Ohio HS XC Meet In Flux?

Two newspaper articles about Ohio governor Ted Strickland's new budget which calls for slot mahines at the state's horse tracks (via Let's Run):

Slotted for trouble? State high school officials ponder status of cross-country meet at Scioto Downs due to slot machines' arrival

The Ohio High School Athletic Association is exploring whether a proposal to install electronic slot machines at Scioto Downs would impact the state cross country meet held there each autumn, the group said Monday.
...
The meet has been held at Scioto Downs since 1985 and typically draws more than 10,000 spectators. It is not a money-maker for the OHSAA. Last year, it drew 10,051 fans and lost $5,934, according to OHSAA figures.

Some coaches said they are worried what would happen to the meet if it leaves Scioto Downs, because there are no obvious alternate sites that can handle the athletes, crowds and parking.

HS Athletic Association monitoring Ohio slots plan

In a story on the OHSAA's Web site, state cross country meet manager Terry Oehrtman says, "Scioto Downs has, in fact, become synonymous with the OHSAA state meet. When you talk to coaches, they don't refer to the state meet as the state meet. "They don't say, 'We hope to make it to state.' They say, 'Our goal is to make it to Scioto Downs."'

The state meet includes three boys and three girls championship races involving 96 teams and more than 950 runners.

The articles discuss a lack of an alternative site. Rubbish--there are always alternatives. Ken Jarvis of Galion HS has led a group trying to get the meet at Mid-Ohio Sports Car Course, and Robert Gary (Ohio State head coach) has reportedly been thinking about the possibility of OSU building a site similar to Indiana State's permanent XC course that hosts the NCAA (admittedly without any action on the issue).

Nevertheless, the guv is playing with fire. High school sports are HUGE in rural Ohio, even minor sports like cross country. Rural areas are swing districts for Dems. Don't mess with farmers--they have long memories.

Track on Marketplace

A teaser on NPR's Marketplace: tomorrow they'll cover professional Kenyan runners and the seriousness with which you must run when it's your living. (Marketplace follows All Things Considered on most radio stations, round about 6 or 6:30 PM).

Things Yelled At Runners

My local road runner's club discussion board has brought up the topic of interesting things yelled at us while running.

My favorite comes from Bob Masters (one-time Olympic Trials participant

A group of us were running in Wildwood and our favorite elderly lady was feeling particularly surly that morning and yelled to us as we ran by, "You're all gonna die someday." Then I replied, "Not before you!"

My contribution:

I was running one morning in Key West a few years back. At 8 AM, you've got the entire island basically to yourself, but going down one side street there were three guys standing on the sidewalk and BSing. They saw me coming, gave me some room, and as I went past one of them watched me and said quietly to his buddies "Oh, yeah."

My initial gut reaction was finally understanding how women often feel, but my second one was "well, I guess someone finds me attractive" and took it as a compliment.

I'm not sure if I've got the details exactly right about this one: Keith Madaras was running his first marathon at Twin Cities in cold half rain/half snow conditions. Late in the race the course went by the Governor's mansion, then occupied by one Jesse "The Body" Ventura. He was standing out on the lawn in shorts and a Hawaiian shirt with a lit cigar and yelled at Keith "Go get 'em buddy, you're the first white guy I've seen!"

Let's Run Still Getting Better

It still makes me shake my head every time I think about it, but Let's Run is growing into one of the premier track news sites on the internet. They've got an Ethiopian correspondent now, and "[i]n his first piece, he catches up with Dibaba at practice and also sees Sihine, Defar and others."

All on a website so primitive it doesn't even have an RSS feed.

Let's Run, SportsCenter

The day after the Lausanne Super GP meet, Usain Bolt's 19.59 run in the rain made SportsCenter's top ten plays. The lead in was a snyde, but funny, remark: "What's the only thing more boring than track? Field."

Needless to say, this ticked off quite a few people. The Brojos did a little digging and found out the background and interests of the anchor who said it, John Anderson. You'd be surprised. Very surprised.

SI's Thrill List

SI.com has a "thrill list", the top ten most-thrilling athletes to watch in fifteen different sports. Tim Layden did a track list that was pretty good, but he dropped the baton by leaving out Bob Hayes.

My thrill list--some I've seen in person, some on TV, and some on film...

10. Wladislaw Kozakiewicz. You're probably saying who? At the 1980 Olympics, the Soviets in the stands whistled loudly whenever he got up on the pole vault runway, trying to ruin his concentration. Not only did he win, he broke the world record, gave the crowd the one-armed salute, climbed into the stands with the Polish contingent and sang "Poland Is Not Beaten" with them, surrounded by 100,000 hostile Russkies. Probably the ballsiest act of defiance in track history.

9. Abebe Bikila. Tom Derderian wrote that when runners imagine their stride is light and fluid and beautiful, they imagine they are Bikila.

8. Jonathan Edwards. He rewrote the book on triple-jumping.

7. Kip Keino. A man who ran balls-out.

6. Carl Lewis. Not for sprinting, for the long jump. He always found a way to win. When, after ten years, he finally lost, it took a world record by Mike Powell--and Lewis had gotten so far inside Powell's head, he thought he'd have to break it again to fight off King Carl.

5. Tommie Smith. Like Bolt, but a badass.

4. Jackie Joyner-Kersee. Greatest. Woman. Ever.

3. Al Oerter. The ultimate clutch competitor.

2. Edwin Moses. 'Nuff said.

1. "Bullet" Bob Hayes. SI's John Underwood, in 1964: "Hayes does not run a race so much as he appears to beat it to death, or it him."

More on T&FN and the Web

I hadn't planned to extend the thoughts on my previous post, but I will.

Yesterday's Fresh Air on NPR was pretty much completely taken up by one interview. The segment was called The New Price Point? 'Free' and was with Chris Anderson, former U.S. business editor at The Economist and now editor-in-chief at Wired magazine.

He notes that the main business model for the internet--free content paid for by advertising--is a very old one, at least as old as radio. And it works, but only if the audience is large enough or targeted enough, and even then it's not a viable model for small companies.

What has become increasingly common is a model called freemium. This is where most content is free, but a smaller number of users gain premium content for a fee. This combines ad revenue and subscriber revenue, neither of which would be enough on their own. The Wall Street Journal's website follows this model.

It's possible to keep too much content for premium-users only. A few years ago the New York Times found this out the hard way; the problem was that they had some of the most popular political columnists in the country. Demand for the columns was so high that people pirated the stuff and posted it all over the internet. So you don't want to keep too much content behind a firewall, because then no one will pay up.

Trackshark could not have done a freemium model. It was one guy, Tom Borish, doing all the work himself (along with the help of part-time volunteers). He just could not produce enough content, nor was he established enough, to have anything worth keeping behind a firewall.

There is, however, a well-established company that could exploit the freemium model, Track & Field News. In a way, they already do. Magazine subscribers get a weekly results newsletter. But it could be a lot better. For example, the issue that came today has the headline "All you need to know about the NCAA Champs" on the cover. I don't care about that, because it happened several weeks ago.

Here's how the e-mail system could work: all copy, no compiled results. Most of us already checked out the results before the .pdf newsletter ever got to us. What comes in the mail should not be looking back, because it will always be old news. The print mag should be features, interviews, previews, and so forth.

Besides the e-mail newsletter, T&FN has 61 years of amazing things available. Sitting on their servers are complete results of every US championship since 1878, every NCAA championship since 1921, and the impossible-to-find AIAW championships of 1969-1982. All free for the taking by anyone. Unfortunately, none of it has been updated in years, and neither have their voluminous World Rankings data. The staff's computers are overflowing with amazing data that really hasn't seen the light of day. All of this is stuff that many people who have no interest in the print mag would pay for.

T&FN, as well as most niche publications, should stop thinking about giving things away when you subscribe to the magazine. They should start thinking about giving the magazine away when you subscribe to the website.

Old Guard versus New Guard

A while back I wrote about how Track & Field News' staff is a bit set in their ways, generally not wishing to rock the boat by, you know, actually writing about important stuff. This was when The Final Sprint and its later founder Adam Jacobs went out and beat the bush for info about the people running for USATF president, which was necessary because little of it about the winner was complimentary.

Anyway, Garry Hill was particularly short when it came to discussing the issue, writing "If you don't like our style, don't read us. It's that simple."

Writing for the Center for American Progress, blogger Eric Alterman discussed the same issues in DC political reporting in an article titled Think Again: The Strange Politics of Collusion (and “Dickishness”). It's not really about politics, its about how the established media keeps its place by being established rather than necessarily good, and the nastiness that can occur when upstarts actually compete with them on a level playing field.

Recently, I've noticed that the home page for Let's Run -- the center of all that is obnoxious, uneducated, self-centered, and (little-a) amateur in the sport -- is more organized and more readable than that of Track & Field News, and is a better daily read due to decent self-produced previews and a more selective use of news links. It's so shocking, it's like discovering that Fox News Channel has surpassed CBS in professionalism. Or that The Daily Show asks tougher questions than the White House press corps. (Well, I guess the second one isn't so shocking.)

You could argue that the Johnson brothers can put together a daily page because they're not busy putting together a magazine. True, but Garry Hill finds time to average 21.35 posts per day at the T&FN message boards, while the Johnson might pop up two or three times a week on their own board.

That's beside the point. The web presence of T&FN is weak and hard to use and parts haven't been updated in eight years. Literally every other news source on the planet now understands that their web content is life or death. If T&FN can't spare one employee's morning to put together a good daily home page, then they'd better find out how to get in on that GM bailout money.

Statheads Rejoice!

At the bottom of the IAAF's World Championships home page are two seemingly innocuous links, labeled "Statistics Book, Berlin 2009 - Part One (pdf)" and "Statistics Book, Berlin 2009 - Part Two (pdf)". The data held in them is amazing. Here is the table of contents:

IAAF World Records & Best Performances

IAAF World Championship Records & Best Performances

IAAF World Championships Facts & Figures
Performance Trends
Superlatives
Multiple Medalists
Most Appearances
Youngest & Oldest
Placing Tables
Major Records Set
Doping Violations at IAAF World Championships

Results From Past Major Championships
IAAF World Championships in Athletics (complete results)
IAAF World Athletics Series
Olympic Games
World University Games
Winners of Area Championships & Games and Commonwealth Games

World and Continental Records
Men
Women
World Indoor
World Teenage Bests by Age

Men's Lists
All-Time World Lists
National Records
Best National Placings
Progression of Official World Records

Women's Lists
All-Time World Lists
National Records
Best National Placings
Progression of Official World Records

Biographical Summaries

The summaries of past World Championships include several paragraphs of written material for each event at each championship. There re biographical summaries on over 400 athletes. Like the Smithsonian, you can get lost in here for days and never want to come out.

More TV Tips for Track

As linked in a comment, Bryan Green at the Runner's Tribe wrote up a top-ten list of tips to improve TV track & field coverage. I agree with all points, and have a few to add myself.

Myself, I think a commercial-free broadcast of what goes on the stadium video board along with an audio feed of the PA announcers would be vastly superior to any US track coverage since the 1992 Olympics Triplecast (which, while a financial bust, was apparently great TV).

I'm writing this in between events of the Bislett Games, which Universal Sports is showing using the international feed and a pair of British announcers. They do this right. Part of it is that track is a bigger sport in Europe, but another part is that TV in Europe has no mandate to make a profit, and there's no fear in putting money into a production with the possibility of never getting it back (since they never will anyway).

For the most part, the real difference is that domestic TV coverage does not respect the sport. No one shows field events in complementary camera angles because they don't appreciate the field events. Larry Rawson doesn't need to explain that these guys are jumping over the equivalent of eighty-seven phone books if the camera work is good. Europeans invented the camera-on-a-rail and use other track-level shots (such as a lone cameraman on a segway) in distance races to transmit just how shockingly fast the athletes run for the same reason.

But all of this goes back to my original statement: domestic track is better experienced live than on TV. Sports are better in person because of the atmosphere, but most of them are now better on TV if you really want to pay attention to all the details of what's going on. Track is not. If every other sport has a constant score/time graphic, why don't we get told in visual form how many laps are left or who the current shot put leaders are?

Besides copying the European's tricks, there are a few other things that could be done. Track is often a three- or four- or five-ring circus, and there's no reason there couldn't be split-screen use to show more than one at a time. In team-heavy competitions like the NCAA, SportsCenter-style sidebars and crawls could keep us up-to-date on all the off-track action and how it affects the team scoring. In a perfect world I'd like to steal some NASCAR graphics to let us know who's leading the 400 and 400 hurdles over the first 300 meters.

The Final Nail in the Coffin

For the past several years, I've been of two minds when it came time to renewing my Runner's World subscription. On one hand, it's a 95% worthless rag. On the other hand, there's usually one article worth reading, and it's only a measly $1 per month, so why not. But I've finally decided not to re-up it.

And today I was sure I made the right choice. RW's back page is a feature called "I'm a Runner", which has minor celebrities such as astronauts, generals, entertainers and so forth. People like Ed Hochuli and Kai Ryssdal.

This month? Sara Palin. I took a Sharpie and wrote over "I'm a Runner" with "I'm an Idiot". RW has not only jumped the shark, it's entered the being eaten by a crocodile contest.

Late Update: This was apparently part of a day-long media presser. Every comedian in the country will be ecstatic.

Later update: Looks like she hadn't planned to resign until after the mag was in the mail...which is an example of the kind of erratic behavior that is making every comedian in the country ecstatic.