WA finally gets it right: no more little q's in mid-d events

If you’re upvoting the OP saying this rule change is the best decision WA has made, it’s pretty likely you support it.

If the goal is to have fresh and best in the final = simple solution

only qualify the top 8 time, have no prelims, just one race = the finals

If the goal is to have a jog-fest to see who has the best closing speed, have many round and only advance top places (as is being proposed)

the middle ground solution:

1) leave it as it

2) tweak it a little by reducing the number of little q's

instead of top 4 + 4, for example, you make it top 5 +2

this still makes placing important, but still ensures some racing for time, and will probably elicit the best spectator results (less jog-fest racing, fewer falls, etc).

I think it could be cool to have little qs but instead of just ranking by time, little qs go to the X number of athletes who were closest to their heat’s winner, or closest to getting Q

Will turn every prelim into an unwatchable tactical affair.

I still think it is a good change in terms of the popularity of athletics. Most fans don't work out the times. They don't even understand them half of the time! Ask someone if 4:44 for the 1500m is good or not. Let alone how many milliseconds faster someone needs to run to qualify compared to the first or second heat. So then it depends on the announcers and on-screen statistics which often aren't put up. In a stadium, people often don't know who has qualified until way after all of the heats have finished, by which time they have lost interest in that anyway. Having the top six go through to me is really the essence of racing, not time trialling. Just my thoughts anyway. We will see what happens!

Is the risk of being disadvantaged by this system really bigger than the risk of being disadvantaged by the system before? Mentally I prefer "finish top six and that's it" over "well, you can finish in the top three but also if you finish in the top four to eight maybe, depending on how people run in OTHER heats which is completely outside of your own race".

I don't quite expect this (because there will always be a few runners who think their chances increase in a faster race) but I see the danger for it and it would be more annoying to me than the fairly rare case of a really strong runner missing a final spot because they were in the slow heat.

Overall, I don't really expect the changes to be all that big; the 5000m heats will get slower but the steeple were a clear exception from the tendency Gault showed (and he did not really try to explain this), so I don't think the steeple and 1500m will be as strongly affected by the change.

There is one side effect, that the weakest runners who would not make the final anyway will lose their chance for a PB in a very fast race, esp. in the 1500m.

Why are "jog fest" prelims something that should be prevented or fixed? Are they giving out medals for the fastest prelim times now? When I'm watching the prelims, the heat times are the furthest thing from my mind, with the exception being when a top runner doesn't get in on place. I will say that the falls and DQ's that happen in tactical races are frustrating, but that's just part of the game imo.

This new system is flawed, and will unfairly disadvantage some runners some of the time. However, the change is still positive, because the old system was more flawed and more unfair.

You could make the argument that the NFL (or practically any ball sport) is unfair, because team A wins the NFC championship despite being worse than team B that looses the AFC championship, whereas if the teams had swapped conferences, B would have gone to the super bowl against the lesser competition offered by the NFC.

But there are no serious arguments of this sort being made anywhere, because although the system is arguably imperfect, no one has any better ideas. On the original topic, the new system IS the better idea, the flaws of the old with the number of qualifiers out of the last heat was egregious. Hopefully the new system will prove to be not just more fair, but very fair objectively.