World Indoors Is A Month Away; Which Americans Have The Standard?

By LetsRun.com
January 31, 2018

Though it seems like the 2018 indoor track season has just begun, athletes are running out of time to secure qualifiers for the 2018 IAAF World Indoor Championships, which will be held in Birmingham, England, from March 1-4. Three weekends of competition remain for athletes to earn the qualifying standards, and in reality, that window is even shorter for American middle-distance and distance runners. The deadline to qualify is February 19, but the USATF Indoor Championships will be held that weekend (February 16-18). Hitting a qualifier at USAs will be very difficult: not only is it a championship meet (where place, not time, takes priority), but the meet is being held at 5,300 feet of elevation in Albuquerque. Any athlete in the 800, 1500, or 3000 who heads to USAs without the IAAF standard will be facing an uphill battle to make the team.

The best remaining chances for American athletes to hit the standard are this weekend at the Millrose Games in New York and Camel City Elite Races in Winston-Salem, N.C., and next weekend at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix in Boston.

Boris Berian and Erik Sowinski both medalled for the US two years ago, but right now, neither has the standard for 2018

To make it onto Team USA, an athlete must finish top two at USAs and have the IAAF standard. If one or both of the top two finishers at USAs don’t have the standard, USATF will select then consider the third-place finisher and pick the team based on order of finish at USAs until two athletes have met the mark.

Other important notes:

• The qualifying window runs from January 1, 2017, to February 19, 2018.
• Marks from oversized tracks cannot be used to qualify in events 400m and above.
• Champions of the IAAF World Indoor Tour in 2017 and 2018 will be awarded wild-card entries to World Indoors. No Americans won the World Indoor Tour in 2017. The 2018 World Indoor Tour, which begins on February 3 in Karlsruhe, Germany, and runs through February 25, includes the men’s 800 and 3,000 and the women’s 1500.
• At the last World Indoor Championships in 2016, if there were not enough qualified entrants in an event, the IAAF extended invitations based on the world descending order list (that is how Erik Sowinski qualified). We’re not sure if the IAAF will do this again in 2018.

A full PDF of the IAAF entry guidelines can be found here.

So which Americans have the standard? And which ones still have some work to do? If we were to list every U.S. qualifier in every event the lists would be massive so we’ve highlighted only the distance events: the 800, 1500 and 3000. For the mid-d and distance events, wbelow you will find the complete list of Americans with the standards for World Indoors (as of January 31).

Men’s 800

Men’s 1500

Men’s 3000

*The IAAF standard is running sub-13:10 outdoors; we assume the IAAF will accept Hill’s 13:07 even though he ran the time indoors

Women’s 800

Women’s 1500

Women’s 3000

MB: The 2018 Worlds are 1 month away – Who has the standard and who doesn’t?