Mingle Until Departure

Specifically, what I learned watching the 800m heats this evening, regarding the 800m-

• American runners are not 'kickers'; it's always important that they run fast early to solidify their position
• What holds back the development of American runners in the 800m is almost always strategy, and not talent
• American runners are basically never favored in the 800m; one runner advanced to the semifinals of the three Americans (from nine heats, top two each heat plus top six times advance)

And to expand on the last point, very rarely is there an American of anything approaching quality or prominence in any race longer than 800m, either.

So why is this?

Unsurprisingly, I have a theory. In two parts:

• Track and field sports are simply not that popular (i.e., able to draw tens of thousands to stadia) in the United States. That is not to say that they are not practiced by many - and many of the best - athletes. But they are not runners, exclusively. There are some marginal sports where America is able exercise (har har) its hyper-superior edge in training facilities and competitive-athletically-imbued culture despite the sport's overall lack of popularity, by the sport being very regionally popular (e.g., swimming and water sports generally in California and Florida; volleyball in California). But track and field sports are more or less universally marginal - the top athletes often use them for off-season training, and the best sometimes find themselves better at track sports than, say, football.
• As a result, there is an enormous glut of the world's best conditioned athletes who participate in track sports for the purposes of training. This means that they're training for, mostly, football and basketball (baseball players, though the most skilled athletes in the world, have more important and difficult things to worry about [e.g., hitting a curve ball] than going really, really fast). These sports emphasize a few things:

i) explosive speed over short distances
ii) leaping ability
iii) brute strength

So, where does that leave the United States track and field team? Well, these are actually pretty good predictors of the events that the U.S. traditionally dominates - 100m, 200m and 400m sprints, hurdles and relays (esp. relays, given absurd depth of the United States' athletes); long jump; decathalon; the throwing sports (javelin, shot put, hammer, discus [which I really think an ultimate player should train for for 2008]).

These sports are emphasized, at this point, both for their training ability, the United States' traditional dominance, and also - their ease. The tools that are developed in other sports are easily translated into these events, which in turn help hone those abilities.

So - 800m+ races? What sport is there where running half a mile straight, with proper pacing and race strategy, comes in handy?

Ah.

The 800m.

Plenty of sprinters and shot-putters went on to the NFL, or vice versa - not so much with the middle distance.

Not that there's anything wrong with that...it's just that, well, there's really no reason the United States should ever lose, at anything.