The 5000m and 10000m will never be as popular as the sprints until....

PS

What would prevent 5 and 10 runners from more or less jogging each lap until they're halfway down the homestretch and then sprinting to the end of the lap?

One of our local high school invitationals opens with a "Devil Takes the Hindmost" race and you do wind up with desperate sprints by the back of the pack on the home straight every lap. The leaders run more or less normally.

Thats what I think with all these suggestions. I like track as it is and I dont want to change the whole sport to cater to people with no attention span, no insight and no appreciation for a square and honest race around a track.

A lot of football fans look for the strategy and formations and try to guess what's going to happen in between plays though. There is literally nothing to gain from watching people doing warm up and lining up at the blocks

I'd rather watch a less popular race that I like than a popular one I don't. But all these people who claim that a race needs to be fast from the start to interest people seem to ignore all of the rabbited races that do indeed go out hard from the start and produce fast times. If going fast from the start is going to make the 5,000 popular why did the Diamond League drop it from their meets? Plenty of DL 5,000's were plenty fast from the gun.

I agree totally, except the boring part. Once they start its a battle royale for some physiological specimees. I enjoy the womens 200, mens 100 especially. ETH v SFP, Abbey Steiner debut. Its all good.

I agree. elimination races are very interesting

I can't see how anyone could not be into speed, this is excitement, far more exciting than and around and around and around they go, talk about boring there it is, hell can go grab a beer at the Mini Mart come back and they are still going around and around, yawn~~~~~~~~

Watching Tommie Smith down a good 15 yards on a 4x2 anchor to Bernie Rivers a 20.5 cat for New Mexico, getting the baton and in chase mode with the crowd on their feet as Smith is gaining and gaining as the crowd.....WOOOOOOOOOOO~~~~~~~~ that beats the hell out of.....and around and around and around they go. Yep, Tommie blew by Rivers with a ho hum nothing to it look on his face, this is excitement.

1954 at the Cali State HS Champs Delano's Leamon King a 9,4 HS record holder will finally meet James Jackson out of Alameda HS who also holds the HS 9,4 record, neither sprinter had ever lost before. The crowd was stoked...............

When were those contracts arranged? Sha'Carri hasn't done much on the international stage.

brojos didn't remove the post. LetsRun is pro-fake news.

I dont run for othwr people.

i would kill myself if i was a sprinter.

Showing off muscles, racing for 10 seconds?

That literally hurts my soul.

I race 8/15 but will move to 5k as i see it as more noble

I think baseball is as boring as golf and bowling. I know how to pronounce names.

I'm telling you how distance races can be more popular.

Track cycling has this (Miss and out) and no one watches track cycling in the US.

This was a real thing. It was called "Devil Take the Hindmost" and a guy literally dressed in a devil's costume with a pitchfork and horns would scamper out onto the track and remove the last place runner after each lap. Made for consistent entertainment throughout the whole race. They definitely did it at the LA Times Indoor Games back in the day. Vaguely related, English soccer teams get relegated to the division below if they finish at the bottom of theirs. It makes fans unusually interested in 5-20 teams at the end of the season where otherwise no one would attend or watch on tv.

In a criterion bike race, if you are about to get lapped they pull you from the race. They should try that with the 5 and 10k. Would it make it more interesting? No so sure.

We need to stress how incredibly fast they are actually going when it looks like they are jogging the first few laps. That’s the key to the race, to go fast while staying relaxed. The 5K “jogged” to a 4:13 first 1600, that is fast for any human. They continued to jog to an 8:37 first 3200, which would win most state high school meets, and nobody had even fallen off the lead pack. That is incredibly thrilling if you realize how fit everyone is, the main reason for the tactics.

It comes down to taste I suppose. I don't see how people can be interested in events where athletes spend less time competing than they do getting introduced and getting into their blocks.

Stupid idea. Elimination is boring. Here's an idea: sell premium tickets that let you sit close to the track with a paintball gun. After the first 2k the last place guy gets put on a list and you're allowed to shoot at him. Each lap after that the last person besides people already on the list gets added to it.

This is me, 100%. I like the sport and that's good enough for me. No sport should be so freaked out about attracting non-fans that it forgets the people who are actually fans. Baseball is going through an identity crisis right now because it has an idiot marketer-type commish who wants to try all kinds of dumb new things to "attract fans." He'll do absolutely anything as long as it isn't instituting a salary cap or something similar, to ensure that teams are competing with a reasonably equal chance of winning it all, rather than having 24 teams hoping to catch lightning in a bottle one season per generation while they otherwise produce talent to be vacuumed up by the few big-money teams as soon as said talent reaches its prime.

But yet, it would be fun to see some occasional variety, and a devil take the hindmost race would be fun at one major meet per year -- maybe Bislett? There's an old former Olympic event, the 3,000-meter team race, that could be interesting. Different relays, etc. Maybe the major championships could have one "wild card" event each time -- one year it's a DMR, the next an elimination race, I dunno. No need to mess with the existing events, though.