The oldest track & field blog on the internet

Sunday, February 17, 2008

Tyson Invitational Recap

IAAF recap
USATF recap

Results

Performance of the meet: Adam Nelson's 73'6" shot put

The IAAF tacitly admitted this to be an indoor World Record. It's #3 on the all-time indoor list, and the furthest since the introduction of random out-of-competition drug testing. The two men who have thrown further? One (Ulf Timmerman) was an East German and was almost assuredly on something, while the other (Randy Barnes) has a lifetime doping ban.

Event of the meet: Men's mile
While I would much rather have not already known how the race came out when I watched this, it did allow me to zero in on Nick Willis. He's a very smart racer; he was last for the first 400, then carefully moved up and never ran wide on a turn.

This week's TV complaint: How about some post-production? Some planning? Or even caring about the viewer at all?
The coverage began with the last 14 laps of basically a non-race, where Cragg easily beat the field. Who else would start off a broadcast with their most boring material? Then we got NO editing of false starts in the short sprints/hurdles (not to mention a name misspelling for 60m champ and LSU gridiron star Trindon Holliday). We got to see infield boom-mounted cameras that would have given us interesting shots of the races, but no footage from said cameras.

Here's the deal: you've got two days to edit this stuff. Get with the program. A couple of middle-school students could do better!

How'd I do in the Fantasy League? I kicked ass. I picked 9 out of 13 events correctly. Of my four misses, one was a no-show (Brie Felnagle in the mile), and two were won by athletes I mentioned as co-favorites (Adam Nelson, Carmelita Jeter). I jumped from 123rd to 50th overall and I still have a shot at the overall title.

If you want to win the final week, watch this space.

1 comment:

Johnny said...

At least they out the meet on TV, something that sadly, is not always the case.