Official Prefontaine Classic Thread Here/LRC Semi-Live Blog

manzano will come back , he just needs to drink some more tortilla recovery drink[/quote]

funny!

r.t.i. wrote:

The pro level is a little above yours, college kiddies.

They're all people in competition against their peers. The level of competition should have no bearing on the boundaries of sportsmanship. But if anything, with more at stake, the pros should have even more reason to be petty about their competitors prematurely celebrating (or breaking other gray-area "rules").

Funny thing, though ... I've officiated a lot of meets, and the most small-minded whiners I've ever seen in the sport are the coaches at measly high school championships, especially private and parochial schools. These guys are out there making videos of every event and charging up to the nearest official, video recorder in hand, bitching about the most trivial rule infractions. A rule might actually have been broken and missed by the officials in a case here and there, but the attitudes of these coaches are so contemptible it's comical. They'll bitch and moan about some guy's discus being too fat (we measure and weigh all the implements prior to the meet and disqualify plenty of them from use) or the same coach will try to invoke the honest effort rule several times in a meet when it's obviously never called for even once.

I even saw a coach attempt to get another team's 4 x 4 DQed under the honest effort rule when the anchor got smoked on the backstretch and trotted in the last 50. Hello-oh. The 4 x 4 was the last event and the athlete wouldn't be running any other events anyway, so how does the honest effort rule affect him? But this is how much of a weasel this coach was - his team, even without a DQ of the other 4 x 4, already finished higher in the standings than the team he was trying to have DQed, yet he wanted to push that team farther down in the team standings since the two schools were such bitter rivals. I'm thinking, "Bitter? About what?" It's a bush league meet with people running 3:30 to win the 4 x 4 and 4:38 or something to win the 1,600 (we're talking boys here, not girls). What does this troglodyte have to brag about by (unsuccessfully) trying to use a bogus DQ to push a team with a bunch of 54-second 400 guys and 20-foot long jumpers back into 5th place rather than 4th? It isn't even like he can use the other team's lower finish as a "recruiting" tool - it's frickin' high school!

But no. These guys really can be that cutthroat about the standings of their teams in these grand, global-level championships where BMOC superstuds actually break 2:00 in the 800 sometimes.

So the level of competition doesn't matter. Feeble-minded cheap shots are feeble-minded cheap shots on every rung of the ladder.

The Flaming Buttocks of Shame wrote:

The level of competition should have no bearing on the boundaries of sportsmanship.

It does when there are differing governing bodies for each level with differing rules. The NBA doesn't have the exact same set of rules as the NCAA and high schools.

Thanks for putting this near the top of your post to save me from reading through the rest of that useless hot air.

I just wanted to say, Jenny Barringer must have been awfully close to the collegiate record to be running that fast at the end! But I really don't know, because we didn't feature the American steeple record holder, we at NBC thought the public would rather see this Anna Willard girl, even though Barringer is faster at 1500 and steeple.

NikeRulz wrote:

sick of oregon wrote:

Here we have Nike's signature meet on US soil and US network television, why can't they come up with individualized uniforms for all of their stars in the meet? I thought Nike was supposed to be innovative?

It is not a horse race.

Real track fans can identify the athletes by sight.

Only when the camera was at field level and showed the athletes faces. Most of the race was the higher up camera. With everyone in the same uniform, it's basically the white guys in the yellow uniforms and the black guys in the yellow uniforms.

Unless you're used to watching each athlete from a far away angle, enough to be able to tell who they are based on their running form, there was no way to tell who was who at all.