Rojas was undefeated and set an indoor WR so I can see why she'd receive a decent number of votes for the award but I don't get why Gidey wouldn't at least be honorable mention. They said Obiri was ahead of Gidey. Yes Obiri beat Gidey in Monaco but Gidey set the WR.
And why are they voting now? There is a BIG race this weekend. If Gidey also gets the half marathon WR, it's going to look really foolish.
https://trackandfieldnews.com/tfns-2020-womens-mvp-yulimar-rojas/
Prolly most Tigray had something else on their minds lately ?
rojo wrote:
And why are they voting now? There is a BIG race this weekend. If Gidey also gets the half marathon WR, it's going to look really foolish.
TFN does not consider half marathons when deciding on an athlete of the year. Some guy could break 50 in the half and it wouldn't count toward AOY voting.
Imagine being a track & field "journalist" and not knowing the criteria used by the paper of record in your field. That would be embarrassing.
What would really make TFN look foolish, even in this strangest of seasons, would be if its voters ignored 73 years of precedent and threw out the magazine's rankings criteria. In order of importance: 1) Honors won (with Diamond League competitions specified as significant honors). 2) Win-loss record (Gidey's record was 1-1 in events considered; the half marathon isn't one). 3) Sequence of Marks.
There is also a long-established preference for competitions over pure time-trialing.
You may not agree with the criteria but should respect the consistency. While LR may not agree that new shoe models are affecting distance times, perhaps TFN's voters in the aggregate think they are and have devalued the third-most important criterion in their analysis.
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