Klecker breaks down The Ten on CC. Group bashes 10K qualifying in general.

Yea, that was great. I basically agree with everything Beamish said. You should produce an incentive structure with a lot of high quality races instead of just hoping for nicely set up time trials, and the 10K just doesn’t allow for that.

Nice bashing of the Diamond league system too

Beamish backed off his initial position that the track 10K is basically too boring and bad for the sport! Klecker followed up with a “the 10K sucks.” Very entertaining.

10k should move off the track and be a cross country race.

Problem solved.

Why? Why not move the 1500m to a cross country race too? IF you knew the history, you would know that the 10000m on the track is one of the greatest events in track and field history.

Yea, agree. To be fair I think the gist of it is that yea it’s entertaining when there are things at stake (championships like NCAA, USA, Worlds).

And they had suggestions for meets that provide a Gold Ticket to those championships, so there is a position-based incentive (rather than just hitting a time) that possibly makes those smaller meets entertaining. I think that’s a good idea, it makes some Golden Tickets ultras that feed into Western States kind of important instead of pointless, for instance

And they should put it in the Winter Olympics

Here's the link for people like me who didn't know what CC was.

I wouldn’t be surprised if eventually the 10,000 is removed from the Olympics at least, replaced by adding mixed team shot put to the track program or adding RC car racing to the general program. That seems to be the IOC’s current trend: get rid of long events, replace them quick stuff or mixed-gender combo team versions of existing events.

I understand the grievances at hand with the 10k and qualifying but I can't believe removing the 10k as an event is even being discussed. One of the best events on the track. Certainly one of my favorite to watch (I know, ill take the judgement and stares). Why is "remove 10k" being immediately jumped to, instead of "hey, this qualification sucks, but lets try and fix that".

Siegel, Coe, and USATF do suck though.

What? Did you watch the podcast? They literally were discussing "hey, this qualification sucks, but lets try and fix that", and at no point jumped to "remove 10k".

100, 200, 400, 800

1500 (should be 1600)

5000 (or this should be 3000)

10000 (this should be 8000)

42.195 (this should not exist, 'marathon' should be 50K)

Beamish opened with saying he thought the 10k should be removed.

Yes, I did. Beamish definitely started out by saying the event was boring and should go, then the convo morphed into a focus on qualification and making the race stakes higher, but his initial take was no more track 10s (and he hinted other events should get axed too).

Sorry about that. Was trying to avoid too long a thread title.

Agree, that was a very interesting podcast today (granted, I'm not all the way through, but I'm well into the portion bashing the 10k).

The Klecker discussion was interesting all the way through, from the comments about pre-race confusion, to his conversations with Woody about the run. Good stuff and #GoodfortheSport

Sometimes a conversation is about more than just the opening statement, and his position seemed more nuanced than that.

I found their discussion about Diamond Leagues interesting. Their take is that there should be an independent group in charge of managing Diamond League meets. A group whose purpose is to make the meets as profitable and appealing to fans as possible. No more behind the scenes deals with athlete agents and meet directors to get athletes in such as: world ranked #1 athlete is offered a spot. Athlete’s agent says we will send him but you also have to give spots to my other 3 athletes. Other 3 athletes have times slower than athletes who are denied a spot. The best athletes who want to be there should get to be there.

pare things down to a minimum
one event per general definition of a runner
no new events

200
800
3000

bonus structure:
all finising runners times averaged together for each event
times for each event added up
total group payout (each finisher) paid based on time performance
use the world athletics scoring tables to determine performance
example meet: avg 200 = 20.2, avg 800 = 1:45.8, avg 3000 = 7:34 would payout better than slower avg times

this incentivizes everyone to run like hell
on the one hand you know you'll make more money
and you don't want to let everyone down
otherwise nobody will want you to be invited again

the very fastest runners would get paid more to race one another
they would not be dodging one another

for the record i'd hate to only see 3 running events in track

They're right about access to DL races. It needs to be merit-based, not because you have the right agent. At the very least, decisions need to be transparent.

On the matter of qualification: I wanted to know if their main objection to the current system is the difficulty of the standard as opposed to having a standard at all. I didn't hear many complaints during the last qualification cycle when the standard was more attainable.

My own view is that standards should be removed from all events and qualification should be 100% based on ranking. We want to incentivise racing and competition, a functioning rankings system does exactly that. Qualification standards for every event from 1500 upwards is always going to incentivise time trialling. For the 10000, that would also mean removing any qualification via XC. It's an entirely different event, as anyone who has ever run XC will tell you. I can accept qualification via a road 10k just because there are so few track racing opportunities, but XC is a step too far.