Athing Mu OUT of Millrose

Yeah, actually it is a major sport. The top pros probably make more bank than the top track pros.

Skiing is also a huge participation sport. There are probably 2-3x more adults that ski as a leisurely activity than football, baseball (softball) & basketball, combined.

And yes, in Austria and most of Europe it is definitely a major sport. Your ethnocentrism is showing.

There was a lot of speculation last year that Abby Steiner was going to move to LA and be coached by Kersee. I’m glad she didn’t and hope she doesn’t in the future.

Bolt and Blake dodged each other for years except when they had no choice at global competitions. What was the damage to the sport?

Wow - I would have never guessed this to be the reason. Also a little surprised Miller did not stay in the NCAA at least another year. He made the WC team of course but hasn’t improved time wise from his freshman year, seemed to struggle during outdoor NCAA last year. The choice of Kersee to coach him seems odd as well unless he is trying to move down to the 400.

Pro skiing is also structured properly. It has a 60 race tour like golf, tennis, nascar, or formula 1. The top stars participate in all the races. In Europe every race is televised on network TV. The big skiing events come during a quiet period for soccer. The top stars become celebrities and make big money via sponsorship. Mikaela Shiffrin is looking at a $100million career in total earnings.

There is also the same built in relationship between 'course', athlete, tv and expensive gear that you get with golf. The European corporate executive takes his family on their annual 2 week ski holiday to Courchevel (site of '23 world ski championship), outfitted in Shiffrin's Atomic Ski's and Kappa skisuits. The next yr they will go to Davos etc. Like playing the great golf courses, one tries to ski all of the great resorts, and you can ski the actual specific downhill and super g runs.

Imagine if track had a 20 meet tour. These were the only pro meets. The lure of prize money and your sponsor requiring you to do all the meets. World championship at the end with participation and seeding based on the 20 meet cumulative performance.

It's hard to find accurate sports participation numbers. Running, swimming, soccer, volleyball, basketball, badminton, field hockey, cricket, tennis, table tennis, golf, and baseball/softball are among them. I saw a statistic that had 135 million people (15 million skiers and snowboarders in the US) ski worldwide, though if you count once a year types like me (but many years not skiing at all), that's really inflated over, say, sports like running and swimming where people participate on a regular basis. It doesn't put skiing among the top ten.

Skiing is not like middle distance and distance running. You need to ski a lot to be sharp but you don't lose your skiing ability by racing a lot, whereas travelling for races and overracing impacts seriously how much and how well you can train as a middle and long-distance runner. The impact of running makes it differ also from xc skiing. You need recovery time from hard efforts and rest beforehand.

A weekly racing schedule for track would cement the current world records forever

Good discussion about the different tours and although none are like T&F where you have completely different athletes participating (e.g., sprints, mid-d, throwers, etc), we do need a better centralized infrastructure. Some type of point system like in tennis sounds promising, but even there, they have exemptions and wildcard entries. The athletes are all independent contractors, and that needs to change. Some type of strong athlete association or union is needed too. I don't have an answer, but when a coach says the fans don't matter, it is not good for the sport.

It's true that skiing is not comparable. (Sponsors might be more willing here because one needs so much expensive in skiing compared to running shoes, IIRC downhill skiiing was commercialized to a larger extent early than track&field was.)

But the modest expectation that a track superstar makes one or two appearances in indoor season and in the main season shows a reasonable presence on the circuit besides worlds is not unreasonable. Sure, there can be reasons against this in particular cases but if big stars are hardly seen in the main meetings it's bad for the sport.

Yes, I'm aware that it's easier for sprinters, throwers and jumpers to compete weekly, than it is for distance runners.

I am baffled though that these same distance athletes could compete weekly in hs and college, then suddenly it's not possible as a pro. If you look at the old schedules of Pre, Steve Scott, liquori, coghlan, even Nick Willis, they were also largely racing weekly. Also sports like cycling and triathlon are not ideal for lots of racing, but the money and the structure incentivises them to show up for the Tour de France, Giro and Vuelta and for the ITU TRI series.

Truly track suffers from regionalism/racism. Everyone wants to protect the local athletes. How interesting is Millrose if there are 15 Kenyans in the women's 3000? If third world athletes started to dominate golf, skiing, tennis and motor racing the structure would be changed to protect vested interests.

I was also surprised by them moving to Los Angeles. Bobby Kersee doesn't have a history of coaching the 800 and Athing Mu has said many times how happy she was living in Texas.

i couldn't get through 6 pages of this piss-fight to see if this opinion has been expressed already...but i'll express it anyway: as a 20-yr old, she is wise to keep her powder dry for another couple years before going all out with the hardest-possible training and making sure she's at EVERY big race. i've seen way too many college-aged women do that from 18-22 yrs...none on Mu's level, but some with pro potential...and the result is that many were fried- physically and mentally- by the time they graduated.

i think whoever's advising her is thinking about her long-term best interests, and for the love of god who gaf about indoor anyway. it's just a way to kill time till the summer.

I love watching this kid and i want her around for a long time. I don't think she's fully accepted the extent to which she needs to develop on the endurance side of the 800m spectrum, part of that is just maturity- she's still really young.

If she and her team slow-play her development a little bit, i think the long-term results will be better. i've thought for awhile she's going to run 1:52 someday- if she is constantly traipsing around the plannet lining up for every big meet at 19-20-21 then we'll never see it.

just my opinion.

I fall somewhere in between. I don’t think anyone is really demanding she run Femke Bol’s schedule. Most fans would just love to see her run Millrose and/or NB Indoor Grand Prix, NYC outdoor meet, the LA outdoor meet, one of the Island meets perhaps and Pre. Showing up for the marquee US meets is a way lower workload than most 400/800m runners and requires pretty minimal travel.

Well, the Olympics are all the general public cares about, and that's been the case for as long as I've been following track and field (since the mid-80s).

Track and Field is just one of those sports that I don't think is ever going to be huge outside of the Olympics.

As for Athing Mu, I'm surprised she even bothers with the Millrose Games.

Yes, it's a prestigious event to us, the hardcore, but the general public has never had much of any interest in it to my knowledge. Even back in the 80s and 90s with Carl Lewis. Nobody but track fans cared, and even only the hardcore cared back then.

To the general public the Millrose Games is just some indoor track meet in the middle of winter. And really, I can't imagine the general public even cares about any indoor meets because it's just such a weird thing to them.

Like... the 60 meter dash.... who the f*ck cares? It's not the 100, and it's not the Olympics.

Who won the Wanamaker Mile last year? The most important event at the Millrose Games. Who the f*ck knows, who the f*ck cares? Right.

Anyway, Athing Mu will run Prefontaine, I'm guessing, because it's a Nike event. And she'll run Nationals and Worlds. And that might be it except for a few other things. And she might double at all of those.

My predictions: she'll win Prefontaine. Win Nationals, and shockingly come in second at Worlds. Or she may be World Champion again, who knows.

Nike: I'm guessing they're fine with the number of times she runs.

If not, I guess she'll be wearing Puma or something in the coming years. 😁

Well Prefontaine is the DL final this year. She will need to travel to qualify to earn points. She has the bye, so she doesn’t even really have to run at USAs. She could run a heat of the 400 and bag it up. I think where I’m going with this is hopefully someone on her team is not taking this to its logical conclusion and she does the absolute bare minimum. It seems Sydney is going to make an adjustment after last year, but could Athing race at all of 3 events this year? Sadly that feels like a possibility.

Yep, fair enough.

One thing with Athing Mu is that she's still relatively new.

I mean, she turned pro before the Olympics. So it's not as though we've had a few seasons of her as a pro to know what her normal schedule would be.

So what she's doing now may be close to what her normal pro career may be.

And of course if Nike is not happy with it and wants her to run more, then she's going to have to run more, or find someone else to run for.

Somewhat related, and it's just a fun thing on Nike's YouTube page (from back in November):

So she's still a young, silly person. She's like 20 or something... so yeah.

Funny, last year she weirdly ran the mile at Millrose. Had a DNF. Then she won Prefontaine, Nationals and Worlds.

So yeah, we'll see what she does this year.

The issue is not what the general public cares about. In reality, you could say they only care about the 100m final at the Olympics. But no sport survives on what the general public wants, unless the general public and the fans of the sport are almost synonyms (e.g., soccer).
You can check all those grainy old videos from races in the 1960s and 1970s and you'll see massive amounts of public even in indoor races. Today, you only see that in a few select meets in Europe, and is on the wane. People like the competition side of it, the head-to-head between the big names, racing as opposed to time trialing. And, much as I hate to acknowledge this, the general public in Europe or the US is not interested in 10 Kenyans and 10 Ethiopians running around a track for 12 or 25 laps chasing a world record (don't get me wrong: I am sure Ethiopians and Kenyans didn't give a damm about a bunch of white guys doing that in the 1950s or 1960s). That is why the Olympics and WCs are a little more interesting: self-identification with competitors and true competition. The NCAA is better at that than the pros. Unless we bring that in some way to T&F at the top level, other than once every 2 or 4 years, the sport is doomed.