Interested in thoughts on the topic.
Interested in thoughts on the topic.
Most people on this message board won't accept the premise of your subject. Define "too far gone as a culture"? Seems to me Americans have plenty of appreciation for athletics.
Meets would have to be a produced and marketed a lot different than they are now to make track and field even a 3rd tier sport.
The strange thing to me is that the TV production of the California High School state championships is much more compelling to watch than almost any other meet. The CIF Masters meet TV production was also excellent and other sports fans could appreciate more than most track meets on TV.
Educating the general running public (over a million casual runners) would be a great place to start. The need for a more informative national website that follows the sport is needed. USATF's website is pretty piss poor, and diehard websites such as this one simply won't do the job promoting the sport to the masses. We have millions of weekend warriors and high school tracksters in this country. If we can capture their attention towards the sport, that would elevate the status of T&F for sure.
Okay, so we have some coverage of the World Championships on NBC and Versus last week.
I appreciate everything they have done, but why do we still have to sit through warm-ups and false starts, etc?
If it is not live, why not show the events and skip the crap air time between things.
I will admit they are getting SO MUCH better about this, I thought the short coverage provided by NBC was actually rather good.
When you look at any pro level sport that has gained a large fan base in the US, you will see that all such sports have a competent league that actively markets and promotes the sport (NFL, NBA, MLB, etc). I don't know that track could gain the same following as football or basketball, but a competent governing body could help a lot. Think about the number of people who run track or xc in high school. If we could market the sport well enough to keep even 20% of those people interested there would be a large fan base.
Harry Kooter wrote:
When you look at any pro level sport that has gained a large fan base in the US, you will see that all such sports have a competent league that actively markets and promotes the sport (NFL, NBA, MLB, etc). I don't know that track could gain the same following as football or basketball, but a competent governing body could help a lot. Think about the number of people who run track or xc in high school. If we could market the sport well enough to keep even 20% of those people interested there would be a large fan base.
Agreed. But we also need to remember that the majority of the top track and field meets are held over in Europe. How do you bridge that gap, when all of our stars leave the U.S. for two to four months and race all their biggest races in Europe? Americans don't care about the outside world, how do we get them to care a bit more about track events over there? Better coverage perhaps?
It is a football nation plain and simple. I wish we were a soccer nation. However, that is not likely.
Not sure what you expect, exactly. We are a nation of some 300 million people. Do you expect tens of millions to be on the edge of their seats during the Zurich Grand Prix or to hear people shooting guns into the air the next time Webb wins a big race?
Frankly I don't think most people in the average office will EVER know the big names of international distance running, or even sprinting, for that matter. Track has its devout following and, during the Olympics, national interest perks up for a while and EVERYONE might learn a name like Carl Lewis or Michael Johnson.
That's about it. TV coverage has improved and might get still better, and that would be great. But other than that, it will not take the nation by storm. So what? It does pretty well compared to many other sports.
Diggety Darryl wrote:
Seems to me Americans have plenty of appreciation for athletics.
Seems to me you don't grasp the meaning of "athletics" in this context?