Beamish is World Indoor 1500m Champ but still doesn’t qualify for the Olympic 1500

As I said on another thread, I think he will get the QT now. As indoor World Champ, he can probably get into DL 1500 races that he couldn't over the last few seasons (a 3:36 former NCAA champ has little pull with DL meet organisers, but an indoor World Champ is something they can use). If he gets into one with Jakob, he'll easily run 3:33, probably a bit faster. But it's getting in that race with Jakob that's the key: nobody has run sub-3:30 without Jakob in the race since 2021. He's the reason everyone on the circuit has improved their PB.

Truth be told, why is this a problem? People seem to talk out of both sides of their mouth on this one. Do you want athletes to compete? If George wants to contest the 1500, he’ll get in if he hits the minimum number of races unless every time out is a disaster. Or he can hit the time pretty easily. Realistically, the system only really stops athletes of any relevance in the 10,000 and the Marathon. For those events they need an overhaul but anything under not really seeing a problem.

It's even crazier to think Americans think Hocker can medal but don't think Beamish can.

So then Runner B might get higher ranked than Runner A with a 2 seconds better PB because Runner B was in a race where a runner like Kerr stopped after 200m because he felt something was wrong in his hamstring? Sounds like a weird system.

For wrestling you have to qualify a spot for your country by winning certain tournaments during the year. Track should have this be part of their qualifying methods. They sort of do for the marathon, if you finish high in a WMM race you're auot qualified. They could extend it to track. If you place top 3 at world indoors you're auto qualified for outdoors. If you place top 2 in a diamond league meet you're auto qualified. And then define a couple other races on each continent that if you win them you are auto qualified. There will be some people who take multiple of these auto qualifying spots, so maybe only a dozen people qualify through this method. Then you can select the remaining competitors by a combination of descending order of top performances and descending order of rankings.

Only going off top performance list is not great because someone could typically not perform well but one time they had the stars align in a fast race that they don't even win. Rankings are flawed because sometimes races award big bonus points even though the competition wasn't actually very good. Doing a combination of multiple methods of qualifying would make people race more and try to qualify by multiple methods.

If it's only by ranking, they'll only go to the races they think they can earn bonus points. If it's only time, they'll only go to special time trial races. If it's only the designated auto-qualify races then they'll only go to those types of races.

Mathieu Van der Poel was ranked #1 in 2023 based off races in only 2 months out of the year.

"I'd like it be much more complex. You get points for time, your bonus
points for place in big events is separate. If you have 5 other faster
races, you use those five times. Then your 5 best bonus points. And it
somehow should factor in who you are beating."

Are you actively trying to drive fans away?

Beamish and Yak in the steeple will be most excellent.

We want more lappers now, huh?

Qualifying for the Olympics is not solely based on times, I think you are confused.

Do you even follow distance running?

Cole Hocker