The Season Finale ⏱️

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Compiled by David Melly, Paul Snyder, and Jasmine Fehr.

How To Fix The Diamond League Final 💎

A lot of cool stuff has happened in the track and field world since the Olympics. Mondo Duplantis broke his own world record in the pole vault. Josh Kerr and Karissa Schweizer rode their Olympic fitness to Fifth Avenue Mile wins. Mary Moraa set a world best over 600 meters and Emmanuel Wanyonyi got even closer to David Rudisha’s 800m world record. But when it came to the Diamond League final at the Memorial Van Damme meet in Brussels, Belgium… it was a bit of a snoozefest, to be honest.

Maybe it was the cool temperatures slowing down the winning sprint times. It certainly didn’t help that a lot of Olympic champs skipped the meet entirely. And the biggest self-inflicted wound of all was relegating Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone to the B races to adhere to the letter of the law in the DL rulebook. But the net effect was that, five weeks after the last medals were handed out in Paris, the professional track season went out with something closer to a whimper than a bang. An event that should’ve been an exciting opportunity to re-engage track casuals with a reminder that their favorite champions are still fit and still racing instead felt like an awkwardly-situated footnote.

Don’t get us wrong – there were some really cool highlights. Kenny Bednarek finally taking down Letsile Tebogo over 200m, Beatrice Chebet clocking her second 14:09 in two weeks, and the return of Femke Bol were all thrilling moments. And last year’s incredible showcase at the Prefontaine Classic showed that the DL final can be one of the best track meets of the year. But it’s just as apparent that, while Brussels featured all the right ingredients, it takes the right recipe and preparation to cook up a truly delicious meal.

If they put The Lap Count in charge of next year’s Diamond League final (which they certainly won’t), here are a few common-sense changes we’d implement:

Time the final just right.

In a perfectly-structured track and field schedule, the season ends with the biggest championship. There’s a reason they don’t keep playing baseball games after the World Series. Six Diamond League events following the Olympics is, quite frankly, at least five too many. The good news is that, next year, the Diamond League final precedes Worlds; the bad news is that the biggest stars may very well skip the meet to focus on the big kahuna. The DL final does offer something championship races don’t: the ability to optimize conditions, fields, and pacers to translate championship fitness into blazing-fast times. If the DL final wants to maximize impact irrespective of Worlds, it should aim to take place around two weeks after the end of a global championship, so athletes have the chance to rest and reset but don’t have to restructure their whole training cycle around a double peak.

Similarly, DL organizers should be realistic about where and when fast times come easy. Temperatures in the 50s aren’t unusual for a September evening in Belgium – so why are we asking sprinters to circle a meet on the calendar that’s statistically unlikely to produce their best results? There are undoubtedly many considerations league organizers have to balance in designing the Diamond League schedule, but for the final, the greatest emphasis should be on picking a fast track during a period of great weather.

Incentivize fun over formality.

Last week’s Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone drama exposed some key flaws in the Diamond League system. In an effort to incentivize yearlong participation in the circuit, athletes must earn a spot in the final via points accumulated in regular season competition – which makes sense, right? You don’t want to create a scenario where the best athletes can skip out on appearances then show up and take all the money… unless, of course, your goal is for the last meet to have the biggest names and be the most exciting. You see the struggle here.

Similarly, the two dangled prize carrots – a $30,000 first prize and a wildcard entry into Worlds in two weeks – may incentivize the top athletes to show up, but also act as a deterrent to risk-taking. With the DL final leading into Worlds next year, it’s unlikely any major contenders would need to secure a bye – particularly if doing so would mean burning off a hard effort. In short, league rules are well-structured to create high-quality races all season long, but not necessarily fireworks in its finale. But if the final is to truly be an added draw for potential viewers, it might be worth bending the existing rules to create fun storylines.

One way to mix things up would be to pilot the possibility of allowing qualified athletes to float across different events, should they choose. If Letsile Tebogo qualified for the 200m final but wants to run the 400m, let him! This will inevitably piss off the first man out of the 400m final but creates an interesting narrative for everyone else. It would’ve been much more fun to see a rematch between Beatrice Chebet and Faith Kipyegon, the 5000m gold and silver medalists from Paris, than to watch them win their respective events by huge margins.

And then there’s the possibility of a “Sydney rule” – letting a World/Olympic champ who hasn’t run on the circuit all season into the final in an event of their choosing. It could reinforce the existing pattern of the biggest stars skipping out on much of the regular season, but they’re doing that already. At this point, we’d rather bend the rules for a special few than force them into a qualification straightjacket they’ll inevitably find a way to wriggle out of. Here, it’s important to recognize that the Diamond League is not World Athletics: its goal is to maximize the impact (and revenue) from its suite of meets, not to grow the sport as a whole. And as it currently stands, the DL needs stars more than stars need the DL.

Get on TV.

We’re generally big fans of the Peacock broadcasts of professional track and field – the platform is (comparatively) cheap, easy to find, and lets you watch every episode of Parks and Recreation. For your average, run-of-the-mill Diamond League taking place mid-afternoon (in America) on a Friday, maximizing streaming eyeballs are about the best you can aim for. But if athletes, organizers, and promoters are going to invest the extra time and money into making the final a can’t-miss event, it really should be on television as close to primetime as possible. Now, with time zones, broadcast rights, and the Fl*track-sized elephant in the room, this is probably the least realistic and achievable change the DL could make – at least in the short term. But if we’re supposed to buy into the idea that the DL final is a championship and not just the penultimate stop on the schedule, it really should be marketed as such – and the bump in viewership that comes from a television broadcast on even the lower-tier channels is worth chasing.

Like so many parts of track and field, the Diamond League final is facing something of an identity crisis right now. Is it a standalone exhibition or a cog in a yearlong machine? Is its existence dependent on its proximity to championships, or is it a meet with its own intrinsic value? Should it prioritize a standardized racing format or attention-grabbing gimmicks? As it battles the continued pressure to counterprogram the Olympics and new competition from Grand Slam Track, the League will have to decide if it wants to play up its strengths or address its weaknesses. It’s hard, if not impossible, to do both.

In Defense Of The Undefeated Season 👍

Does an undefeated season really need defending? Well, as a Lap Count reader, you’re clearly a high-minded connoisseur of the sport. You float above the fracas of knee-jerk takes and instead scratch your chin wisely when contemplating the goings on in the world of athletics. “Is this good for the sport?” is your weekly mantra. 

Our newsletter has historically and unambiguously endorsed pro-racing takes week in and week out: “WE BELIEVE PURE RACING TRUMPS TIME TRIALS. THE DL FINAL SHOULD PRECEDE THE GLOBAL CHAMPIONSHIP. THE SPORT IS MORE INTERESTING WHEN IT’S NOT PREDICTABLE.”

A common theme of all sports is rooting for the upset. We generally are pro-David in the fight against Goliath – except, of course, when the Goliath in question is your home team. And the best outcome of all is a months- or years-long rivalry that ends up looking like a coin toss each time out.

But then again, Mondo Duplantis and Faith Kipyegon still have plenty of fans – in Sweden, Kenya, Louisiana, and beyond. While there are plenty of us who like to root for the underdog, there are just as many fans out there who are drawn to the inevitable pull of the… uh… overdog. 

Frankly, we get it. It’s fun to be a part of something – even if that’s as simple as belonging to a fanbase – that’s basically guaranteed to be successful. How many Mondoheads turned up in Paris nervous over what medal their hero would exit the stadium with? None! Those lucky souls got to sit back and yuck it up while Duplantis repeatedly soared over the bar and set yet another world record en route to Olympic gold. That doesn’t sound stressful. That sounds like a party.

If you’re a Valarie Allman fan, or a Tara Davis-Woodhall diehard, or a Jordan Díaz stan, 2024 was a very good year. You could reliably tune into whichever meet they were contesting and simply take in the spectacle of an athlete at the top of their game without sweating the outcome – you already knew what it would be.

But even if you’re like us – occasionally self-righteous nerds who love the drama of an insurgent victory that nobody saw coming (and also love that such moments provide wonderful fodder for our newsletter) – you’ve gotta admit there is something a little enjoyable about witnessing totally expected total dominance. In a vacuum, a basically predetermined outcome in a race or field event isn’t always appointment viewing, but at a macro level there is something to be said for being there when an athlete was at the peak of their powers, doing the sorts of things that fans of the sport will be talking about decades into the future. As a few of the aforementioned win streaks start to reach Joe DiMaggio levels of improbability (looking at you, Faith), each successive win starts to write a new history all its own.

We’re still firmly in the “upsets are good for the sport” camp, but we’re happy to reach across the aisle and shake hands with any fan who prefers to be able to say “I was there” during a performer’s period of transcendent greatness. And we were very fortunate to witness so many GOATs – both indisputable and up-for-debate – firing an all cylinders during the 2024 campaign. 

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What Do The New Boston Marathon Qualifying Standards Really Mean? 🧐

When you’ve been around as long as the Boston Marathon has, you get used to receiving feedback: the good, bad, and ugly. And the Boston Athletic Association’s rollout of its new qualifying standards for the 2026 edition of the storied 26.2 mile race certainly generated… a large response.

The Boston Marathon sets a field size target at 30,000 participants and fills those fields with a mix of entrants who qualify by time and those who participate in charity fundraising programs. In recent years, roughly three-quarters of those 30,000 are selected via “BQ,” a series of times broken up by age and gender designed to produce a competitive but equitable group of participants. The race has had some version of a qualifying time since 1970, but it’s also grown unevenly in both size and competitiveness: the fastest qualifying marks, for example, were around in the 1980s but the race was roughly 25% its current size.

For the last five years, the BQ was 3:00:00 for men aged 18-34 and 3:30:00 for women 18-34. But that doesn’t mean that running 2:59:59 will automatically earn you a spot on the starting line in Hopkinton. More qualifiers applied than Boston had spots in eight of the last ten years, meaning the de facto cutoff was faster than the on-paper BQs in those years. The way Boston aims for fairness across categories is to rank everyone by how fast they run under each mark, so in 2024 when the adjusted cutoff was 5:29, the on-paper 3:00/3:30 became 2:54:31 and 3:24:31.

Beginning in the 2026 cycle (the qualifying window for which opened on September 1), runners aged 18-59 will have to target a time five minutes faster than the marks in place for the last six years. 60+ runners will have the same qualifying marks as before, but then again – they’re also getting BQs well into their senior years, so they deserve the break. The race will also have official non-binary qualifying marks for the first time.

The last time BAA moved up the qualifying mark by five minutes (in 2019), the cutoff the previous year was 4:52 under qualifying – so in practice, the mark only got 8 seconds faster. And the following year, the cutoff was 1:36 under the new mark anyways. BAA hasn’t released its registration cutoff for the upcoming 2025 race yet, but in 2024, the race set an all-time record for qualified applicants and 11,039 people were told to try again next year.

So although “BOSTON QUALIFIER GETS 5 MINUTES HARDER” is a headline that may generate a lot of emotional social media reactions from those on the cusp, it’s actually not doing much – if anything – to shift the actual time you need to run to get into the race. If anyone does get slightly screwed, it’s those at the faster end of the spectrum, simply because the cutoffs are evened out by time and not percentage. So a 20-year-old man looking to improve from 3:00 to 2:50 needs to knock 5.6% off his total time, but a 55-year-old woman only has to improve 4.1% to lose the same 10 minutes. Arguably, this change makes the overall population of Boston qualifiers more inclusive, as it makes qualifying harder for the youngest, speediest demographics.

This change isn’t really a move by the Boston Marathon to make its race more selective; it’s a recognition of how much faster and more competitive marathoners have gotten writ large. It’s a great sign for the overall health of the mass participation sport of running that more people than ever before are running faster than ever before. And while we haven’t had a ton of success historically in making casual runners diehard fans of pro running, having a large and semi-aware base of potential viewers/readers/consumers isn’t a bad place to start.

So before you vent your rage in a comment section or email inbox, consider that your personal passion about this issue may be inextricably linked with the very same factors making marathoning more popular. And then channel your feelings into your training for next year!

Coach Spotlight: How New Mexico’s Darren Gauson Is Shaping The Future Of The Lobos’ Cross Country Program 🐺

With the NCAA cross country season underway, Jasmine Fehr is catching up with some of the top coaches to showcase their programs, explore their insights, and pitch their teams to new fans as the championship season approaches.

For our first feature, she spoke with Darren Gauson, Head Coach of Cross Country and Track & Field at the University of New Mexico, to hear about how he’s continuing to rebuild the program after his successful first year with the Lobos.

The following interview excerpt with Darren Gauson has been edited for length and clarity. You can find the full interview here. 

CITIUS MAG: You're starting your second year at New Mexico. Your first year was a huge success: the men qualified for NCAAs for the first time in 14 years, where Habtom Samuel finished runner-up. Habtom also won the outdoor 10,000m. Going into this season, what are you most excited about and what sets your team apart?

Darren Gauson: Before I got here, Coach Franklin’s team was sixth in the conference and hadn't made the meet for a number of years. We were able to bring in a few athletes with Thomas Termote, Lukas Kiprop, Evans Kiplagat, and obviously Habtom as a freshman and launched straight into 18th in year one.

We were hoping for a little bit more. I think we were sitting in tenth and then Lukas had a little bit of a knee problem. He was up there at the regional meet and did pretty well all year and then fell back quite a lot into the hundreds which really killed our team score. 

The team is a lot stronger. We added Vincent Chirchir in January. He’s a 13:34 guy, low 28:00s. We added Iker Sanchez from Arizona, a top athlete from Mexico who went to World Juniors and he's doing an outstanding job at the moment. And then Rikus Van Niekerk from CBU was their number two or three all year. He also is way ahead of where we thought he was going to be. I think the sky's the limit on the men's side. We added one more, he just arrived a week ago: Collins Kiprotich. We're looking really good on the men's side. Habtom is in incredible shape. I mean, 26:53 was an amazing 10,000m performance, but that was the week after indoor nationals. He is really looking to lead this team to our second Mountain West championship and then see what we can do on the national stage.

How would you describe your coaching philosophy and how has it evolved over the years? 

I was at Lamar for three years in Beaumont, Texas. Had some great teams there, finished third in the region a couple of times. Bradley [in Peoria, Illinois] was easier from a weather standpoint. We could do some longer threshold runs and were able to get the men's team to the national championship and finished second in the region, which was incredible. But back then I was just doing a lot of long 10-mile tempos, long threshold runs, and a lot of aerobic work during the season. 

But the championship has changed so much. You look at this past year in Virginia; 2:29 for the first 1K is crazy. So unless you're doing some speed and some turnover stuff during the year, it's really hard. Unless you've just got a bunch of 3:30-something guys on your team that can handle that first mile, it's hard to compete. 

Now we do three different blocks. Our first six-week block is very aerobic, pretty short recovery, and not too much turnover. We'll still do our 200m strides at the track once or twice a week. But now the last few years we've been doing a lot more on the track, doing some 300s, some different pyramid-type workouts we would do during the track season. So just trying to prepare them a little bit more for the intensity – it's like a track race nowadays. You're trying to be in low 13:00s and low 27:00s shape when Wisconsin rolls around…

In the middle of the season we’ll do 4 x 300m, then we'll jump into 800m repeats, then we'll finish with 4 x 300m at like 43, 44, 45. So simulating the start of the race, the middle part and then the end of the race. We'll try to hit a different stimulus once we get to that second phase of training. And obviously we've got the huge added benefit of being at 5,000 feet. A lot of those easy runs benefit us a little bit more being up here compared to the sea-level schools. 

Touching more on the mental side of things, how do you prepare your athletes for the challenges of competing and training and making sure that everyone stays locked in for the season? 

Every athlete's totally different. You got guys like Habtom Samuel – an NCAA championship is a huge deal for them, but they're able to process it fairly quickly. They've been on that scene. 

And then you have some freshmen where you've really got to let them know what it's going to be like and settle their nerves and make sure they're prepared to compete against some of these athletes. And it's just the mental aspect of the day-to-day training: managing the workouts, managing the academics. We've got a lot of international athletes on our team, so managing being away from home, being away from loved ones and how they navigate that through throughout the season. There's a lot that goes into that and it’s one of the beauties of being here. 

And some people are totally different. I was just talking to Habtom about a math class. Or I’m talking to some other athletes about getting them a phone. Practice might be going fine, but other things can weigh on them and affect their sleep. And it just varies from person to person. It's a real family feel on our team and everyone's helping each other out. Our culture is really strong this year. 

Read the rest of the interview here!

Rapid Fire Highlights 🔥

–  Congratulations to Jakob Ingebrigtsen on becoming eligible to slap a 13.1 bumper sticker on his Ferrari. Two days after an uncharacteristic sit-and-kick win in the Diamond League 1500m final, he debuted in the half marathon in Copenhagen in a really funny way: splitting a Norwegian national 10km record (27:27, or sub-58-minute pace) before coming to a complete stop several times en route to a 1:03:13 finish.

– Meanwhile, Sabastian Sawe outkicked Jacob Kiplimo for the win in the aforementioned half marathon, a little over five minutes ahead of Ingebrigtsen (Sawe went 58:05), and Margaret Kipkemboi threw down the gauntlet, going 1:05:11 to put over 30 seconds on the rest of the women’s field.

– The marathon course for the 2025 World Championships in Tokyo have been revealed, and what it lacks in a hill that could be called “the Parisian widowmaker,” it more than makes up for it by featuring six out-and-back sections.

– And speaking of next year’s World Champs, athletes who won their events’ Diamond League final this past weekend do not earn automatic bids. That’s because the DL final will take place prior to Tokyo ‘25, meaning it’ll be next year’s winners who will earn those spots.

– At the Sydney Marathon, Brimin Kipkorrir of Kenya bested the field by nearly two minutes to take top honors in 2:06:18, and Ethiopia’s Workenesh Edesa also coasted to victory by a significant margin, breaking the tape in 2:21:41.

– Last week was a big one for Runner’s World’s Sarah Lorge Butler, who came away with two significant scoops pertaining to American distance running: Union Athletics Club is moving from Oregon to Colorado, and Molly Seidel had to have her appendix removed in Paris during the Olympics.

– CITIUS MAG will be on the scene at next Thursday’s Athlos NYC at Icahn Stadium for a special pre-meet show. Tune in to the CITIUS MAG YouTube channel, and stay tuned for more info.