Carl Lewis sounds off

Carl is correct about the lack of leadership. The athletes though are great.

Exactly. We lose the 4 x 1 b/c we are Americans and Americans are stupid, distracted duds. These four sprinters are simply a representation of us as a country. These boards are an even better representation of our collective sloth, stupidity, grandiosity and nothingness.

Baker reacted much too late. Kerley was moving past him before he was ready to receive the baton. Also, he should have been running on the inside of the lane, not the middle (Kerley was towards the outside of his lane, where he should be running the straight). Why they only practiced a couple of days is the question. It's been said that one of the problems with the US teams is that they all think that they should be anchor. Carl Lewis is right, and being about the greatest T&F competitor ever, and now, one of the best coaches in the NCAA, he has more credibility than somebody who brings up a terrible video from 30 years ago.

Video would have been perfect if he dropped the 🎙

I don't recall noticing myself, but somebody said kerley switched from his left hand to his right. if this is true, it's gonna be difficult for baker to get the handoff on the inside of the lane. This is why second guy goes with left.

Can anybody confirm this?

Carl Lewis was a lousy singer and did some ridiculous stuff back in the day. I wouldn't hold silliness from the 1980s against him, however. He's entirely right about the relay debacle. Here are some links I posted in another thread where he explains what he meant in his tweet:

disregard my last post. obvious from this picture that kerley does have stick in his left and baker is just lined up very poorly and got a terrible jump. Lewis is correct about the leadership.

Bednarek said athletes had no idea what was going on even a day or two before and there was no practice. he advocated for camps, etc. the athletes want to do it. at least some of them.

high school xc coach wrote:

disregard my last post. obvious from this picture that kerley does have stick in his left and baker is just lined up very poorly and got a terrible jump. Lewis is correct about the leadership.

Bednarek said athletes had no idea what was going on even a day or two before and there was no practice. he advocated for camps, etc. the athletes want to do it. at least some of them.

Outrageous stuff. Leadership and coaches need to be hold accountable for this.

Harold #1 wrote:

Carl is correct about the lack of leadership. The athletes though are great.

Are they?

Bromell ran one of the slowest splits of the entire heat, and absolutely sucked in the individual rounds.

The athletes themselves practiced together for two days prior to the event.

People use the Chinese as an example of how to do handoffs correctly. Sure, but those four athletes practice with each other year-round. The Chinese national Olympic program picks the team years in advance. Failure is not an option. We don't have something like that, which is a good thing.

"he looks like he's running on ice because he's never run a turn. He doesn't run the individual 200m, so why is he running a turn when he never runs turns?"- Lewis about Ronnie Baker. God I love Lewis.

typically the gnashing of teeth over failure, such as how "poorly" the u.s. men have done on the track, is a lot of sound and fury, signifying nothing (yes, that's a nod to an earlier post on this thread). overall the men have done well, decent medal count and representation in the finals, many personal bests and even one american record--it just shows the razor thin margin between good and great, or great and really great.

but this relay problem is truly a systemic problem, and has been for a long time. two days' practice is clearly not enough; putting a 60m specialist on the turn is generally not a good idea. i like kerley on the long backstretch, but in the absence of real veteran international experience like bednarek or lyles, put kerley on the anchor. or simply reverse baker and gillespie, who runs the 200 regularly.

maybe i'm missing something here, or my ideas are stupid; or, the fact that an old miler can see these points may mean leadership is absent or incompetent. i'm open to possibility of all of the above as well...

that's my story and i'm sticking to it,

cush

you mean like UH at NCAA when the dropped the stick in the 4x100 this year!!!!

Let's pick our relay teams in a separate "relay trials," a week after the regular Olympic Trials. The athletes themselves would have to form their own relay teams, commit, bond, practice, prepare, etc. I think we would get better results than the current system, and it would eliminate all the infighting around voting people on or off the relay teams.

drops happen. you are always gonna be on the edge of disaster when you are trying to squeeze every last 1000th of a second out.

The US 4x100 has been an embarrassment for decades now so nothing has changed with this result. Now we have added all of USA’s track team as embarrassments in this Olympics. USATF needs to be shut down and we need a new system for everything.

Lewis is just stating the obvious. The US has all but given up on the 4x100 while other countries have learned that it is a big medal opportunity if you just invest some time into getting a good team together who can have super clean handoffs.

The exchanges weren't the issue. They certainly weren't good, but should have been easily able to overcome those with the speed advantage. Brommell and Gillespie simply looked awful. Brommell got smoked by Chinas 3rd or 4th fastest guy and it was all downhill from there. No way that should happen.

drbop wrote:

Let's pick our relay teams in a separate "relay trials," a week after the regular Olympic Trials. The athletes themselves would have to form their own relay teams, commit, bond, practice, prepare, etc. I think we would get better results than the current system, and it would eliminate all the infighting around voting people on or off the relay teams.

I think rules limit who you can run in the relays. So what if your winning relay team has no one make the team individually?

USATF sets it own rules on how they pick the US squad.

They pool from the top 6 finishers in US 100m trials plus they have other Olympians available from other events.

Like Lyles from the 200.

But they don’t have to do that.

Other countries simply bring 6 of their choosing. Any 6 as long as the country can get the standard.

I don’t know why the Olympics scheduled the 4X100 heats the same day as the 200 final with the 4X100 final two days later.

It makes teams hesitant to put 200m runners on this relay.

The US won gold 2 years ago with Lyles on anchor.

But they had Gillespie anchor their prelim and they qualified with the slowest time.

They won the finals from lane 8.

They somehow didn’t learn from that and this time did miss making the final.

The rest of the world is getting too good for you to put second string runners on your prelim team.

And of course you have to practice and race together a couple times.