L'Athlétisme Commence! ⏱️

Lap 179: Powered By Asics

CITIUS MAG’s coverage in Paris is powered by Asics. Over the coming days, get ready as we bring you non-stop coverage including daily podcasts, daily newsletters, interviews, live results, analysis and much more. Be sure to follow along with @CITIUSMAG on Instagram, X, Threads, YouTube and your preferred podcast player.

This week’s newsletter was compiled by David Melly and Paul Snyder.

The 2024 Olympics Are Here! 🇫🇷

With track and field still two days away, there’s no lack of opportunity for the sport’s biggest athletes to make a splash in the Seine (literally and figuratively) as the Paris Olympics are now officially underway. While we didn’t get an Ingebrigtsen brothers feature on Celine Dion’s Eiffel Tower performance, we did get French Olympic legend Marie-José Pérec lighting the Olympic cauldron to officially kick off the Games.

For a sport considered “niche” the other 51 weeks of the year and the other three years of the quadrennium, track and field sure does a lot of heavy lifting as the face of the Olympic Games. For starters, NBC’s Olympic promo graphic in the United States features four athletes: Simone Biles, Katie Ledecky, Sha’Carri Richardson, and Noah Lyles. Not only does track and field take up two of the four slots, which the NBC overlords seem to think is their best shot at grabbing 50% of the American attention span, but it’s also tacitly elevating Lyles and Richardson, two athletes who’ve won one Olympic medal combined, to a pair of eight-time Olympic medalists. Sure, it’s just one “cut to commercial” visual, but it’s telling.

While Team USA was represented by Coco Gauff and LeBron James, track and field makes up a disproportionate proportion of other nations’ Olympic flag bearers. From Olympic champions Jasmine Camacho-Quinn and Gianmarco Tamberi to veteran sprinters Akani Simbine and Marie-Josee Ta Lou-Smith, many of your favorite athletes to cheer for on the track were representing their home countries out on the Seine.

One of the most fun and heartwarming phenomena of the Olympics is watching our favorite athletes across many sports meet and interact – whether it’s Minnesotans Anthony Edwards and Dakotah Lindwum, fan favorites Tara Davis-Woodhall and Coco Gauff, or LeBron James angling for a spot on the 4x100m. For once in their lives, track stars are the cool kids! And there’s nothing more thrilling to occasionally-indignant fans than seeing a bunch of multimillionaire “mainstream” athletes pal around with their favorite runners, jumpers, and throwers.

Already, one of the feel-good moments of the Paris Games has been the mutual admiration between Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Kiwi rugby player Michaela Blyde. Blyde went viral for the video of her (understandably) freaking out about meeting the Jamaican sprint star, and in turn SAFP cheered on her biggest fan at her match on Sunday where she equalled some sort of rugby record we don’t understand.

Clearly, when the Olympics do roll around, the entire world takes track and field very seriously. As they should – we’ve got a lot to offer! Few sports cover the range of nations, backgrounds, body types, and skill sets represented in track and field, and the good news that you, dear reader, already know is that these athletes don’t just compete for two weeks every four years – they’re doing this cool stuff all the time!

In case you’re wondering, “Are all these track and field athletes actually going to do any athletics in Paris? If so– who, what, when?” We’ve got you covered. The CITIUS MAG team has been churning out event previews all week in our other newsletter feed. The final preview drops tomorrow morning, and if you want daily updates on all the action from Paris, you can subscribe there!

The Fiery Debate Over The World’s Stupidest Title 🤦‍♂️

As the summer track season continues and Paris Olympics approached, denizens of the track and field Twitterverse have been consumed by one central debate: the fight over appropriate usage of the term “World’s Fastest Man.”

As best we can tell, the latest round of online fighting can be traced back to Noah Lyles’s appearance on The Tonight Show with Jimmy Fallon, where the reigning 100m World champion was promoted as the “fastest man in the world” – a claim he repeated on the air. This claim, combined with Vogue Magazine’s promotion of Sha’Carri Richardson as the fastest woman in the world, rankled some hardcore track and field fans – especially those who love Jamaican stars like Usain Bolt and Elaine Thompson-Herah. There’s been a lot of hair-splitting over who deserves the title – is it the 2024 world leader? The reigning global champion? The world record holder? Also, why is it the 100 meters versus any other event?

The Lap Count is here to settle things once and for all: It doesn’t freaking matter. “World’s fastest” may look splashy on a magazine cover or talk show ad, but it’s a meaningless title within the context of the sport and track and field fans – casual or hardcore – aren’t doing the sport any favors by taking it seriously. Debates over athletic greatness are central to being a sports fan: Is LeBron or Jordan the true GOAT? Is Shohei Ohtani better than Babe Ruth? Are Serena Williams’s 23 Grand Slam titles the greatest athletic accomplishment in any sport? But fighting over terminology is a waste of everyone’s time.

The goal of anyone looking to elevate the status of track and field in the eyes of the general public should be to help the world understand what accomplishment in our sport really means. Noah Lyles hasn’t lost a 200m since 2021 – that’s a streak that, if the average sports fan understood, should be mind-boggling. Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce has 9 of the 22 sub-10.7s ever run. Usain Bolt is the only man in history to win Olympic triple-double gold. These are all real measures of “fastest” that can engage and excite track fans, old and new. What’s not going to get the job done is engaging with every bit of track and field-related bluster with a “well actually!”

A little context can go a long way, and if there’s one thing watching the pommel horse or the canoe slalom every four years reminds us, it’s that the barrier to caring about a new sport is way lower than we pretend it is. We don’t need gimmicks to get people to care about Noah Lyles – and online fighting over minutia certainly doesn’t make our fan community look like a fun one to join. We just need a little faith that track and field, when presented properly, can sell itself.

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Reader Mailbag: Paris Edition 📬

The entire Lap Count team is very ill… with a bad case of “Olympic Fever!” Ha! And accordingly, nobody really felt like writing their usual weekly essays. So we did what any responsible newsletter would, under the circumstances, and opened up the mailbag, picking the best questions we may or may not be qualified to answer:

“Who would you put on the men’s 4x4? Specifically, would you include Noah Lyles?”

Before we make any bold claims about whether Lyles can – or should – win four golds across two individual events and two relays, we have to add a disclaimer: we only know what we know.

We don’t know exactly what Lyles has been doing in training (if anything) to prepare for the possibility of a 400m. We don’t know how Team USA’s large stable of long sprinters is currently doing, health-wise. Anyone who’s ever chased a team championship at the high school or college level knows the panicked scramble that comes when one too many pulled hamstrings lands a miler on the 4x400m. But here’s what we do know: five of the ten fastest runners in the world over 400m this year are on Team USA. Three of those athletes – Bryce Deadmon, Quincy Wilson, and Vernon Norwood – aren’t running individual events and will be fresh for one or both 4x4 relays. And that doesn’t include Chris Bailey or Rai Benjamin, who’ve both run 44.42 this year.

So with that information, you can draw one of two conclusions: Either Team USA shouldn’t take the risk of putting Lyles on the relay when they have such a deep pool of proven commodities to draw from… OR Team USA has such strength in the 400m that they can add an additional layer of intrigue and spectacle to the end of the competition – and still have three strong legs to pick up the slack if Lyles messes up.

Our position, at least until we watch the early events play out, is that the best bet is to play it safe and give other athletes the chance to shine. Guys like Vernon Norwood and Quincy Wilson are already beloved by the track and field community – wouldn’t it be nice to give the broader sports audience the chance to become fans? If Lyles picks up triple gold in the events we know he’s running, he’ll have earned his spot as one of the sport’s all-time greats. A fourth gold would be icing on the cake and wouldn’t change his legacy much – but it could be life-changing for some of the more unsung heroes of Team USA.

“Which American has the best medal chances in the marathon?”

It feels sort of nuts to choose the American marathoner who has only ever run one marathon, but that’s who we’ve gotta go with: Fiona O’Keeffe. O’Keeffe debuted at the Olympic Trials, and won the damn thing in 2:22:10. She trains at least a good portion of the year in hilly, humid North Carolina. And we’ve got to cop to at least a touch of Molly Seidel-induced “inexperience can be a good thing in the marathon!” bias.

All that said, O’Keeffe’s PR slots in as the 40th fastest time run in the world in 2024. Whittle the list ahead of her down to just each country’s Olympic delegation, and account for the fact that O’Keefe’s time was run under less-than-stellar conditions, and she’s still a long shot for a medal, at least on paper. There are some truly incredible athletes she’ll have to outrun. We’d rate her podium odds as “unlikely,” but not quite “will take a miracle” due to the challenging nature of the course. More on that later.

But going back to the previous answer’s “here’s what we do know” framing: we know how Emily Sisson fares against Sifan Hassan in competition. We know where a 2:08 level (the Mantz/Young/Korir Zone) performance usually shakes out in a World Marathon Major-caliber field. We’ve seen Dakota Lindwurm steadily chip away at her PB. What we don’t know is where O’Keeffe’s ceiling really lies.

Could one of the other five U.S. marathoners make a big jump as well, capitalizing on a slower course and a championship-style race? Absolutely. But we have more evidence of past performance to determine our expected range of outcomes. Career marathon starts for Team USA are as follows: Lindwurm - 12, Korir - 7, Sisson - 5, Mantz - 4, Young - 4, O’Keeffe - 1. O’Keeffe is also the youngest of the group, at 26 years old – although Mantz, at 27, is probably the athlete with the second-most upside in the eyes of many. But until she proves otherwise, the sky is the limit for Fiona.

“Who’s the best value for track and field sports betting?”

Disclaimer: The opinions expressed by the Lap Count editorial staff should not be taken as any sort of credible gambling advice. We’re mostly just talking nonsense.

Updated sports-betting odds for the Paris Olympics have been released, and everyone who thinks they have the inside track (no pun intended) is trying to see how they can make a quick buck. The risk-averse might want to pursue some sort of multi-way favorites parlay into reasonable odds – something like Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone x Mondo Duplantis x Grant Holloway seems pretty safe. But there are some deep-value picks out there – here’s a few:

Steven Gardiner (400m, +370): The Olympic champ has had injury issues over the last few years, to be sure, but when he’s healthy, he’s hard to beat: his only two losses over 400m in the last six years have been DNFs. Since 2018, if he crosses the finish line, it’s in first. He hasn’t run sub-44 this year, so it is possible he’ll finally simply be outrun, but he also hasn’t been seeking out fast tracks and Diamond League competition much this year.

Julien Alfred (100m, +500): With huge question marks around Jamaicans Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce and Shericka Jackson, all it would take is one misplaced step or sloppy start from Sha’Carri Richardson for Alfred to find herself atop the podium. The second-fastest woman in the field by season’s best has looked incredibly strong all summer and is fresh off a 21.86 PB in the 200m, her weaker event, where she managed to fight World silver medalist Gabby Thomas to the line.

Tobi Amusan (100H, +1000): The 2022 World champ and world record holder in the event is far from unbeatable this year; her most recent race was a loss to U.S. Trials third-placer Grace Stark. But as most people view the 100m hurdles as an evenly-matched bout between five or six contenders, it was wild to see Amusan so far down on the list – particularly when the world lead of 12.28 is 0.16 slower than Amusan at her world-beating best.

Hugues Fabrice Zango (TJ, +2000): We had to double check to see if we’d missed any injury reports when we saw these odds. Zango, the reigning indoor and outdoor World champion in the triple jump, may not have jumped as far as the champ and runner from the European Championships, Jordan Diaz Fortun and Pedro Pichardo, but he’s won nine of his 10 competitions this year and is coming off a season’s best 17.57m in his most recent meet. Zango, the bronze medalist in Tokyo, has also shown real consistency in championships, winning medals at each of the last four global outdoor championships.

“If Team USA had to field a mixed gender 4x400m relay entirely of athletes from other sports, who would be the best choices?”

Leg 1 - Men’s basketball’s Anthony Edwards: Anthony Edwards is – athletically speaking – about 10x more impressive than that JV basketball kid from your high school who managed to split a 50.X the one time he ran the 4 x 400m. In fact, he’s among the most explosive leapers in basketball today, so you have to assume he can get out hard and stay out of trouble, which might otherwise be a concern for a 6’4” athlete. During the ‘23-’24 NBA season he ran on average ~2.5 miles per game played for the Minnesota Timberwolves, so his engine’s decent, too. Then there’s his borderline deluded sense of confidence. If sufficiently gassed up, Ant would 100% believe he’s got a 48.X split in him, and while that outcome is highly unlikely, he would willingly go to the well to prove it possible.

Leg 2 - Women’s tennis’s Coco Gauff: You occasionally hear rumors about tennis players running 400m repeats as part of offseason conditioning. Repeat times get tossed around that sound plausible, yet still mighty impressive for an athlete that doesn’t technically have to be doing crap like that. Coco Gauff is an incredibly talented athlete, who’s known for her quickness and fluidity on the court. Based on this training montage, she seems to do a lot of hard things in preparation for matches that at least wouldn’t hurt one’s ability to clock a quick quarter mile. That sounds like a good second leg to us.

Leg 3 - Men’s triathlon’s Morgan Pearson: This sort of feels like cheating in the sense that Morgan Pearson was five-time NCAA track All-American for Colorado back before he pivoted to triathlon semi-full-time. While a Buff, Pearson did manage to run a 1:52.89 800m at one point. World Athletic scoring tables suggest that was worth a 48.57 over 400m. Given the thousands of miles he’s since logged on the roads, on his bike, and in the pool, we can assume he’s significantly stronger but probably a touch less snappy, now. But it’s a damn relay! Rolling start! Bright lights! Roar of the crowd! He’s still got a sub-50 split in him. We just know it.

Leg 4 - Women’s soccer’s Lynn Williams: Writing this section of the newsletter is neither art nor science. It’s content, baby. And that means we are really going to take some liberties with our reasoning. In a game setting, Williams has been clocked running – for at least a short stint – a blistering 21.11mph. Continued for 400m, that’s a 42.39, and while obviously she’s not hitting us with a sub-43 split, it indicates tremendous wheels. Digging in further, Williams’s sister ran track at Cal Poly, specializing in the shorter sprints, and their parents both ran track at Fresno State. That’s the sort of pedigree you simply love to see having already committed to slotting an athlete into your theoretical Olympic 4 x 400.

“How do you feel about the Olympic marathon course? Is it good that it’s so hilly?”

We have a lot to say here. To answer this question, first we need to talk about a prominent high school cross country course in California. 

It was announced last weekend that the historic course of the Mt. SAC Cross Country Invitational would be altered, removing one of its signature hills and now winding up with an on-track finish, to make it way more boring. That’s of course not what the event’s PR angle was. They mentioned things like a desire to “enhance [the] spectator experience” and “evolving trends in cross country that emphasize speed and endurance over challenging hills.”

Everyone is pissed. We are pissed. The only people who aren’t pissed are a few dozen California teenagers who will for the rest of their lives get to brag about having a sub-15 “three mile” PR.

And why? Because the hills are what makes Mt. SAC a legendary cross country course – that and the fact that generations of uber-talented high school harriers have waged battle on the same undulating terrain. It’s both a rite of passage and something to be feared. Nobody speaks in hushed, ominous tones about cross country courses in Texas that are just loops of soccer fields for a reason.

This is all to say that the same holds true for marathon courses. Yes, the flat, and frankly UN-AMERICAN World Majors are iconic. They are World Majors. That makes them inherently iconic. That and the fact that for the most part – no shots at Chicago here – they run past thousand-year-old shit.

But consider Heartbreak Hill, a gradual, 88’ climb along a fairly nondescript stretch of Commonwealth Avenue in Newton, Massachusetts. In the context of the Boston Marathon, it’s the stuff of legend, and athletes’ assessments of their races almost always hinge on how they handled that particular ascension.

Now consider the Paris ‘24 marathon course. It’s got a yet-to-be-named hill that’s six times the size of Heartbreak. We’re nodding like Jack Nicholson in The Departed just thinking about the carnage that will result from that bit of topography alone, and we don’t think it’s farfetched to suggest people will be talking about this hill for decades to come. Will it break a favorite? Will some unknown rise (literally) to the occasion? Even if you could analyze the training and injury history of every runner in each marathon field for the last 12 months, that won’t tell you how they’ll fare on a course with a certified widowmaker like this.

So to answer your question… we love it. This is an awesome marathon route. There’s a time and a place for speedway style courses. But as is Lap Count policy, we need to reiterate that when the potential for a world record-setting performance is the main draw of an event, if the athletes fall short, that makes that event a bust. Championship-style racing on a hard, hilly-ass course is always going to provide something at the very least interesting, and at best, for the history books.

Rapid Fire Highlights 🔥

– Jakob Ingebrigtsen, along with brothers Henrik, and Filip, released a song and accompanying video via the Norwegian television station NRK. (For the record, this is far from the strangest music video to ever come out of Norway – the undisputed #1 is this surreal, celebrity-laden cover of “Let it Be” that aired on TV2 in 2010. If you’ve never clicked a link in this newsletter, please, click this one.)

– In another shake up for Team Ethiopia, 2022 World champ Sisay Lemma is out of the marathon, citing injury. In his place, Tamirat Tola, who won the relevantly hilly New York City Marathon last year in 2:04:58. As with all matters of Ethiopian 5,000m-and-up roster configuration, this change comes with legit medal implications!

– Nigerian Sprinter Favour Ofili, who had qualified for both the 100m and 200m in Paris, has shared that she will not be competing in the 100m, stating that Athletics Federation of Nigeria never entered her in that event. It appears she was in fact entered in the 200m. But as Ofili reminded her followers in a Tweet, in Tokyo she was also unable to compete because AFN didn’t pay for enough drug testing for her – and 13 other Nigerian athletes – ineligible. 

– Christian Miller, best known for being the teenager who placed fifth at the U.S. Trials, has decommitted from the University of Georgia and will instead go pro. Seems reasonable! This past season, Miller ran four sub-10-second 100m races.

– RIP to American coaching great Tracy Walters. Walters is best known for coaching Gerry Lindgren to high school records and an Olympic berth in 1964 while still a prep athlete, and for helping guide Don Kardong to his fourth place finish at the 1976 Olympic marathon. But Walters’s lasting influence is also a big reason why Spokane, Washington, a sleepy city of 230,000, is still one of the major hotbeds of American distance running talent.

– The removal of caps on scholarships and new roster size limits were announced for all Division I NCAA sports, starting in 2025-2026. Men’s and women’s cross country teams are capped at 17 athletes each, and men’s and women’s track programs cannot have more than 45 athletes on their rosters. To be clear, athletic departments will not be required to – and in most cases, almost certainly won’t – offer this many scholarships for cross and track.

– At Cleveland’s Guardian Mile, Johnny Gregork took home is fourth consecutive title, and Micaela Degenero outleaned Heather MacLean for her first win on the bridge. Check out some pretty slick footage of both the men’s and women’s races, courtesy of CITIUS MAG – a must-watch for fans of road miles and fans of 1930s public works projects.