Houston gets BOTH US Marathon Trials!!

Armchair Quarterback wrote:

HUGE mistake. This is like the NFL moving the Super Bowl to Cornhusker Stadium in Nebraska. What the USATF is saying and why the USATF has no vision goes like this: We will settle for being a medium sized fish in a small pond. We will continue to cater to existing runners instead of taking our product mainstream. The trials in Boston and New York were amazing and a giant step forward. We just took 10 giant steps back.

HAHAHAHA.

-1 for a crappy analogy. Ratings would still be massive for the Super Bowl even if it was at Cornhusker Stadium, and they would sell out. Oly Trials are early in the morning and only a couple thousand high strung, emaciated people show up to watch it.......and a couple thousand more will wake up to tune it.

As Wejo said, the key will be live TV coverage. If there is none again then press exposure for Houston will be limited.

I didn't say the key was live TV coverage. The key is network TV coverage. That gets the most eyeballs. In terms of people watching something it depends on what network it is on. Unfortunately a lot of running events are on obscure networks.

So in terms of obscurity the order are:

Universal Sports < Versus < ESPN2 < ESPN < Network TV

The last trials were not on live TV either but they had a show later in the day on NBC. Usually I believe a show like that on Network TV gets a million viewers depending on the ratings. The NY Marathon has an NBC show. The Boston Marathon I believe has been on Versus and Universal Sports the last few years. Much less exposure. It used to be on ESPN2 which is more exposure.

And let's not kid ourselves, Houston won the Trials because its bid was financially superior. Steve Karpas may have said that it wasn't but 1) it's the diplomatic thing to say and 2) I don't think he saw the other bids.

Read the Ed Torres article on the trials going to Houston.

Houston's "support" was much greater than NYs. Yet at the same time no one has done more to "support" US distance runners this decade than Mary W and the NYRR. I don't think support is patting people on the back. It's paying the bills. The money being equal you think they're going to give the Trials to Houston over NY? No way.

The Trials are more expensive to put on in NY than Houston. It's interesting that Boston and NY which both had put on the Trials in the past and dealt with the sponsor conflicts bid less than Houston. They definitely are the more informed bidders.

My reading on it is, USATF wanted to have a Trials in NY if possible but has an obligation to go with the financially superior bid especially if it's not just a rounding error. NY had the opportunity to bolster it's bid and still came out in 2nd. Hopefully, Houston puts on a blockbuster Trials, NY and Boston see that it can be done financially and the bar keeps getting raised higher and higher.