World athletics not counting marks in certain races at NCAAs

It's pretty common knowledge that the NCAA chose not to follow world athletics rules related to shoes. Generally, this makes sense as it is easier on the athletes legs and health to race in the high stack shoes, but this choice does impact the top athletes negatively related to their WA ranking. 99.9 percent of college athletes do not need to worry about their WA rankings while in college. Sadly for her, Parker Valby isn't one of them due to how well she's performed. Next week she steps onto a new level of competition for her. If she's ready to qualify for the US team, she'll likely be able to exceed the threshold needed still to compete at the Olympics.

As for why it was disqualified, I'd guess a coach or agent of other borderline athletes reported it to world athletics. The rules apply to everyone, Valby could have go after an auto time at a meet with better pacers or wavelights but chose to time trial against inferior competition.

I don’t necessarily disagree with the decision, it’s just interesting they choose to enforce it now.

As an agent, if my clients are looking at a possible 4th place but have the standard/ranking quota I'm looking for any advantage I can give them over people who aren't my clients. Also maybe there was a bitter agent (pure speculation) when Valby chose to have her dad represent her and wanted to make sure there were more roadblocks to deal with.

Watch Valby's interviews, she was wearing custom vaporfly shoes with an added spike plate made for her by Nike. she was cool with just getting the ncaa win, not concerned about Olympic standards.

Broke the world athletics rule for both stack height and custom items not for sale to the general public.

That was only in the 10,000 though. In the 5000 she wore legal spikes and it still doesn’t count due to other athletes with super shoes. I don’t recall world athletics ever not taking any results from an ncaa race due to some athletes in the field wearing non legal shoes. It has some major implications for college athletes going forward if that’s how world athletics chooses to enforce it from now on. Her 30:50 at Bryan Clay wouldn’t count under this enforcement since other athletes (not Parker) wore super shoes in the race.

Are you sure it's because other athletes in her race wore non-compliant shoes? I'm not aware of that being a rule, and it would open up the door to people sabotaging competitor's rankings.

World Athletics has thousands of athletes just as talented as Valby to keep track of, and tens to hundreds of thousands of performances. It's possible they just made an error or haven't approved the performance yet, especially given she wore non-compliant shoes in the 10,000.

It's a great point regarding the 5000m and to note the shift in regard by world athletics.

Many threads on LRC in the past few years pointing out the concept of multiple runners in ncaa events in contravention while the legal athlete has their time listed. many users were calling for this stricter interpretation because you could essentially have teammates rabbit you in vaporflies and should that count.

Personally I think it was always world athletics intention to interpret and police it this way, but their own bureaucracy and scale of oversight caused a delay getting around to the issue. this is a 2021 issue getting dealt with in 2024, sounds about like "death by committee" pace to me

I am not completely sure but every mark in those races says TR 5.5 next to it ( rule about stack height) and is not counted for rankings for the athletes despite many athletes in these races using legal spikes. It is not just Parker who the race doesn’t count for. World athletics has emphasized that the shoe rules must be enforced for all athletes for the race to count but has not been enforcing that at the ncaa level until now.

Cut your inflammatory crap out. She was in college, idiot.

Really only minor implication. Going forward, the NCAA could choose to fix the rules to help the 1 percent or keep the rules the same to help the rest of their athletes stay healthy and make it easier to recover and race more. Any NCAA athlete looking for a time or ranking in the 5000 and 10000 have plenty of opportunities to get in fast paced races at events like the Ten or the BU time trials inside. The rest of them likely benefit from being able to race more often.

Nico and Graham Blanks were able to get auto qualifiers in their events while still competing in the NCAA season and following WA rules. Valby and her coaches chose this path knowing these rules existed. I will point out that a lot of the top ranked US 10k athletes near the rankings quota cut-off are have connections to the same agency.

Valby was obviously wearing the spikes NIKE gave her to run that 5000m in.

WA should have made there rules clear on the matter, rather choosing to spring it up now, to specifically punish an athlete that did no wrong. There may very well be cases in the past where Pros were wearing spikes in a race with a random competitor wearing a high-stack shoe. Are those marks for the random competitors going to be invalidated? Is Kelati’s 10000m mark from Bryan Clay going to be invalidated?

It is not a minor implication, since the same enforcement would invalidate Kelati’s Qualifying mark at Bryan Clay.

This looks like a selective targeting of an athlete, and it completely wrong to be selectively picking and choosing which marks to invalidate, where they have allowed marks in the same meets in the past.

Kelati did not run at Bryan Clay. Her mark at the ten will count as shoe rules were enforced. I do feel bad for Valby, but I have to blame the ncaa for consistently flouting world athletics rules and hoping for continued lack of enforcement.

So, missing the standard by .18 was meaningless for Valby. It wouldn’t have counted anyway. That alone is reason enough to leave college early.

Look at the two guys on the left of the circled area; they look to be in high stack shoes. If so, per WA, the whole meet is INVALIDATED for WA qualification purposes, which means Grant Fisher’s, Kelati’s and everyone else’s marks are thrown out!

Hmmm, maybe there is an opportunity for some lawyer types to start perusing the video evidence. It is likely there are a lot more meets besides The TEN in question.

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It sounds like someone protested the inclusion of the NCAA 5000 and 10000 and there B Category bonus points in the rankings. This singular action hurts one athlete (Valby). The protester was targeting her, either to help their athletes or because Valby chose to go without a real agent in her contract negotiations.

Parker Wolfe, et al didn't go fast enough to get enough points to help their rankings in the men's 5000m race. None of the other NCAA women are on the cusp of qualifying for anything in the 5000 or 10000. Habatom Samuels got an auto qualifier in the 10000 already, and the Kenyans racing NCAAs aren't making the Kenyan team. Chandler Gibbens is accepted into the trials and that's probably the culmination of his season.

So you are suggesting Nike’s agent put Valby on report, to flex their negotiating muscles, while at the same time supplying Valby her shoes?!

I don’t put anything beyond that company being the ringleader in this sus sport.

Those all look like legal spikes to me

You clearly don’t have great judgement, that’s not what the poster is implying. Wow how did you manage to jump to that conclusion…?

And the post with the photo you provided about athletes wearing super shoes was false. All 4 of those athletes in that circle were wearing legal spikes their companies sale. Everyone in the meet wore legal spikes…at NCAA’s, that wasn’t the case