Track and field — going nowhere fast in the United States

TV coverage of track has always been frustrating but we have felt lucky just to have it on.

I miss Craig Masback announcing. British announcers are also usually good and make it sound compelling.

This is an example of a good announcing of a distance event.

Aouita 3000 record

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gYZNMvlrLM

1983 Dream mile

Looks like a white dream and Americans take 1, 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gYZNMvlrLM

I'm not a distance guy, per se. However, it's pretty bad wehn I see guys telling me, ON THIS SITE, how boring distance running is because they "don't start running until the last lap" or some such nonsense.

First of all, I hear people say all the time that NBA players don't kick it into high gear until the fourth quarter, but a better example would be the Tour de France. Ratings are very very high and people watch all the time for a bunch of guys that don't "race" on a daily basis. Everyone attributes that to Lance. Well, it wasn't just him. What happened was the networks quit dumbing down the sport and started to present it to people in an intelligent way. Viewers were drawn in and wanted more. There was a narrative to the race, and not a narrative that some idiot producer came up with and canned for Dwight Stones to relay off a teleprompter. They dared to let the narrative unfold, with articulate, passionate, and intelligent announcing. I'm sick of hearing how track is in trouble because of the personalities or it's boring or doping or whatever. Phil Liggett and Paul Sherwin appear to make up for all that by treating their audience with respect, and the sport is televised correctly. That's all it takes.

In start contrast, what do we get in track? The sport was whored out long ago for TV dollars, and look what TV did with it. We get shrieking stupidity, very little action, dumbed down commentary, and mostly just plain wrong commentary. (If I hear that damn sellout Stones say that "Cantewell is just too big for the ring" one more time I'm going to go on a rampage.) Track doesn't need to get leaner or change events any more than soccer needs to get a bigger goal to appeal to people (like me) who think it is stupid. Soccer doesn't need me and track doesn't need Joe sixpack or Sally homemaker. It's the largest participation sport in the U.S., but what you see on TV does not resemble a track meet. The IAAF feed from many Euro meets, with intelligent commenting, DOES however resemble a track meet. But heavens, we can't do that, can we?

What track needs is to get so "unimportant" that the jacksass ignoramus TV excecs (who create the slop that is presented to us as athletics now) will cease to pay for the rights to it. When the money dries up, the vampires like Stones and his ilk in TV and Hightower and hers at USATF will find another victim to line their corrupt pockets with. Then some wildcat network will take a risk and start televising it as it should be, and the sport will gain a TV following. It might happen on Flotrack or somewhere else, but it will happen. I've been to the mountaintop, and I've seen the promised land.

Great post, dude. I really agree with you. I never watched much cycling, but I'm living with a few cyclists right now and watching the Tour of California this year I realized how fun that sport can be to watch. And yeah, Phil Liggett, though I'm pretty sure he makes up 90% of the expressions he uses, is awesome and makes it fun to watch. A well announced mile or 5k or even 10k can be great if 2 guys with good insight, good personalities, and genuine enthusiasm for the races are announcing. Jesus, imagine trying to watch a baseball game with the quality of announcing that track gets on NBC... it would be horrible! But even though any one regular season game means virtually nothing in the grand sceme of the season, people will watch 3.5 hours of mostly dead space 160 times a year. That's because it's covered well, the complexities of the game are highlighted, the audience is kept informed, and the color commentary is interesting and entertaining. Absolutely the same thing can be done in track and field.

I also think, however, that track needs more racing for the sake of racing at the professional level. The Tour De France has 21 stages that are hours long. That lets the "story" that you're talking about really unfold. It gives the audience time to get familiar with the top riders and teams. even the Olympics, though spread out over a week or two, feature races that are over in pretty short periods of time. A season, like the diamond league, that was well covered and had key players that showed up and ran to win all 10 or how ever many races, would let personalities and fan bases develop in the sport.

Sick of it wrote:

What track needs is to get so "unimportant" that the jacksass ignoramus TV excecs (who create the slop that is presented to us as athletics now) will cease to pay for the rights to it. When the money dries up, the vampires like Stones and his ilk in TV and Hightower and hers at USATF will find another victim to line their corrupt pockets with. Then some wildcat network will take a risk and start televising it as it should be, and the sport will gain a TV following. It might happen on Flotrack or somewhere else, but it will happen. I've been to the mountaintop, and I've seen the promised land.

That's exactly what I have been telling "1 hour meet guy" on the other thread. Show the races, tell what is going on and why, and people will become interested.

It's easy to get a fast competitive race. Just do what the Tour De France does and pay to lead at some points.

(mile)

15% after first lap

15% after second lap

20% after 3rd lap

50% to win the race

No way they would let one guy lead the first 3 laps and make more money than the winner. It would get very competitive very fast.

You can use the money saved by not having rabbits to

increase the overall purse.

my idea is to have every athlete have their own uniform/spikes. it looks terrible when every athlete in the race has the same nike kit on

muredhawks1 wrote:

Betting is the key. Horse races are on tv more often than people races, and its horses!!! Add in the human element and pursuit of records coupled with betting, its a definite win. Of course, since its an individual sport, questionable things could happen like in tennis, but still. Basically I love to gamble, and betting on humans running around in circles would be fun.

Horse racing has it's own channel.

So let's take a different approach from the other sports on how to make elite distance running a money-making sport, and if not money-making, at least have enough capital to keep our best runners training for the Olympics:

Other sports can draw tens of thousands to a game in a super-packed Coliseum and make money on ticket sales, wall-space for advertisements, and television advertisements for people watching at home.

It seems pretty clear that our sport is not going to draw tens of thousands on a regular basis, and meets are not television friendly, so we don't have ticket sales or commercials to make money on.

What do we have that brings tens of thousands of people together in one city where everyone is willing to fork over a wad of cash just to take part, with enough attention for sponsors to buy advertising space?

We have road races.

No, we're not going to get the field of a major marathon to care about the front ten guys, and people watching on television are probably looking for their spouse/parent/friend/Oprah/Chilean coal miner, not the excitement of the elite race.

But we do have the ability to draw a large crowd together where businesses like ING are willing to pay for advertising space on the thousands of courtesy tshirts.

This is the one place where our sport can make money. What we need are race directors willing to pass that money onto elite American athletes in order to support Olympic dreams, rather that simply pocketing it.

I don't think the ING NYC marathon makes much extra money by supporting the elite field. But it's nice for them to pretend that it matters. The money made in road races is the only money that falls into the hands of running-minded people (with the exception of some running shoe companies), and we need to encourage these folks to put capitalism aside every now and then in order to keep the top Americans running.

These seems like a modest goal. I'm not going to make the argument that track can be like the NBA in spectating and jersey sales, but I do think we have more resources at our disposal than your swimming/gymnastics type sports, so that we can support our elite athletes and still be competitive on the international stage.

I think this is partly right. but most road races are run by not-for-profit organizations and attempt little else that host the meet. Maybe if we stopped looking at how USATF is screwing things up and turned our attentions to how groups like Rock n Roll and NYRR are being true professionals, we can could pull more money into the sport.

The Rock n Roll series is a joke. I believe they are a for-profit, and they have no goals of supporting elite athletes. They are the capitalists of the running world.

I agree that maybe we should complain about the head of their staff, not the heads of the USATF clowns.

This is a serious proposal: could we make NYRR the head of road racing in the US? Maybe we give them control of road racing and cross country, and if they do a better job, then we give them USATF's Olympic money.

I think your proposal is one that should be considered. NYRR knows road running. What if we stripped down USATF to being simply the kiddy race organization, and leave elite running/adult road racing to someone else?In keeping with my previous post, I think elite racing and road racing needs to be unified so that the former can be funded by the latter.

abRIPPERx wrote:

The Rock n Roll series is a joke. I believe they are a for-profit, and they have no goals of supporting elite athletes. They are the capitalists of the running world.

I agree that maybe we should complain about the head of their staff, not the heads of the USATF clowns.

This is a serious proposal: could we make NYRR the head of road racing in the US? Maybe we give them control of road racing and cross country, and if they do a better job, then we give them USATF's Olympic money.

Maybe we should start cheering for Hightower to become the USATF CEO so that the Olympic Committee can get mad and strip away their funding.

[quote]dudewheresmycar wrote:

I think your proposal is one that should be considered. NYRR knows road running. What if we stripped down USATF to being simply the kiddy race organization, and leave elite running/adult road racing to someone else?

In keeping with my previous post, I think elite racing and road racing needs to be unified so that the former can be funded by the latter.

quote]toro wrote:

TV coverage of track has always been frustrating but we have felt lucky just to have it on.

I miss Craig Masback announcing. British announcers are also usually good and make it sound compelling.

This is an example of a good announcing of a distance event.

Aouita 3000 record

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gYZNMvlrLM

1983 Dream mile

Looks like a white dream and Americans take 1, 2

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7gYZNMvlrLM

[/quote]

I agree Craig Masback was a very good track announcer.[

This road racing structure is exactly the opposite of a stable future for the sport. I'm not disagreeing that there's plenty of money in the masses running road races, but that's a separate business. If none of them or the spectators care about the elites, then there's no money for the elites. Sure right now the 4 hour marathoners entry fee might subsidize appearance fees, but no one's going to continue making that investment if they don't expect a return on it. We can't count on a bunch of charitable race directors to unnecessarily give the money they make back to elite athletes for no reason other than to have fast people in the sport. That's ridiculous. Eventually one of two things is going to happen, race directors are going to realize they're wasting money and keep it for themselves and their organizations, or race directors are going to realize they're wasting money and waste it in a better way i.e. charities. Elite running is NOT a worthy charity cause, and charity cannot keep a sport alive. It has to be valued enough by it's fans to be a source of revenue. If that can't happen then it's doomed.