Can We Provide Some Examples of "Non-Professionals" Ruining Track?

So when you say it's not a professional sport but it's "vaguely pro".....you do know pro is short for professional, right? So, it's not, but it is vaguely. OK. Yeah, this is why I rarely visit this place anymore.

all of those sports produce way more revenue than track (maybe not cycling? idk too much about that)

This really distills my general view on the argument over whether track needs to be more "TV friendly" or whatever term you want to use, and you did it much better than I could have worded it. You hit the distinction between who "drives" the major teams sports as opposed to the participatory sports very well, and its an important distinction. I've never been too worried about the fact my neighbors don't all know about or follow elite running, its enough for me that I know about it, because I care about it, and I think that should enough for any fan, er should I say, "enthusiast" to use your term. All the suggestions I've ever heard to make track more "popular" always sound like gutting the sport in some way -- its often "get rid of the 10,000" or "make athletes join teams representing major cities and run a circuit of dual meets instead of going to Europe" or now, whatever this is.... "if your times are good enough for our meet but you don't meet some putz's gatekeeping definition of 'pro' you can't compete here." Another bad idea among many. As bra-ket points out, our sport just works differently than football, baseball, basketball, etc. That's perfectly okay.

Thanks for all the conversation.

One flaw with the "20 Pro Meet" concept is that there are not enough professional runners to go around and fill these 20 Pro Meets, thus the opportunities for "non-pros" or college or high school runners who can beat pros any given weekend.

Separate men's and women's meets.

Track races can be very exciting and dramatic. They're extremely popular at the Olympics. If a meet is presented well on TV it can draw an audience. My advice to TV stations would be to edit the thing ahead of time to get rid of downtime. If someone false starts and gets booted, note that on the screen when you show the start with an empty lane. Eliminate the gaps between events. Show entire races and get actual knowledgeable commentators (hire someone from the UK if necessary) and a good color commentator. Utilize a split screen when beneficial, but don't cut away to some field event.

That being said, the average attention span of younger people seems on average to be less than for older folks (I say this as someone in his 40s). Many younger people like some pretty stupid stuff. You can do everything right and not interest some of these folks.

To add, we need the announcing to be better. Glad to see Tom Hammond gone, he really didn't know anything about the sport and didn't care. If you have watched XC skiing (especially the Olympics), you had Alex Morgan - if I recall his name - he has such enthusiasm it was fantastic. He even made the Pursuit event exciting. We need someone like him.

Regarding 'amateurs' and pros in the same meet, aside from the mile and maybe a sprint, their races are usually before the national broadcasting time. Only rarely are they featured. Finally, the US open (golf, not sure about tennis, but think so also), has slots for the amateurs. They play in regional tournaments and qualify for the main Open. So there is precedent for that too. We need to look at the individual sports, golf, tennis, even triathlon, trying to compare T&F to the team sports never works.

The easiest and most impactful thing that could be done to improve the product of T&F is to invest in the production quality of meets. I don't think it's so much about the order of events, gender, commentating, event schedule, etc. NASCAR and the PGA figured this out years ago. Just some basic tweaks and graphics would make a big difference to the product quality:

- Every track race should have floating labels on top contenders and how many MPH they're going or what final time pace their on.

- A trackside camera right up on the rail to really show how fast the feet are moving. An overhead camera to show how close the runners are together (a la Tour de France)

- If it's a record or qualifying standard attempt, for the love of mercy, show us how far ahead or behind they are. Don't force the commentator to do mental math on live television.

- On replays being able to show acceleration speeds with a trail that indicates how much they sped up. They showed 3 seconds of Woody's 5k kick from BU on the track broadcast last week and literally highlighted him running in a pack instead making his 26 sec last 200 a WOW moment.

Yeah, in tennis the amateurs (and depending on the tournament) have to win matches in qualifying rounds in order to make it into the main draw to play against the professionals.

Most of them of course usually lose right away because they're simply not as good as the pros, but that is how they're able to compete against them.

John McEnroe, while an 18 year-old freshman at Stanford, famously went through the Wimbledon qualifying and got to the semifinals of Wimbledon and lost to Jimmy Connors. Everyone is not John McEnroe, though.

How does swimming figure it out? Or gymnastics? Do those sports have age minimums or anything?

I believe figure skating does now, after the last Winter Olympics and the Russian figure skater (Kamila Valieva) with the doping thing. She was like 15 or something.

Tennis has restrictions for female players. Unless you're 18 you can only play a certain amount of tournaments per year. Coco Gauff (now top-10 in the world) just went though that. She just turned 18 last year and is now free and clear to play as much as she wants. She's been famous since she was 15 when she beat Venus Williams at Wimbledon; she was a professional at 15 though, she had just turned pro, I believe.

I'm not sure if they have that rule for the male players though. And I believe that's because there's almost no male players who are good enough at that age to compete on the men's tour, so it's not really an issue on the men's tour.

In track and field I guess they just have to go by times.

If your times are as fast as the pros, you should be allowed to run against them.

That's about the only way to do it, isn't it. And it seems pretty simple and straight forward.

Of course, how many people are actually fast enough to run against the pros? There's not like there's dozens of people or anything. There's a handful. And how many in that handful are actually able to beat them?

And the ones who are actually able to beat them usually turn pro because why would they waste their time running against amateurs when they can beat pros?

Like Athing Mu or Erriyon Knighton.

And I'm sure if Shawnti Jackson is fast enough, she'll be a year at Arkansas, and then on to Paris with a nice big Nike or Adidas contract.

I see that Citius Mag just asked Noah Lyles about this (it's at about the 4:05 mark):

I watched Noah Lyles talk about it earlier.

I can understand their points, but is it really a widespread problem? Because again, there's only like a handful of amateurs who can run with the pros; at least at the sprint distances.

And at the distance events there's not really any Americans who can run with the Africans so they're almost irrelevant anyway. So I don't see how it makes much of any difference either way at the distance events. Pros and fast amateurs running together at the distance events seems fine to me.

Also, fast American amateur sprinters can turn pro earlier because they can already compete at the world level.

Fast American distance runners though probably have to stay all four years in college because they're just simply not fast enough to compete with the Africans and some of the other people in the rest of the world (and probably never will be).

Ultimately track, at least in the US, just needs people who win, because winning takes care of everything.

Of course, I guess you have to attract to kinds of athletes who can win to run track. So there is that catch.

Sprints we're fine, and pretty much always have been.

Distance... well. 😁

Noah gets at a good point though that there isn’t a robust set of pro meets domestically which is why you see pros running at college meets. However, this is slowly but surely being addressed and athletes have to get behind it and be willing to travel and promote the meets like Lilac, Dr. Sander, NB, Millrose. Not everyone can run within 30 mins of their base or against a hand-picked field in this scenario but there’s no reason there couldn’t be a circuit of weekly meets in the US with pro sections that are more easily followed by fans.

This suggestion only really makes sense in the US where the idea of being pro means something.

In Europe there is a thriving club scene which produces many of the athletes that make up the fields at diamond leagues etc. If you start excluding those that make the bulk of their living as a teacher, but also happen to be in the top 15 in the world, that doesn’t help things.

We shouldn’t try and impose a global solution to address American idiosyncrasies

Trying to separate pros from amateurs is at best irrelevant, and at worst harmful.

The comparison to the European club system is useful. Look at a big-time pro soccer league like the German Bundesliga. There are still tournaments during the pro season that start out with local small town club teams playing against each other for the right to move on to the next round, and eventually competing against pro teams. At some point most amateur teams get eliminated by pro teams, but it can and does happen that an amateur team knocks off a pro team.

So the idea that contact between pros and amateurs harms the health of the sport at the pro level is, I think, baloney. I think it would be a lot healthier for the sport if pros would show up at road races and if national championships started with a series of local all comers meets that anyone could run in. Instead of a pro sport that all but a few people experience only through TV, make pro running something that's directly connected to the hobby joggers and (former) high school track team members by building in all the intervening steps. Did you hit the local qualifying time? Great, you can compete in your state championship. Win there, and it's on to the regional championship for a chance to run at the national championship. Get all the participants in a participant sport invested in the pro level as participants rather than treating them only as consumers.

Exactly- Tennis has young people, high school or college age.

It's an individual sport and every high schooler/college athlete has the right to turn pro if they get an offer.

In most other countries there is no division between" pros" and "non pros". Anyone can, formally, participate in a competition.

There are no "amateur teams" in soccer in Europe. In the local club where my son is playing they get money from the club - not a lot, but still.