Love this for so many reasons. This kind of stuff is exactly what the sport needs. I hope it is streamed in entirety - I will pay to watch this if it is. Really like how it has "classic" sports stuff like black and white ref uniforms and obviously recognizable hand signals.
Why exactly do you all think ‘the sport’ needs any of this, when you think ‘the sport’ has integrity issues? Weren’t the field athletes determined to be some of the bigger PED users according to “The Dubin inquiry” ?
This is a great idea. I've come to really enjoy high jump because of the "raising height / 3 misses and you are out" format they use. I guess pole vault is the same way. This format creates way more drama and tells a better story than a simple "jump/throw X times and whoever jumps/throw the farthest wins". I think that moving throws and horizontal jumps to this kind of increasing distance/elimination format would make the events way more interesting for spectators and give the commentators much more to talk about.
What we love about the distance events is the strategy involved. How will the race play out? Who will be left standing with 200m to go? This kind of format brings some of this drama to the field events whereas currently they are basically just "time trials".
One of the big reasons the vertical jumps are less-celebrated is that, for broadcast purposes, nobody knows how long they'll take. Another one is that they almost always end on a failure (as opposed to a celebratory moment of triumph).
The horizontal events as currently structured don't have the first issue, but do share the second. I like that Crouser is trying something new, but this format, if anything, brings in the problem of the first issue while not adequately solving the second. I do like that more throws will have drama and then subsequently be viewed as a success (as they will move the athlete on to the next round, even if they don't move them into podium or the winning position), but that would also be solved by a "two throw face-off" bracket, which seems so clearly the superior format to me that I'm worried I must be missing something.