5K & 800M Heats Unfair!!!

It is all about helping the local boys, Rupp and Symmonds.

unfair?

run fast and don't worry about it

slow runners are the only ones concerned

I'll agree the first heat of the 5k looks to over loaded compared to the second heat but the 800 heats look pretty fair with the first and third heats looking slightly stronger (on paper).

how many qualify from each though?

is the 800 three rounds or four? even if only three, it goes from 30 to 16, so i'd guess at an absolute minimum there would be 4 time qualifiers - top 4 in each heat plus the next 4 fastest times. in other words as many as 8 could make it out of one heat.

and in the 5000, what's the size of the final? is it only 12? again, even at 12, you're looking at 4 from each heat plus 4 time qualifiers. still allows for up to 8 qualifiers from one heat.

in either situation, you just want to make sure you're in the fastest heat. you'd hope that an overloaded heat would be full of people who realize that and who push the pace. i'm constantly surprised, however, by how little strategy goes into pacing in heats at the US level.

5000 heats: It looks like they ranked the seed times, then set up the heats using a simple method:

Seed Heat

1 1

2 2

3 2

4 1

5 1

6 2

7 2

8 1

9 1

10 2

etc.

So that seems to be fair.

800 heats: they apparently assigned heats randomly. Here is how they break down giving the rank of their seed time.

Heat 1

1. Khadevis Robinson

3. Jonathan Johnson

7. Samuel Burley

8. Duane Solomon

9. Lopez Lomong

11. Floyd Thompson

12. Brandon Shaw

13. Elliott Blount

18. Carlos Phillips

22. Golden Coachman

Heat 2

2. Nicholas Symmonds

6. Jebreh Harris

10. Matt Scherer

17. Tetlo Emmen

19. Ryan Brown

20. Kevin Elliott

23. Dustin Emrani

24. Tyler Mulder

28. Mark Wieczorek

30. Abraham Mach

Heat 3

4. Jacob Hernandez

5. Andrew Wheating

14. James Hatch

15. Kevin Hicks

16. Trent Riter

21. David Krummenacker

25. Jon Rankin

26. Neville Miller

27. Tim Harris

29. Christian Smith

This seems a bit unbalanced, with the first heat having 8 of the top 15 seeds, while heat 2 has 3, and heat 3 has 4.

The 800 and 1500 usually are seeded using best marks from the current year instead of entry marks, so that may be what happened. Just guessing.

It looks like you are correct. Using the 2008 time ranks, the heats look like this.

Rank Heat

1 1

2 2

3 3

4 3

5 2

6 1

7 1

8 2

9 3

10 3

11 2

12 1

13 1

14 2

etc. This seems more fair.