Fantasy League lessons learned

In the IAAF fantasy league, I had about as much fun as I can have while getting my ass kicked. There were somewhere around 6600 teams in the league and I finished 2209th.

The point of any fantasy league is to increase your interest in competition that might otherwise be rather meaningless. Whether Irving Saladino or Anderw Howe won the long jump wouldn't have made a tremendous amount of difference to me, except that I had Saladino on my squad. So when he went over the leader line on the last jump of the competition I jumped out of my chair and yelled in celebration--something I haven't done for a long jump competition since 1991.

I am not particularly good at making predictions and my premeet medal picks prove that. I am fairly good at analyzing what has happened in the past, and I noticed two trends that would greatly help in future fantasy leagues.

1) Don't think you're smarter than the guys at Track & Field News. Their favorites to win virtually always won a medal of some sort. When they've run their prediction contests, the winners always do better than the T&FN gang. But there's always an element of luck involved; if you average results over several years, I bet no one does better than the Mountain View boys. So use their gold-medal picks as an initial worksheet.

2) Semifinals tell you a lot about what will happen in the final. Check these out.

Men's 100: semi winners went 1-2 (bronze was 2nd in semi)
Men's 200: semi winners went 1-2 (bronze was 2nd in semi)
Men's 400: semi winners went 1-2-3
Men's 800: semi winners went 1-2-3
Men's 1500: semi winners went 1-2 (bronze was 7th in semi)
Men's Steeple: semi winners went 1-3-8 (silver was 3rd in semi)
Men's 5k: semi winners went 2-5 (gold & bronze were 3rd & 5th in semi)
Mens' 110H: semi winners went 2-3-4 (gold was 2nd in semi)
Men's 400H: semi winners went 1-2-3

Women's 100: semi winners went 1-4 (silver & bronze were 2nd & 4th in semis)
Women's 200: semi winners went 1-5 (silver & bronze were 2nd & 3rd in semis)
Women's 400: semi winners went 1-2-3
Women's 800: semi winners went 1-6-7 (silver & bronze were 2nd & 3rd in semis)
Women's 1500: semi winners went 1-3 (silver was 2nd in semi)
Women's steeple: semi winners went 2-3-6 (gold was 2nd in semi)
Women's 5k: semi winners went 1-5 (silver & bronze were 2nd & 3rd in semis)
Women's 100H: semi winners went 1-4 (silver & bronze were 2nd & 3rd in semis)
Women's 400H: semi winners went 1-2-3

The correlation is better for the shorter races than the longer ones, but it's still rather stunning. Only two who qualified on time won a medal, and with one exception (Carmelita Jeter) no one who got the last qualifying spot won a medal. In 15 of the 18 running events, the gold medal winner won his/her semi--and in the other three, they were second.