Fair or foul? Karsten Warholm and Marcell Jacobs are denied Diamond League final wildcards as the rules don't allow it

If you get points for being injured then suddenly you might have a hangnail that could be embellished into an injury. The rules are there for a reason. Just saying…

fair enough. these are the defending Olympic champs from last year so theyre not just anybody, and karsten won euros

So does 8th place miss out because you are adding them to the final? Might be OK to have a 9th in the 100, but Zurich is an 8 lane circular track.

Also, prize money is down to 8th place, so are Wild Cards exempt from that as well? Not really fair if a Wild Card wins the 30k for winning the final is they didn't earn the right to be there.

Qualifying on points seems fair to me.

Isn't that the point of DL? You accumulate points to quality for the finals.

Sucks for the big names. If you give them a pass, what about the athletes who are displaced?

can’t be denied something that doesn’t exist.
qualification is based on points not ability.

does an NFL team get a free pass to the playoffs cause their star quarterback was injured most of the season?

Qualification on points makes the final dull AF because:

1) the final can negate most of what happened in the season
2) often the best runner will do the minimum necessary to qualify and show up freshest

In either scenario, a DL meet is functionally little better than a college dual where everyone is chasing a qualifier and the win or loss in the actual meet means nothing more.

What a DL can, and usually does, do is gather the world's best for entertaining time trials. That's what the people want to see, so reward it! The final should be the top 8 (or 12 or 15 for distance) performers of the year, wherever they happen.

That will usually be in DL meets, but could also happen anywhere else, which gives DL extra incentive to run good meets, and not this crappy London/Birmingham stuff, sorry Brits but you know it's true

This makes every track meet in the whole world potentially very exciting if it has even one top athlete, because they may qualify for the DL final.

And if they do, every meet afterwards will be suspenseful because someone might knock them down the leaderboard and out of the final!

Fair

Interesting idea, but I think it should be limited to DL meets (and WC or Olympics). This will prevent obscure time trials that no one will ever see. The idea is to increase viewers to the DL meets and incentivize top athletes to compete. If a top runner can set up a fast time trial on their home track and call it a meet there is no reason to run any DL meet until the final.

This is like saying the Atlanta Braves and Houston Astros should get a bye into this year's playoffs without playing the regular season. The Diamond League is a separate entity from the Olympics/Worlds. They are a series of private, for-profit meets sponsored by World Athletics and run by meet promoters. Obviously, the DL can't be successful both commercially and for the promotion of the sport if top athletes don't compete in them for whatever reason. Think about it. Should an athlete that runs DL regularly and compiles enough points to make the final get bumped for an injured athlete that hasn't competed? The whole point of the final to reward those athletes that have competed and determine the DL champion. The DL champion is like the regular season champion. It's not a winner take all one meet champion like Olympics/Worlds.

Or we can make it like wrestling and just get the most entertaining people to run in the final. Let's give Jacobs a bye to the finals. And while we are at it, let's just throw every big name into the race regardless of form. Yohan Blake. He's famous. What about Matthew Boling? He's polarizing and I'm sure would get people to pay attention. We can drag Gatlin out of retirement. People love to hate him. Nothing dull about that.

They have injury exemptions so you don't get kicked off the tour. But sure look at your example. Guys who haven't played get invited. That would be the same as inviting say the WC medalists, defending champ, and say the Olympic champ....

The Diamond League Final is more analogous to the FedEx Cup Playoffs, not the Majors. You have to qualify for the FedEx cup every year, it doesn't matter how many wins you have in the past.

RoJo: You frequently praise the US system of trials for selecting athletes to go to major championships. No selectors, no old boys club, no quid pro quo favours. Just turn up on the day and put in the performance necessary. Top three and you go to the Olympics, fourth, you do not.

The Diamond League operates on the same principal. Turn up at the events, put in the performance and if you amass enough points you get to the final. If you start granting exemptions for reigning champions, world record holders, injured star athletes etc., it will quickly devolve to a situation where a significant number of the competitors qualify through exemptions and the regular league meets become meaningless.

WA introduced its ranking system to try to get the top athletes to compete more rather than just run time trials and only surface in public for major meets. The Diamond League is doing a similar thing. Granting exemptions will undermine that initiative.

Comparing track to golf or tennis is not a good example. Yes, various players and former champions get invites, but the fields are much larger. 90 players started the 2022 Masters golf tournament, and in tennis 128 players of each sex entered Wimbledon. Could you imagine what the Diamond League final would be like if 90 runners qualified for the 100m final and 128 for the 1500m?

Also, in both golf and tennis invited players start from the beginning of the competition, Ex champions do not get an exemption from the cut-off in golf or a bye to the quarter finals in tennis. In fact, one could argue track is actually the same as golf and tennis. Reigning champions are invited to enter the start of the Diamond League competition each year. How far the go in the competition depends on how well they perform that year.

Come on, the DL is already a stitch-up. Getting into a meet is as much about an athlete's agent as their ability. Why not give a wild card to two athletes who are superstars and would certainly improve the fields? When they make entry into DL meets somewhat merit-based, then you can argue against wild cards for the final. As it stands, why not just have a stitch-up final to go with the stitch-up regular meets?

World champs get a bye into the next even though it is years later. It's obvious that other recent major area or world and Olympic champions should get a bye into the Diamond League final if they've proved they're in shape with prior races. The reigning Olympic champions also won Euros, despite injuries, and recently ran low 47 and 9.95 at the European championships to meet the criteria I offer above. Otherwise, you're going to get the negatives, over-racing such as Kipsang did this year, which produces lower quality performers at championships and on the circuit, as the accretion of travelling and missed training takes a toll.