Nobody made the argument that they wanted Faith to go. The reality was they were trying to get their teammate the standard by running the standard with her. If that meant Faith lost then I’m sure they were ok with that. There was no surging. No breaking away. They ran the splits she needed to run to hit the standard. When she faded they kept the pace because that was the point - to pace for that time.
I think “old school” is a code for senile. Not a single coach I spoke to there had a problem with how the Toga girls ran. Everyone understood it’s purpose and you’re the only person that felt it was disrespectful. Go watch the video, the presumption that they stop while ahead is wrong. They slowed down from about 250m to go until the finish. It wasn’t like they stood there on the track.
Disrespectful was the event earlier in the day, the girls 400m, where the Amsterdam girl had the super standard and won the race anyway, taking away the chance for anyone else from the section to go to the meet. I heard about 5 coaches all mention how selfish that was for them to do that when she didn’t need to.
As for the lecture given to the coaches by the officials. They can lecture all they want. But any idiot with a brain who had been to a state qualifier meet in the past could’ve seen this coming (somebody already mentioned the history of athletes working out this stuff themselves in the past) when you make kids run a race with nothing on the line. Hell, the boys with 3200m super standards were talking weeks ago about setting up a paced effort for everyone. They wanted to pace a stacked 3200 and help everyone run fast.