I am always visiting sites that talk about athletics and from time to time I recommend the best among them to my readers. Today I am writing about a great site that focuses on combined events: deca passion.
It's a blog, created by two combined-events experts. It has been around since 2013 (just like the "rethinking" blog). Their analyses are great but there is a problem: you have to be able to read french. If you don't, then tough luck, unless you can stand the awful google translations. Well, this is one of those rare cases where, had I not been speaking french, I would endure the bad translations just to be able to read some of the great articles that appear on that site. If you are a combined-events fan I suggest that you do just that.
In a recent post the IAAF announced groundbreaking changes to be implemented to race-walking competitions over the next few years. But before commenting on them let me make a very important statement.
I have the deepest respect for race-walkers, the athletes. They train very hard, and compete over long, endurance-based, taxing events. I will never criticise them. What I am criticising is this un-natural sport where the possibility of cheating is in-built (since it relies on a human-eye judgement, something utterly inefficient in this case). Having made this point I can now proceed to the IAAF announcement.
Just a year after the 50 km was added to women's program (and, in fact, just after the IAAF recommended to the IOC that it be included in the 2020, Tokyo, Olympics) the 50 km is going the way fo the dodo. In the 2021 World Championships both men and women will compete over 20 and 30 km (a ridiculous choice if there is one). From 2022 onwards the official distances will be 10 and 30 km. The latter distance will bring the duration of the event down to the Marathon one. Well, assuming that the athletes continue walking as they do now, i.e. essentially running.
And here comes the major change. From 2021 onwards a race-walking electronic control system will be implemented. It will consist in a sensor which will be fitted into the athletes' shoes and which will detect a loss of contact with the ground. Hunting around for references on the internet I found an, IAAF-funded, study by a team of the Polytechnic University of Catalonia but I could not get anything more than the description of the project. If implemented, this system will change radically what we call today race-walking. The athletes will be compelled to walk, lest they be disqualified.
The race-walkers themselves reacted immediately pointing out the various flaws in the new proposals. I suggest that you track down their response and read it: it is well-thought, just what one would expect from high-level specialists.
Looking for a picture to illustrate my post I stumbled upon a short video entitled "Race-walking is terrible". And, of course, race-walking as performed today is terrible, in the sense that the walking rules cannot be enforced. But let us suppose that with the new control system all "flight time" disappears. Would it be still worth keeping this discipline? My answer is a resounding "no". I have written on several occasions that for me race-walking would make sense only as an ultra-marathon race, say 100 km or more. It is precisely what E. Anthoine, the great french race-walker of the beginning of the past century, had been campaigning for. Unfortunately when race-walking was included in the olympic program, in 1932, it was over the shorter 50 km distance. The reason was certainly that a 10 hours race cannot be part of a world championship or of the olympics. If we decided to go for ultra-marathon-like race-walking, a special championship should be created for this, eschewing all shorter distances. But an even simpler solution would be to forget about this discipline. Just abolish it and be done with it.
It started when I was reviewing the 2018 season and I tried to find a photo of the pole vault silver medalist at the 2018, Berlin, Europeans, T. Morgunov. I had trouble with this but in the end I managed to get one where the three medalists are together.
And then I had one where Duplantis and Lavillenie exhibit proudly the flags of their country.
That got me thinking. There are literally dozens of russian athletes who obtained an authorisation to participate in official competitions in athletics as Authorised Neutral Athletes (ANA). This is the aftermath of the doping scandal in which the russian federation was implicated, a situation which, two years later, has not been resolved and which led to the introduction of the ANA class.
When an ANA athlete obtains a medal in the Olympic Games the olympic flag is hoisted and the olympic anthem is sounded for a gold medalist. I can understand this since the russian federation is (temporarily) banned from official competitions. But it remains that the ANA athletes are of russian nationality. Why on earth can't they celebrate their success in competition by exhibiting their national flag?
This flag thing is not as strict as the IAAF would like us to believe. When C. Freeman won the women's 400 m in the Sydney, 2000, Olympics she did celebrate her victory with both the Aborigines (her tribal ancestry) and the Australia flags.
M. Jones did the same with the Belize (her mother's country of origin) and the US flag.
While winning the 2017 World championships for men's 200 m, R. Guliyev first put the Azerbaijan (his country of origin) flag and then the one of Turkey.
(Mind you, this year, after his victory in the European's, only the turkish flag was displayed). So would that be a big deal if russian athletes were allowed to show the russian flag in the minutes following the end of the event?
I would definitely like to see a smiling M. Lasitskene displaying the russian flag after her victories in the high jump.
