darkwave wrote:
I agree that the two standards do NOT match, but I think they should open up the men's to allow more in - I like 2:23-2:24, honestly.
Having a more open standard encourages development - it encourages people to stay in the sport and keep carving time off. The further out of reach the standard is, the less people try for it.
We have so much more depth in women's marathoning than we do in men's right now - and I keep thinking it's because the easier women's standard has encouraged more development over the last decade.
I get the concerns with having too many athletes in the trials (bottles, etc). But...I would think you could control for that by only letting the A standard athletes get bottles.
Agree completely.
The only potential downside I see is that at some point, if the field gets too big, the popular perception of what it means to be a trials qualifier will change, and qualifying for the trials would stop attracting local media coverage. But I think we're a long ways from that. Qualifiers would probably continue to get local coverage even if there were hundreds and hundreds more. Most people think that if you're among the top 1000 at your sport in the country, you're really, really good.
Of course, I'm talking only about the wider perception of the public, which I think is the relevant consideration. For runners, "trials qualifier" doesn't have to mean anything specific because we understand the difference between a 2:18 guy and a 2:24 guy. We talk about "trials qualifiers" more as shorthand for the relevant times, whereas the general public, which doesn't understand times, needs that "trials qualifier" label to understand that someone is among a fairly small group of athletes across the country. (It's a weird characteristic of the U.S. running community that it is so insistent on telling people that they're terrible; in fact, that was basically the only rationale that Latimer could come up with for tightening the male standards a decade ago--to clarify that what used to be "good" was no longer good.)
Individual athletes of course are going to have widely different takes on the right place to put the standard that aren't always objective. Someone who's on the bubble now but thinks he can make it wants it to stay where it is. It'll be a hugely meaningful accomplishment if he gets it, but if the goal line gets moved, it feels too cheap and easy. But the same guy doesn't appreciate that there are (1) slower guys who will only have the chance to chase that meaningful moment if the standard gets a bit more achievable, and (2) faster guys who already qualify without worries and aren't especially proud of having done so. But no matter where you set it there are going to be people right on the edge along with people who are comfortably on each side. At bottom, I think that it's silly to talk about how "hard" it should be when any standard is going to be hard, easy, and impossible to different people. The consideration should be how big we want the trials to be. We can then pick a time with the objective of getting close to that number.