend that you do it. In one episode Monk (who insists that the count of everything should be a multiple of 10 or of 100) sees somebody doing chin-ups on a horizontal bar and counting 95, 96, 97, reaching 98 and then, with great difficulty, 99 at which point Monk starts encouraging him for one more. Indeed he manages the 100th and surpassing himself we does one more reaching 101. Monk looks seriously at him and says: "now you must go to 200". I feel like being in the same situation. Ten years was a good point to stop. Having gone past that milestone, I can only continue. So, onwards to the 12th year. 

Tygart pranked

Those who follow my blog have heard of Travis Tygart, the guy with the ridiculous hair-style whose unique desire is to see Russia disappear from the international sports arena. He is the head of the US Anti-Doping Agency and a great expert in condemning Russia (and, on occasion, China) while explaining and justifying his acquitting decisions when it comes to american athletes. If you don't remember what I am talking about, I invite you to read my posts on the Knighton and Coleman affairs. (And don't start me on Gatlin who should have been banned for life after his second doping offence, but received just a four-year ban, and went on to win World and Olympic medals). 

In a recent post of mine I wrote about the Friendship Games, that will be held next year in Russia, and how the two russian pranksters Vovan and Lexus trapped the IOC president, T. Bach, and the EU vice-president M. Schinas, pretending to be a "representative of the African Union". 

Lexus and Vovan

Well, this time they did it again, with the USADA CEO, T. Tygart, as victim. (This is not the first time they are tricking Tygart. Back in 2016 they had again contacted him pretending to be Ukraine's minister of sport, O. Zhdanov, asking whether the Sochi biathlon results should be revised, resulting in Ukrainians gaining medals awarded to Russians, to which Tygart said that this could potentially happen). 

The two pranksters posed as african officials. When asked about the Friendship Games, Tygart claimed that athletes taking part in the Games could be banned from future Olympic competitions. His precise words were

"If you compete in those games that don't have doping controls sanctioned by our country or our international sports federation, then you can't compete in the Olympics".

I have trouble understanding this. Why couldn't WADA test the athletes participating in the Friendship Games just before and/or after the Games? And if one supposes that some athletes had taken stimulants during the Games in order to enhance their performance for this particular event, why should this, having no effect on future performances, be unacceptable? Tygart tries to wrap his argument under a doping hide but the main point is governance: it shows through when he speaks about "sanctioned by the international sports federation". This is what this is all about. And Tygart later confirms this by adding that the IOC could feel "seriously threatened" by these games, which could lead to sanctions against participating athletes.

The reactions of russian officials did not take long. Tygart's comments were labeled a "provocation by the United States" and Tygart was invited to "focus on the doping problems in his own country" instead of attacking Russia. And they pointed out that proper doping controls will be in place at the Friendship Games. 

Tygart did not miss the occasion to refer also to the (in)famous Rodchenkov Act (a legislation, passed in 2019, which extends US law enforcement jurisdiction to any international sporting competitions that involve American athletes or have financial connections to the US). It gives the US authorities the ability to detain people also from outside the US if they are suspected of involvement in doping violations. And of course, for zealots like Tygart, the Rodchenkov Act trumps the power of the WADA which is the supreme authority in the fight against doping. But it has been quite some time that the WADA and the USADA do not speak the same language, despite the fact that the former has established the Sports Human Intelligence Network (SHIN), a special intelligence unit that is tasked with spying on athletes and coaches suspected of violating anti-doping rules. But apparently even this is not enough for Mr. Tygart. Perhaps he could lobby the next US administration to institute the death penalty for doping offenders (the non-US ones of course).