Big43 wrote:
Heat 1 of the Big12 women’s 3000m tomorrow has a start list with a whopping 43 athletes (16 in heat 2, presumably the “contenders” heat). The men’s will be just as bad at 39. Jamming 40+ athletes into a 200m banked indoor track is ridiculous, the meet organizers really should know better and should have limited the entires. This means there are nearly 7 athletes per lane for the dual/staggered waterfall start, so there will be 3-4 layers deep of 2 athletes side-by-side stacked up in every lane. This is going to be a goat rodeo if anyone false starts, stammers, or inevitably gets clipped and falls in the mass of bodies.
I understand meet organizers don’t want to devote nearly an hour of meet operating time to run 4 heats of 3000m races when realistically only one heat will have athletes competing for the individual conference title, and rightfully so. But allowing this many athletes to congregate in one heat is inexcusable. Meet organizers need to set a cutoff time qualifier or limit entires to somewhere around the top 16 or so fastest times. They clearly already understand the necessity of doing so for the fast heat(s) by separating them in the manner that they have. I’m interested to see how pedestrian the first lap splits are for the unlucky athletes stuck at the rear, and how on earth the top runners will navigate hoards of lap traffic
Careful what you wish for? Some conference accountant is going to see all these bodies and identify a nice cost reduction opportunity.
Perhaps they will give the hook to lapped runners here too.