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or if st pierre does just the 1500, valby will get a spot in the 5000

I mean a time roughly half a sec better than he's ever run before. Is that really too tough to grasp?

Top pros^ doofus

There were always 3-4 favorites in that race...and then Valby. She ran the legs out of the women who weren't in contention anyway.

Yep. Very impressive, and big-time PR in her biggest race of her life.

She's got the mind-set, and the strength, and both she and her sister close really well.

She knew how it would play out because the exact same thing happened in the heats. She eventually needs to learn more sophisticated strategies, but Valby had a slower time than ESP et. al. AND she doesn't have as good of a kick. She's inexperienced at the pro level and winging it. Her best bet to get to the Olympics was to lead a breakaway and hope that only 2 women were able to go with her. As it happened 3 went with her and she came in fourth. It was her best bet given her situation, and as Emma Coburn said during the Steeplechase heats, college stars are used to front running. It's where they feel comfortable.

Don't bother him; he dropped out of community college.

A palace coup made the queen of the 800 abdicate the throne.

What else is Valby going to do? She goes out slower and she still isn't going to be able to pick it up much more over the last 800-400m and she was running a PR pace, so she couldn't have gone faster (so didn't have the 14:30 Monson pace option).

She doesn't have the pace to go out slower and wind it up from halfway - if she does that, she's probably still not going to run that second half much quicker than she did today.

Forgetting about world level - the top Africans - as I don't think she's getting there at the 5000m and 10000m, Valby's best option is either to develop some speed (which seems unlikely given her form and her training limitations) or to continue to develop her aerobic capacity so she can run domestic opponents into the ground. I think she has a chance to do the second, and if she could stay healthy being very good gong longer

Yep. The way she was fighting her guts out to try and hang on to Karissa was freaking awesome.

She's Monson 2.0, but maybe better. I don't know if Alicia will ever win a global medal, but she's a magnificent runner, and is still getting better, and has gotten substantially quicker on her last lap through 4-5 years of really hard work.

That's the track Parker's on.

What spikes was Valby wearing? Looked very different to other Nike ones. A lot thicker too...

No, not a mistake. She has no kick; if she would have hung back, then the winning time would have probably been around 15:10 with a furious kick at the end. She might have finished worse than 4th in that case.

At $57,000 everyone makes high honor roll

TBF, if you look at Quincy's splits, he basically gets out at the pace Boling should do for a fast time. About 11.2-11.4 in the first 100m. About a 10.5 in the 2nd 100. If he was one of the stronger 400m runners in the world, I'd want him to be able to go about 10.8 in the 3rd one. He isn't at that level of fitness yet to maintain that and still come home fast enough, so he seemed to be more hovering around 11.3-11.4. This is enough for him to come home better than a lot of guys that probably have better fitness than him because he doesn't overcook his start. It's really about having a smooth acceleration-deceleration curve. The first 100 shouldn't be that much faster than the last 100. The middle 2 100s of the race about 0.5s faster than the first 2 100s combined and the back half only a little slower than the first half.

Chris Bailey honestly ran a fantastic race if you look at his splits. Not surprised he equalled his PR. Also, this has to get him a sponsorship opportunity. He's been balling this year. He was out in 11.3, his middle two 100s were only about 0.3s apart, 10.50 and 10.87, and he was able to close really well working through the field in both his last 2 100s to make the team.

I think Norwood probably could've pushed the 3rd 100m about a tenth of a second faster, because he closed much faster than anyone else. He would've only sacrificed a couple hundredths at the end, that would've been the difference in him making the team.

Norman went full on Warholm at European indoors but against much stronger competition. 20.90 at the beginning of a 400m is ridiculous. He's getting up to top-end speed way too early in his race and burning basically all of his matches in the first 150 or so. He didn't push the first 100 as far as Boling. Thank God, 'cuz otherwise he wouldn't have made it, but that second 100 is where you're supposed to be building your speed so that you can take the third 100 with more authority. It's about building into your top-end speed. You get up to top-end in the third 100, leaning into the curve so you can maintain momentum around it to really push that third 100. He instead pushed that 2nd one so hard, with a 10.09 split. This made him decelerate into the curve and ran one of the slowest 3rd 100s in the field, so he wasn't really able to get that slingshot effect and carry his momentum out of the curve as much as others, so he ended up closing in about 12.2. He obviously is one of the fittest guys in this field, so he wasn't as hurt by it as he could've been, but he has to work on his race pattern.

Yeah, this was so obviously her smartest approach in this race, it's amazing anyone doesn't grasp that. But it still took a hell of a lot of guts to lead it out, and she's got that in spades.
And it actually had a shot to get her on the team, too. When Schweizer tried to go right with Elle and Elise, you had to figure there was at least a slim chance she might blow up badly in the last 150.
But clearly, both Elise and Karissa have come a long way back. Maybe not all the way back to top form just yet, but definitely getting close.
They both might have a shot to sharpen up another big step by Paris, and go in in really good shape.

And, obviously, Hocker looks a *lot* better than he did then, and ran a lot smarter here.

I think it might just be that Rojo is an idiot.

Yeah, I'm not sure either of the translations presented here is correct.

You could plug Rojo into some Japanese auto-translation, then auto-translate him back into English, and it wouldn't make any less sense than his original usually does.

That was in no way a fast race. That's why they smoked her over the last 1000. The US has no depth in women's distance, so burning the legs off them is no big deal. The gap between the 3 qualifiers and the rest of the US 5000 runners is huge.

If Valby's race was gutsy she would've tried to run 14:35 pace that's the only way she would've made the team.

Forty years later, and Carl Lewis would win these competitions by a foot without taking his sweats off.

Maybe when you’re one of the favorites for Olympic Gold, you don’t hobbyjog in the middle of the pack with people way slower than you. That’s just asking for bad things to happen.

Need to give max effort all the time, not just phone it in because you are super talented and the 800 is still painful.