Samba Anybody?

Perhaps it was prescient that at Garrison Keillor's Prairie Home Companion block party last Saturday, they had a samba dancing contest. It's Rio. The International Olympic Committee announced today that they had chosen Rio de Janeiro as host for the Summer Olympics in 2016. It's the right choice.

It was not my choice. For sentimental reasons, I had hoped that Chicago would win the vote among the four finalists--Rio, Madrid, Tokyo, and Chicago. I grew up in Ohio and my first plane ride was to visit my aunt in the Windy City. She lived in an apartment and worked at Michael Reese Hospital. That area was my "second home" in Chicago and would have been the site of the Olympic Village had Chicago's bid been successful. My son also lives in Chicago. I have friends who worked for the bid.

In retrospect, I believe Chicago's bid failed because it was marketed and sold on money. The US, the most powerful nation in the world, wanted to welcome those less economically fortunate to its core for a lucrative opportunity to enrich the city, the US, and the IOC. The President and First Lady lobbied in person, along with Oprah, for Chicago. Their message was that we are a diverse nation that wanted to welcome the world to visit us for the 2016 Games. We're rich. We're powerful. We'll be good for the IOC.

Rio countered with a message that has won the day in the last three Games bid contests, not what we are, but what we can do for you. It's widely believed that London's message of a Games that would leave a lasting legacy of promoting sport among all carried the day for the 2012 bid. The opening up of the world to China for 2008 triumphed. Rio combined those messages in selling their bid. Come to South America, Pele said. Be international. Be Olympian.

As a representative from the sports marketing firm IMG, David Abrutyn, said the Games in South America can be good for business as well. Just like Beijing, it is an opportunity for companies to have high profile access to an emerging market economy. But that was not the leading pitch by the boys from Brazil. Their president did not fly in at the last minute or send letters, he had traveled to Africa and elsewhere long before to lobby in person for votes.

As in most political processes, it's personal. Most of the countries voting and part of the "Olympic family" are more like Brazil than the US. They are not super powers. They don't have lucrative TV deals from corporate operations that pitch the financial rewards of their relationships. They don't have the albatross of what is viewed as the "Ugly American" syndrome of revenue sharing on those television contracts. If anything, Chicago's, and New York's before that in the last bid process, is another wake up call that, despite inroads made by the Obama administration, the US still has a lot of work to do to repair damaged relations with the rest of the world.

And, as Team USA Minnesota's Chris Lundstrom discovered when he competed in the Pan Am Games in Rio, the Brazilians can deliver on putting on an international sporting event. There will be a lot of analysis and aftershocks reverberating from today's vote. Those very different "games" will continue. But Rio is the right choice for the right reasons and has the potential of enhancing the Olympic "brand." With all it's other baggage, that brand survives because the underpinning of the Olympics is that it was created as an opportunity for the youth of the world to come together.

In 2016 the Olympic "party"/gathering will be in Rio. And, as the revelers at every year's Carnival can tell you, Rio knows how to party.

Staying Healthy, Sport's Great Challenge

At the introduction of Team USA Minnesota many years ago, coach Dennis Barker was asked about how one handled such talented athletes. He replied that his job was "not to ruin them." It was a tongue in cheek response that basically acknowledged that one of the keys to high level performance is to minimize injuries, a fact even Usain Bolt talked about recently, noting that one of his primary goals for each season is to avoid getting hurt.

Anyone who has coached top level talent will tell you that motivating the athletes to train harder is not an issue, it's getting them to train smart, to not overtrain, that produces the best results. A recent example of that is the new American recordholder in the 5K, Dathan Ritzenhein, who has been a top performer since high school, but has seldom been injury free. For US athletes staying healthy has always been a major challenge.

As the world of distance running has become more competitive, the workload for elite athletes has escalated. That, plus the US high school and collegiate system of racing, has combined to short circuit many careers. Oregon's Galen Rupp, for example, had a brilliant collegiate season, helping his team win the cross country, indoor, and almost the outdoor track championships. Rupp had to double and triple to make that happen, and the effort took its toll as Galen was not 100% going into the World Championships.

Much of the success of the African runners comes down to a sort of "natural selection," Darwinian process where the athletes who can tolerate the highest workload rise to the top of a large pool of genetically gifted athletes. If they don't over race and/or keep their motivation for success high, the Kenyan, Ethiopian, and other top Africans stay near the top of their profession for a long time, just look at Haile Gebrselassie, still setting records as he marches toward his 40th birthday.

In the US, we have access to more sophisticated and costly sports medicine programs that are increasingly utilized to rehab and keep healthy athletes who might otherwise quit their sport in frustration. Zero gravity tredmills, underwater tredmills, and the various technologies used to help heal injured tissue have kept athletes, such as Kara Goucher and Ritzenhein, able to train at a high level year round, instead of constantly struggling to deal with injury layoffs.

We've learned from the Africans that running on soft surfaces, instead of city streets or synthetic tracks, appears to help strengthen the body and reduce injury. Some have suggested that Bolt has also been helped by the fact that much of his training was done on grass tracks and soft surfaces as Jamaica does not have the many modern tracks as we have in the US.

Australian coach Percy Cerutty used to have his runners go barefoot on the beach and run up sand dunes to help strengthen the runners' feet and bodies. Oregon's Vin Lananna had his athletes run barefoot regularly because he thought it helped prevent injuries. The strategies for promoting injury free running are many, and there is no magic formula, as every runner is an experiment of one. Goucher's recent experience with the marathon being a cautionary tale of sorts.

Having had what she and her coach, Alberto Salazar, thought was great training going into Berlin, Goucher was confident that she was ready for a great performance. While the rest of her body was ready, Kara's stomach was not with the result being vomiting up her fuel and falling far short of what she believed she was capable of doing in the race. Now the search is on for training a testy stomach, as well as the rest of the body.

As the saying goes, "if it was easy, everybody would be doing it." Staying healthy sounds easy, but doing it while you push your body to its limit is the great challenge of modern sport.

The B's Have It

For Athletics(track & field to us heathens in the US), this has been the year of Bs. After the Olympics in Beijing, everything centered on the World Championships in Berlin where the stars were Usain Bolt and Kenenisha Bekele. The successes and relative notoriety of the pair illustrate the nature of modern sport.

Bolt is everything the media want in a star. He not only performs spectacularly on the track, but he entertains. He has a signature pose. He goes through a mime routine before lowering himself into the starting blocks, then he turns the competition into one of a man against boys, Superman versus mere mortals. Bekele, however, is from a culture that frowns on self promotion and appreciates him for what he is, potentially the greatest distance runner of all time, an executioner who is comfortable crushing his opposition from the gun or with a last lap sprint worthy of a middle distance champion.

Thus, nearly everyone who follows sport and many who don't know who Usain Bolt is. Only the sport's aficionados recognize Bekele. In the entertainment world, self promotion is an essential piece of an athlete's resume, especially if your intent is to maximize the income you earn. Bolt's agent, Ricky Simms, says he hopes to parlay his charge's athletic talents into $10 million in economic rewards. Bekele runs to win championships and the money derived from that success is merely a bonus.

Nike, which has made good use of its endorsed athletes, doesn't use Bekele heavily in its promotions, while Bolt is the poster boy for the Puma brand. Bolt has been everywhere post Beijing to promote himself, his sport, and his sponsor associations. Interestingly enough he has been largely invisible in the US except for assorted television appearances, which speaks to the Eurocentric nature of the sport at present and the relative invisibility of the formerly potent US Athletics circuit.

Once the crown jewel of Olympic sports within the US, track has shrunk to becoming a niche sport followed almost exclusively by the die hard fans of the activity. Attempts are being made to reverse this decline, but just as the fall was gradual, rather than rapid, the recovery will also not happen overnight. While the US team is still the best in the world, the economic clout of the sport in the US is minuscule.

Some blame the stain of drug use, but that argument falls flat with the current revelations about baseball, which have done little or no damage to ticket sales and revenue in that sport. More likely the answer is in another b word, business. While the vast majority of people are attracted to the sport as a sport, an activity, a social network of people involved in the same pursuit, the business end of the sport does not have the success rate of the athletic side.

Sport in today's society is indeed big business. Athletics has yet to fully and effectively embrace that concept. Efforts are being made to correct that. The success of the sport as a business depends on how effective these efforts are at reaching their goals.

Will Usain and Tyson Rise to the Level of Rafa and Roger?

Forgive me if this appears to be an article about tennis. It's not. It's about rivalry, sportsmanship, deportment, and the mysterious workings of the most potent "muscle" in the body, the brain.

On Sunday, Roger Federer will play for the only major tennis title he has not won--the French Open. If he wins, he will not only have won all four major tennis championships, but it will also be his 14th Grand Slam title, which will tie him with Pete Sampras for the most Grand Slam titles. If he wins, he will be hailed as the greatest men's tennis player of all time.

There's a lot at stake here, but as any top athlete will tell you, the pressure to succeed does not some so much from external sources as from within. "How much do you want it?" is a familiar "motivational" tool used by coaches giving pep talks to their athletes. How much you want it, however, can be a burden instead of an inspiration as the London Times columnist, Simon Barnes notes here.

What Barnes describes is the sometimes crippling effect of too much desire, of "wanting it" too much. How many times can you think of when you wanted something so badly that, instead of calmly executing a pre-race strategy, it all went down in flames as you tightened up, strove too hard when you needed to relax, and resulted in a loss of the prize you so fervently sought?

That is the paradox of desire in sport. You want it so much that wanting is what defeats you. Athletics is generally a series of repetitive physical actions that culminate in a polished or not so polished performance. Execute well and you are usually successful. Fail to execute, and you are left beaten, ruefully examining your mistakes.

Federer almost succumbed to his own desire, Barnes writes, in the semifinal match when he was playing an opponent that he had handled easily in his previous encounters. Had beaten easily when the stakes were not so high. How often have we done the same thing? More often than not, I would guess, and it is a valuable lesson that it happens not only to us "lesser mortals," but to one deemed to be among, if not the best, in his sport.

This is the "human" side of sport most athletes attempt to mask or hide. Every athlete has his or her weaknesses, insecurities, flaws that they try to mask or conceal from their opponents. For years Federer had ruled the sport as no other, aside from perhaps Tiger Woods in golf. He had created an aura of invincibility, a mask that there were few, if any, flaws. That the only person who could beat Federer was Federer.

Then came Rafael Nadal, a "freak" of nature as tennis legend Andre Agassi recently referred to him in praise of Rafa's unique talents. For the last four years Nadal has ruled Paris and the French Open, just as Federer had ruled the rest of the game. Then Nadal also beat Federer at Wimbledon, on grass. Then in Australia on the hard courts. Nadal became number one.

Federer was not merely unable to beat Nadal on clay, but he also began losing to others. Britain's Andy Murray has risen to number three in the world and has beaten Federer in their last few encounters. On the verge of history, Federer had suddenly become no longer invincible, but vulnerable. The way he and Nadal have handled their rivalry, however, has been a lesson in statesmanship and sportsmanship.

They seem to be genuinely fond of one another, appreciative of each's abilities and personalities. There is none of the "trash talking" and psychological gamesmanship that is so prevalent within sport. Maybe as a result their Wimbledon final battle last year has been elevated to the title of the greatest match ever. So often sporting contests are won by mistakes. The athlete or team that makes the fewest of them prevails.

What made the Federer/Nadal dual in the sunset last year was that the points were usually won, not lost. One or the other of the contestants merely executed better, produced a greater shot in a series of great rallies to win the points. They elevated the game, displayed how it can be played at the highest level. That is when sports is at its best, when it "lives up to the hype" that usually precludes what is hoped to be a historic contest.

Track has had few of those moments of late. There have been no great rivalries, no contests featuring two or more athletes at the top of their profession battling out to get to the top. Usain Bolt provided the most memorable performances of recent time in Beijing last summer, but it was less of a race than an exhibition. Now Tyson Gay has opened the 2009 season with a 200 meter performance that hints at what we might have missed in Beijing, a challenger to Lightening Bolt, someone to help elevate the event and the sport.

Both Gay and Bolt have been unusual among sprinters in that they have not engaged in the usual chest thumping and bravado of many past sprint champions. Bolt has deflected the verbal boasts of other sprinters by noting that he doesn't concern himself with the talk of others or their potential challenge, but merely in raising his own game, improving and displaying his own talent. Gay has acknowledged that what he has done thus far will not cause Bolt to lose any sleep worrying about him, but it has put him on Bolt's radar, has suggested that Bolt may not have it as easy as it was in Beijing.

The delicious possibility is that both will push each other to new heights and, with them, the sport. Tennis has thrived with Rafa and Roger. The future of athletics may rest with Usain and Tyson.

It's Not Cheating if Nobody Finds Out

A swim coach sent me a clip today from Sports Illustrated of an interview with Indy Car driver, Danica Patrick. She is asked by reporter Dan Patrick(no relation): "If you could take a performance enhancing drug and not get caught, would you do it if it allowed you to win Indy?" Her reply was: "Well it's not cheating, is it, if nobody finds out?" He followed up with: "So, would you do it?" She answered: "Yeah, it would be like finding a gray area. In motor sports we work in the gray areas a lot. You're trying to find where the holes are in the rule book."

The coach was appalled. Unfortunately, Patrick was merely giving an unguarded, honest answer to the question. She is hardly alone in believing the pervading ethos of modern sport: "Cheating isn't cheating if you don't get caught." It is the engine that drives athletes to dope, to "find where the holes are in the rule book."

Back when I was competing in the '60s and '70s there was a coach in Southern California, Chuck Debus, who was a leading proponent of this philosophy. Drug testing was in its infancy, testing for anabolic steriods was being developed, and drug use was talked about more openly than it is today.

Many coaches and athletes from that era have told their stories of Debus' practices. One of the more tame being when Debus was trying to convince an athlete to "get with the program." He threw a magazine with the picture of a top track athlete on the cover down on the table. "You think she is not using drugs?" he told the athlete he was attempting to convince. In the early 1990s, Alvin Chriss, who was then Ollan Cassell's right hand man within USATF(which was then called The Athletics Congress), asked around about what could be done to stem the growing problem of drugs in sports.

Debus would be a good place to start, he was told. So, Chriss interviewed athletes, coaches, administrators, and put together a case against Debus, who eventually was banned from the sport for life. Doping was not headline news back then. None of the prominent athletes Debus worked with was named. The story hardly received a mention in the news. The impact on the doping problem was minimal. Others, who had done things as bad if not worse than Debus, shrugged and went on about their business.

It's not cheating if you don't get caught.

History may well repeat itself with Patrick's remarks. She may have to apologize for her remarks. Her sponsors and the Indy Car people will try and "spin" the story, make it go away. They will probably succeed because this ethos, this philosophy is not limited to sport. The leadership of Enron was infused with this sort of win at all costs mentality. One of the alluring values of sport is supposed to be an ethos of "fair play." The Olympics are supposed to embody this concept, to lift sport to a higher plane.

Sadly, doping is merely the most visible example of the erosion of these values in sport and society in general. Protests will be lodged with Patrick's sponsors. Like Michael Phelps, she may be deemed no longer marketable enough to appear on a cereal box. Her image may be "tainted," but there will be little discussion of what to do about the underlying problem, the real issue. Patrick is merely a symptom.

John Dean made the famous statement that the Watergate affair and subsequent cover up was a "cancer" on the presidency. This ethos of cheating, "getting an edge" is a "cancer" on society, on sport. If we don't address it. Don't deal with it, it will continue to grow. Eventually sport will not be known for fair play, but for who is the most clever at exploiting the gray areas of the rules.

Ironically, the rules of sport are what are supposed to define what is fair, what is allowed. Instead they are being perverted, bent to serve those who cannot exist within them. In the modern era of sport it is rules, not records, that appear made to be broken. Patrick is merely the latest in a long line of sportspeople alerting us to this danger. It is up to us not to ignore the problem, to spin it away, but to find a solution.

Whereabouts

The word Whereabouts has become the common descriptive term covering the current debate raging within the sports community over drug testing. The topic came up again during the recent Twin Cities Mile press conference.

TC Mile women's race winner, Shannon Rowbury, detailed the requirements for track athletes to keep their country or region's testing agency aware of their Whereabouts, where they can be found in case the agency wants to test them. The WADA code, which sets the standards for sport drug testing for Olympic sports, requires that athletes provide this information so that no notice, out-of-competition(OOC) testing can be done. The code is updated periodically.

The latest update took effect on January 1 of this year and, for the first time, covered every Olympic sport and the countries that are signatories to the UNESCO treaty on anti-doping. The requirements for Whereabouts resulted in a lawsuit by a group of athletes in Belgium, a report on whether or not the code was deemed to be in violation of European Union(EU) laws, a FIFA(the governing body for soccer) declaration that they could not adhere to the code as written, and howls of protest from some athletes. The unstated fact that was not mentioned in this discussion is that the new WADA code is actually less stringent than rules and regulations in place in many sports and by many testing agencies prior to this year.

Olympic athletes in the US, for example, have always had to adhere to the 24/7, 365 days a year Whereabouts notification. At one time, they could be tested at any time. That was relaxed so that testers would not show up at an athletes door in the middle of the night, as neither the athletes nor the testers particularly wanted to be doing bodily fluid collections at three o'clock in the morning. The rationale behind this seemingly onerous obligation for athletes is that many drugs that enhance performance are "training" drugs. They assist an athlete in recovering from workouts and allow them to do more heavy training.

Since the 1970s, Olympic drug testers have insisted that no notice, OOC testing is a key to deterring drug use among athletes. One of the pioneers in Olympic drug testing, the late Manfred Donike, who ran the Cologne laboratory in Germany that helped develop testing for substances, such as anabolic steroids, campaigned back then for testing out of competition. It was nearly 20 years before any groups implemented any out of competition testing, and the disparity between how much such testing is done the various countries is often cited as a rationale many athletes used to justify doping.

The "Everybody is doing it" mantra is reinforced when athletes from the US, Canada, Australia, and other countries with full-functioning testing agencies observe that athletes from other nations are seldom tested. One of the missions of WADA is to close these "loopholes" in the system, to create a uniform standard that strives to expose all athletes to equal scrutiny from sports drug testers. In most sports many athletes suspect that their opponents are trying to get "an edge" any way they can.

One of the reason's WADA was formed nearly ten years ago was to attempt to change the perception that sports federations and some country's sports governing bodies were actively aiding athletes wanting to get that edge. The revelations of how things operated in the GDR reinforced this mistrust between countries when it was shown that there existed a state run doping program in what was "East Germany." As many former GDR athletes have admitted, they did what they did because they believed the US and other countries were doing it too.

A story that illustrates this happened at an Olympics in the 1970s. An athlete from the US and an athlete from an Eastern Bloc nation were talking before the competition. They openly compared the drug regimen each was taking. They concluded that each was using pretty much the same stuff, and they had no qualms that the other had any unfair advantage. One won the gold, the other the silver medal. A prominent exercise physiologist told of tests done in his lab on Olympic team strength athletes in the 1980s. They all were using steroids, he said.

The athletics company Nike started an track team, Athletics West, in the 1980s with the express purpose of being the US version of the GDR system, which was then touting it's ability to use science to identify and train genetically gifted individuals for sport. One of the coaches for AW openly admits that information on steroids was given to the athletes because they knew the athletes were at least considering taking them and that they wanted the athletes to be able to make an informed decision about the risks and benefits of performance enhancing drug use.

It wasn't until after the Pan American Games of 1983 drug scandal and revelations about how the USOC had done "informational" pre testing of athletes prior to the 1984 Games that anything apart from testing at competitions began to be considered. A smattering of out of competition testing began prior to the Seoul Olympics in 1988, and after Ben Johnson was caught there, the movement toward a more comprehensive, year-round testing process began to gain momentum.

In fear of further doping scandals, many of the international sporting federations resisted such programs or, if they allowed them, tightly controlled them arousing much suspicion that potentially embarrassing positive test results were manipulated and/or "covered up." Positive tests were not punished because the use of a banned substance was deemed to be "inadvertent" or accidental by the governing organization. Appeals panels exonerated athletes on arguments that would defy explanation in hearings held behind closed doors.

Rules for doping were filled with loopholes and ways for athletes to avoid punishment. Dorian Lambelet Coleman, who helped draft a new set of doping regulations for the US track governing body in 1993, commented at the time that the existing rules appeared to be written either by people who were not very smart or who didn't want to catch anybody. Athletes were also very enterprising in attempting to avoid sanctions.

One, at a time when it was possible for athletes to handle their B samples during the confirmation process for a doping violation, pretended to drop the B sample bottle containing his urine. It bounced on the floor, but didn't break. He picked it up and threw it against the wall. It shattered. There was no rule that applied to intentional destruction of a B sample, but there was a rule that a test result could only be declared positive if the A and B sample were positive for drugs.

This athlete did not go free, said Ollan Cassell, the head of the US federation at the time. He was sanctioned under another section of the organization's rules governing conduct, a lesser charge than a doping offense. Drug testing has had to evolve to meet many legal and scientific hurdles. Kathy Presnal, who ran the drug testing program back then, noted that she never saw a clear cut doping case that went to appeal. There was always some "technicality" or issue that could leave room for doubt in obtaining a conviction.

This same issue remains with Whereabouts. The EU and WADA are looking at the code to determine if it is in compliance with EU privacy laws, among other things. Dick Pound, the former president of WADA, defended the stringent out of competition testing requirements by declaring that it wasn't a "right" to participate in sport, that athletes had obligations, requirements they must fulfill to be able to compete. Chuck Yesalis, an epidemiologist who has followed sports drug testing issues nearly since their inception, cringes at the code requirements.

He agrees with the EU judgment that they are in violation of privacy rights and others. If a system has to trample basic constitutional rights to be effective, how is that a valid system? he asks. Aren't we giving up more than we are getting? The question not being asked or answered is why can't the science meet the demands of effective OOC testing in a manner that doesn't appear to infringe on individual rights?

Part of the answer to that might be in the way the sports doping lab system has evolved. There was never a plan or a blueprint for how to develop an effective system. Drug testing labs grew out of the need for a testing lab near the site of each Olympics. They weren't selected for their scientific expertise, their research capability, or their role in creating a unified system to meet the various obligations and functions of a global sports drug testing system.

What has grown out of this randomly blossoming network of sports testing labs has been a collection of dedicated scientists attempting to stem the growth of a burgeoning industry that aids in the production and distribution of performance enhancing substances. The BALCO lab was one example of the "industry" the testing labs are fighting, but a bad one. They got caught.

Thee 30+ WADA-certified labs compete for the limited research funds, attempt to grapple with the myriad of challenges of detecting an ever widening array of products, and meet the legal obligations of defending their results before appeals panels.

As has been the case all through the process of the evolving drug testing system in sports, the science, economics, and logistics of a hopefully effective program have held a backseat to the politics surrounding the issue. Control is more important to the various "stakeholders" than the results. The discussions about this topic do not focus so much on solutions as to the vested interests of the combatants.

FIFA complains because it wants control over drug testing of its athletes. Yesalis has an illustration of how far this control goes as he tells the story of another sports body that was faced with news of a drug bust on one of its athletes. The sports body sent a "Swat" team to investigate the issue, not to discover how the athlete cheated or where the drugs came from, but rather to put a "lid" on the publicity surrounding the publicity over the drug bust. There interest was not to investigate the problem, but rather to limit its potential damage to their product.

Rowbury made another familiar plea at the TC press conference. Why, she asked, doesn't USADA or USATF help the athletes with the issue of supplements? While the testing labs have shown in studies that contamination of supplements is not uncommon, there has been little effort to protect the athletes from the threat of consuming a banned substance in a supplement deemed to be "safe." Yes, it's unrealistic for a sports organization to attempt to regulate the supplement industry, but there should be a way for athletes to avoid the fear of being banned for ingesting a seemingly "safe" substance.

Athletes are "stakeholders" too. Much lip service is given to the belief that most athletes want to compete "clean," play fair. Yet, the history of sport is littered with tales of the marginalization of athlete input. Is Rowbury being a bit paranoid in thinking that nothing has been done on the issue of supplements? Yes, but when an athlete is told that they are responsible for whatever they put in their body and that "strict liability" provides the system no ability to differentiate between an athlete attempting to "game" the system and one who simply has made an innocent or tragic mistake on something they ate, then there are trust and communication issues.

The pro sport model of unionization creates the battle of labor(athletes) against management(owners) and certainly doesn't work in the drug testing area. Olympic sport has chosen the representational model where former and/or current athletes are granted a seat at the table, but little influence in decision making.

To be fair, most athletes aren't well equipped for the politics that are the lifeblood of sports governance. Compromise is not the forte of a competitive athlete. Most athletes don't have the time or skills to work with sports administrators on sports governance while they are competing. And, until recently, there have been few really good advocates for athletes' issues in positions to lobby effectively within the sports organizations.

The result is a system that adopts rules that make good talking points in debates about drug use in sports, but that ultimately do more to foster athletes attempting to beat the system, rather than play within it. WADA has done more than the organizations that preceded it in attempting to listen to all the stakeholders in the process, but it can do more. Whereabouts seems like a simple problem to fix, but it's not.

It's trying to mesh the law, politics, science, and human behavior into a workable process that protects clean athletes and punishes those who dope. Just like climbing out the current economic situation, the issues being argued over won't have easy solutions that are quickly adopted. It's going to be a gradual process, and not one that is furthered much by various interest groups trashing each other in the media. Dr. Don Catlin, who ran the drug testing lab at UCLA and now runs the only full-time independent research organization into sports doping issues, characterized it back in the late 1980s, it's like cold war politics.

Both sides distrust one another. Neither sees an advantage in working with one another. Those barriers need to be broken down. Common threads need to be woven, the barriers to trust chipped away. Then, at least, there will be a chance for success in the battle to contain sports doping.

What's in A Name?

When the University of Minnesota's Hassan Mead was interviewed by Flotrack a few weeks ago, he was sitting on the university track. The interviewer asked him what the name of the facility was. Mead hesitated, thinking. Finally he said it was the Bierman track.

Last weekend the Big Ten Outdoor Track Championships were held on the campus of Ohio State University in that school's Jesse Owens Memorial Stadium.

Today it was announced that another $6 million had been given to the U of M to support the new TCF Stadium being built on the campus to replace the old Memorial Stadium that had been torn down when the Gopher football team moved off campus to play in the HHH Metrodome. Both Ohio Stadium, where the Buckeyes play football before 100,000 plus fans, and Memorial Stadium had tracks.

So what do these bits of information mean? For one they reflect the changing nature of sports, of paying for sports, and perceptions of the marketplace. Jesse Owens, a track legend, was a major public figure, a national hero. Years ago track and field was a sport that promoters believed could fill stadiums with spectators. It was the key sport in the summer Olympics.

The USA/Russia dual meets filled football stadiums in the 60s with track fans. Sports stadiums didn't sell naming rights or have luxury boxes catering to corporate clientele. The Penn Relays wasn't the only meet that could fill a 50,000 seat stadium. Today, track or soccer, and any other "minor" sport are not deemed able to consistently draw large, paying crowds. If they are built at all, track facilities only have room for a modest numbers of fans.

The only track athlete who is generally recognized by the public as well as sports aficionados is another sprinter, Jamaica's Usain Bolt. My friend and colleague, Peter Gambaccini, who writes and edits the Racing News section on Runner's World's website, suggested, somewhat tongue in cheek, recently that Bolt has been designated the "Messiah" of track and field. While one might pause at the thought that the last Messiah ended up getting crucified, there is no doubt that both Bolt's business representatives and the IAAF leadership want to generate wealth, brand awareness, and growth from Bolt's current popularity.

Last weekend he was in Manchester running a street race that all involved admitted was little more than a lucrative PR event for Bolt, the sport, and the country that will be hosting the 2012 Games. As media celebrities often do these days, Bolt also created more publicity leading up to the event by rolling his BMW and injuring his foot on thorns, which leads one to believe that Messiahs should not drive fast cars recklessly, an admonishment that the IAAF leader Lamine Diack made not so subtly the other day.

Hidden behind all the headlines over Bolt was the fact that on the same weekend in a portion of the same event in Manchester another running legend, Haile Gebreselassie, headlined the 10K road race. Geb has accomplished more in his storied career than Bolt, but he comes from a different culture. While he is rich beyond belief by African standards, he doesn't spend his money on fast cars or bling, he reinvests much of it back into his home country, Ethiopia. And his events take nearly a half hour to just over two hours to complete, not less than 10 seconds. Not exactly a good fit for television where the viewer's attention span is deemed to be limited.

Geb also has not developed a "signature" gesture, such as Bolt's unique pointing to the sky celebratory bow shot that has begun to be copied even by owners of thoroughbred horses. Thus, he is not as easily embraced by the mainstream media that does much to make stars out of athletes and develop "brands." Hopping around the globe to run in lots of races, get "face time" before the cameras, and the other obligations of brand name properties are also not as conducive to training and performing at a high level for a distance runner. So, we read and hear more about "Lightening Bolt" than "The Emperor." More about how Bolt wants to become the $10 million dollar man in earnings, than how Haile is working to help his countrymen and women rise out of poverty.

There's a track stadium named after Kip Keino in Eldoret. Probably there is or will be one in Addis Ababa for Haile. In Africa the purpose of a brand, if such a thing exists, is to inspire the young people to know that there is opportunity, that life does not have to be simply worrying about where the next meal is coming from. In these African nations, one doesn't need to promote track and field, it is the major sport. In the so called developed world, however, the rules are different. The "lesser" sports are becoming marginalized because they don't generate huge revenue.

While participant sports, such as road racing, have captured the interest of causes, marketers, and fund raisers because they do generate awareness and dollars, track meets no longer fill 50,000 seat stadiums. At the adidas track classic in California last weekend, much of the talk on the blogs was how sparse the crowd was in the stands. Toronto is taking a gamble in June by promoting a meet that will feature Bolt where some of the tickets are on sale for $250. That's rock star concert money.

Will those running/promoting the sport be able to create a package that those who pay to watch sports will buy? Is that really the goal of competitive sports or merely a lucrative element of the endeavor? What Minnesota track athlete would be best to name a facility after? Few probably know that Bernie Bierman was a track athlete and started out as a track coach(You can read a bit about it here, but does his name do anything for the promotion of track and field?

I don't have the answers, but they are certainly some questions that are worth asking. What is in a name? For the citizens of Ohio, where I grew up, a name that got mentioned was Jesse Owens. The sport, the legend, that's associated with Owens is track and field. Bob Kennedy, Edwin Moses, Dave Wottle, and many others grew up in that tradition. There's as rich a history here in Minnesota. Where would many of the top Minnesota track athletes be, for example, if it wasn't for the work of Coach Roy Griak. The Griak track? The Fortune Gordien discus throwing circle?

The tradition is there. We should all recognize it.

Photo courtesy of the University of Minnesota

The True Olympic Values

One of the stated values promoted by the Olympic movement is to bring together the world on the field of play to better promote social harmony and understanding. For me it has certainly been the alluring part of covering Olympic sports that one is able to interact with people from all parts of the globe, all "walks of life." It is truly a globalization of sorts.

When you travel to other countries, as Charlie Mahler is now on his journey to Kenya, you not only meet athletes in their home environment, you get to see the world close up, not merely through a picture travelogue or from others' stories. One of the most valuable assets the current resident of 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. has is the fact that he has lived, visited, or has relatives in far reaching parts of the world.

President Obama's relations in Kenya, his time in India, provide him with a more global perspective in a world where all things are becoming more and more homogenized and connected. So, when someone, like Charlie, goes on a trip to Kenya, he doesn't only meet with Olympic champions Pamela Jelimo and Wilfred Bungei, or Janeth Chepkoskei Alfred Yego, Asbel Kiprop, Nancy Langat, Paul Koech, and Sammy Koskei, he interacts with the citizens of the country, as the picture he posted from a Kenyan primary school shows.

When you're traveling, you read the local papers. Learn about gang/tribal warfare such as this link to a investigative series run this week in the East African Standard(you can follow the links to the related stories from the lead article)chronicles. Last year the violence that erupted after the disputed election gave those outside Kenya a view of the forces at work in Kenya and many other parts of Africa or so called Third World nations.

What sports reporters have learned through getting to know the Kenyans over the years is that the greatest threats to their success are political instability,corruption and disease. More Kenyan athletes have been sidelined by malaria than sports related injuries. More of them have been denied a chance to either race outside the country, go to school and pursue and education in a foreign land, or run in the world championships or Olympics by corruption in the alphabet groups who govern the sport in the country.

Patrick Sang, who came to the US to attend Iowa State University and ran in the Human Race 8K in St. Paul, told me when we visited him in Eldoret was that one key to Kenyan success was the relative political stability of the country. Unlike Ethiopia, Somalia, and other African nations, political turmoil, until last year, had been mild. There wasn't widespread violence or genocide to rob the country of its youth.

The success of the Kenyan runners in the Olympics and IAAF championships became a source of pride and inspiration. So, even while there was meddling and empire building among the country's sports officials, most athletes could find a way to compete and prosper in the sport. But as Charlie noted in his dispatch from Nairobi this morning: "It seem like a lot of lives here are very close to the edge. We saw Internal Displaced Persons camps here and there during our rounds. Kind of sobering to see 'UN High Commission for Refugees' on the side of a tent you're motoring past."

In depth reporting from foreign lands has never been a major element in US media coverage, and usually only surfaced at times of major disasters or events of political significance. With the current turmoil in the media business, foreign reporting is getting even less exposure. This is why Olympic reporters can and have provided an opening to the world for readers of the sports pages.

All one has to do is go back to the Beijing Olympic coverage and the "window" that opened to the rest of the world of China. The games we play offer us opportunities to meet people that have different values and perspective on the world. They can open our eyes to cultures we know so little about. It is a voyage of discovery.

With the internet, cell phones, and social networking, it has become easier to make and maintain contact with people in all parts of the globe. It's globalization in its purest sense, and one of the most noble of the Olympic values.

The TC Mile Goes to the Dogs

Last Thursday evening I took Stella and her friend, Tess, on a walk along Nicollet Mall. Stella(pictured here) is our 11-year old Beagle. Tess is a friend's Beagle who we often Beaglesit while her owner is out of town. The stroll gave the dogs their daily exercise and a chance to view the TC Mile from the vantage point of a spectator.

Road miles have become the "in" event for race promoters recently. The Twin Cities are in a unique position in that they have the designation as the USATF Championships this year and for the next three years. Thus giving the event the "gravitas" of being a championship, not just a bunch of unknown runners dashing down the street. This year, in fact, there was an even more attractive "media hook" as both of the US's top marathoners, Kara Goucher and Ryan Hall, were in the state. Ryan came to support his wife, Sara, who finished second in the women's race at the TC Mile. Kara was on her way to Duluth to speak at a Fitness event sponsored in part by Grandma's Marathon.

Both were fresh off of fine performances at this year's Boston Marathon. Both are attractive, articulate spokespeople for the sport. It seemed to be a great opportunity for Grandma's, TCM, and USATF to pool their resources and stage some sort of media event featuring these runners that might have played in the local media along with the daily Twins' play by play and whether or not Brett Favre will come out of retirement to play for the Vikings. This isn't a criticism of any of the aforementioned organizations, as it might not have been logistically possible or something that the local media was ready to go for, but rather just an observation about a potential way to gather some more visibilty for the elite end of the sport.

The exposure the event did get was from the general public who were enjoying a nice meal on a beautiful spring evening in downtown Minneapolis. The various restaurants along the mall that featured outdoor tables were packed with people who got to view some of the finest runners in the Twin Cities and the US flying down the street. Aside from commenting on how cute the two Beagles were, I could see the interest on the faces of the spectators in what was happening in front of them. Who were these runners? What was this event?

It seems like a natural that both the restaurant owners and the TC Mile folks could develop some sort of mutually beneficial cross promotion as this event matures and becomes a fixture in the yearly calendar in Minneapolis. At the Tour de France, for example, before the riders come through each town along their routes a caravan of sorts comes through town informing the people of what will follow and allowing the various sponsors of the event to promote their products. The Tour is so well established that it isn't necessary to inform the town folk about the event or the riders. Many of the die hard fans write the names of the riders in chalk on the roadway along with messages of support.

How much of that could be done in an event like the TC Mile is uncertain, but a couple of things could be considered to maximize the exposure and educate the public to what they are viewing. Near where the outdoor dining crowds are located, a station could be set up with a loudspeaker and an announcer who could do live commentary on what everyone was viewing, create some excitement, and get the diners into the event.

The event organizers could event print up flyers for the elite competition listing who is running in the championship event along with short bios on the athletes. They could be handed out by race volunteers along the street or offered to the restaurant owners, who could do a TC Mile night promotion. As we walked back after the race, we could see that many of the runners had topped off their evening by having dinner at one of the mall restaurants, so the owners already know that the event has a positive economic impact on their business.

Another possibility for exposure is to add a short "celebrity sprint" event to the evening. Run it right around 6:15-6:30 PM in time for the evening news and have the sprint finish right in front of the WCCO studio so one of their people could do a stand up with the race participants. Make it a celebrity match race between, say for this year, Al Franken and Norm Coleman, winner take all in the Senate race. Or with a sports theme of who is the fastest Viking with some of the players going for the title. Or team up with the University of MN and have a similar challenge for one of their sports teams.

Sports these days is all about entertainment if you want to break into the media cycle and reach a large audience, so if the goal is to broaden the appeal and visibility of the sport to the general public, events such as the TC Mile have the potential to enhance the public image of the sport by adding a little "glitz". As for Stella and Tess, when they heard about the prize money on offer for the two legged contestants, they wanted a four legged division.

$4,000 would buy a lot of dog food, and for a Beagle it's all about the food.

Analyzing Our Opinions: State & the DtB Plans

We at Down the Backstretch have been eager to offer our opinion on how MSHSL State Meet qualifying could be improved. We see inherent unfairness in the current two-teams-from-each-section qualifying system. Last year, we offered a plan to reward sections that performed better at the previous year’s State Meet that we thought would improve the quality and fairness of selection to the meet.

Now that the 2008 State Meet field is set, we can actually observe how the DtB plan would have changed the composition of the State Meet in 2008 in the often-problematic boys Class AA division.

One way to frame the discussion about the MSHSL State Meet qualifying system is to think of it in terms of the “other eight” teams. Nothing that DtB has proposed and very few of the other solutions we’ve heard around the “virtual water-cooler” have advocated ditching the sectional qualifying framework. Section qualifying is an MSHSL staple – across its sports’ landscape – and a big part of Minnesota’s high school sport's tradition.

That being the case, if we consider sectional qualifying sacred and assume that section champs will and continue to earn the right to compete at State, then eight teams – the “first eight” – are essentially not part of the discussion. Win your section – whether you’re the #1-ranked team in the state or a team that’s never gotten a coaches’ poll vote – and you’re in the meet, no questions asked. You’re the section champ, after all!

That means, in 2008, #6 Owatonna, #10 Chaska, Burnsville, #4 White Bear Lake, Coon Rapids, #1 Wayzata, #5 Moorhead, and #7 Forest Lake, the section champs of 2008, are not part of the analysis and discussions below. What we’re really discussing, when we talk about changes to the system – or the need to keep things as they stand – is how to choose the “other eight” teams at State. That is, the State participants that aren’t section champs.

Currently, of course, the “second eight” are selected based on whoever finishes second in their section. Simple enough, except that not all sections are equally strong and history has shown that more than a few deserving teams – teams ranked in the 12-deep Coaches Association rankings after sections – have not qualified for State.

To get specific, the “other eight” teams in this year’s meet are:

#11 Lakeville South
Willmar
St. Thomas Academy
#9 Roseville
Osseo
#2 Eden Prairie
Duluth East
#8 Alexandria

Four of those teams, you’ll notice, are not ranked in the top-12 of the state rankings.

The following state-ranked teams are not in the State Meet because they finished worse than runner-up in their section:

#3 Edina
#12 Minneapolis South

Last year DtB proposed a system, whereby a section’s teams’ finish at the State Meet would determine whether more teams than just the section’s champion would qualify to State the following year. The post where we described the system -- and some additional tweaks we thought might be reasonable -- is HERE.

In a nutshell, the system works such that, if none of a section’s teams finished in the top eight in a previous year, that section would only qualify its champion to State in the current year. If a section had one team in the top eight, it would qualify an additional team the next year. If a section had two teams in the top eight, it would qualify two additional teams the next year.

Now that we know the make-up of the 2008 State Meet field, we can actually observe how the proposed system would have worked this year in boys’ Class AA. Granted, a single season isn’t the end-all for analyzing competing systems, but it can be instructive all the same.

If such the system had been in place this year based on last year’s State results, the “other eight” teams at State in Class AA on Saturday would be:

Willmar … 2AA runner-up
St. Thomas Academy .. 3AA runner-up
#9 Roseville … 4AA runner-up
#2 Eden Prairie … 6AA runner-up
#8 Alexandria … 8AA runner-up
Rosemount … 3AA 3rd place
#3 Edina … 6AA 3rd place
Bemidji … 8AA 3rd place

The following ranked teams would be out the meet:

#11 Lakeville South
#12 Minneapolis South

The following teams that are in the actual 2008 State Meet but not in State via the DtB plan are:

#11 Lakeville South
Osseo
Duluth East

Another way to put it is that you’re trading those three teams listed above for:

Rosemount
#3 Edina
Bemidji


As you can see, using the previous year’s top eight to choose the second tier of State teams this year would have done a slightly better job of strengthening the field at State than the current system. While the same number of ranked teams still on the outside looking in at State – two – is the same in both plans, the top ten teams in the rankings all make the meet with the DtB plan because #3 Edina gets in the meet based on the strength of Section 6AA at State last year. The system didn’t actually add to the number of ranked teams, because another ranked team, albeit a lower-ranked one, #11 Lakeville South, got bumped by the DtB system.

DtB also suggested last year that using a mix of qualifiers earned the previous year and teams selected by an objective committee might be a more precise way to get the most deserving teams on the starting line at State. We suggested that six teams could be earned at the previous year’s State Meet and another two could be selected by the committee of coaches and officials. The two “selected teams” could work as a fail-safe for outstanding teams that rise from sections that haven’t earned enough extra qualifying slots to advance them to State.

If such a system was in force for 2008, the field would, we think, look like this:

“Earned Teams”
Willmar … 2AA runner-up
St. Thomas Academy … 3AA runner-up
#9 Roseville … 4AA runner-up
#2 Eden Prairie … 6AA runner-up
#8 Alexandria … 8AA runner-up
Rosemount … 3AA 3rd place

“Selected Teams”
#3 Edina
#11 Lakeville South

We’re assuming, of course, an objective committee would select #3 Edina and #11 Lakeville South, the top-ranked but-as-yet-not-qualified teams in Class AA.

In that case, only a single team ranked in the top-12 is left at home in 2008:

#12 Minneapolis South.

The following teams who are in the actual 2008 State Meet but not in via this second DtB method would be:

Osseo
Duluth East

Or, put another way, you’re trading those two schools – neither of which are ranked – for:

#3 Edina
Rosemount

Sorting it All Out … I think the DtB systems fared pretty well in 2008. Ideally, we would like to have seen one of our plans put all 12 ranked team in the meet. That was impossibility from the start for our “eight earned teams” plan, because in the first year of its existence no more than three schools could qualify from a single section. For a Minneapolis South – 4th in their section -- to make it to State solely via the eight earned teams plan, Section 6AA would need to have had three top-8 finishers at the previous year’s State meet, and you don’t get a third team, of course, until you've earned the third team.

The six-earned, two-selected plan didn’t pick up South either. After the earned slots were awarded, there were still three ranked teams awaiting two selected slots, and #12 Minneapolis South was behind #11 Lakeville South in the pecking order. If you’re going to leave a ranked team behind, it is best that it be the lowest-ranked one, but ideally the top-12 would all be in the meet.

That neither plan brought Minneapolis South into the meet prompts one to look at the strength of teams that got to State via “earned” slots. If only eleven ranked teams made the meet, then, obviously, five un-ranked teams advanced. Only half of the teams qualifying in the “other eight” with “earned” slots were ranked – 4 of 8 and 3 of 6 in the two plans. We anticipated the earned slots would bring more ranked teams than un-ranked ones into the meet. Perhaps it was an odd year that way.

Or, maybe sectional strength moves around between sections in a way that makes using one year’s State Meet results to earn the next year’s qualifiers a less than ideal way to select the State Meet field. It improved the quality of the field relative to the current system, it should be stressed, but did so less accurately than we expected or hoped. We liked the “all-earned” system because of its objectivity, but acknowledge that the system that mixed earned and selected teams chose a stronger State Meet field – assuming of course the selectors would identify and choose the most deserving teams.

Based on 2008 – which is only a single year’s worth of data, we feel compelled to note -- employing three “selected” teams and only 5 “earned” teams would have struck a better balance and gathered a stronger field. Such a plan would have put #12 Minneapolis South in the meet at the expense of un-ranked Rosemount, a qualifier via our other plans.

Getting the #3 team in the State meet, though, was the critical problem of 2008, we think. In a 16-team State Meet, it’s an egregious shortcoming for a qualifying system not to advance the #3-ranked team. Both of our systems solved that problem.

In sum, we still think the MSHSL should modify its current manner of advancing teams to State. We acknowledge that neither of the DtB plans would have worked “perfectly” in 2008, but both improved the quality of the field – getting #3 on the starting line.

If the strength of the State Meet field is an important value – and we feel strongly that it should be – a system that combines earned and selected teams to fill the “other eight” slots of the State Meet field is still the course to follow.

Grandma's Adopts New Heat Protocol

Today's Duluth News-Tribune reports, HERE, that Grandma's Marathon has instituted a new protocol for dealing with hot weather. According to the story, the protocol calls for race officials to decide on the Thursday afternoon prior to the Saturday event -- today in this year's case -- whether the race would be shortened to a half marathon distance or cancelled.

The new protocol, the story says, comes in response to last year's second-warmest Grandma's which had "maxed out" the event's abilities to respond to emergencies, according to Grandma's medical director. The change in policy also comes in the wake of tropical conditions at last fall's Medtronic Twin Cities and Chicago Marathons.

The Weather Channel's hour-by-hour forecast, HERE, currently projects a start-time temperature of 59 degrees with a 53 degree dew-pint and 80% humidity for this year's race. A high of 73 degrees is forecast for Saturday in Duluth.

The Hot Weather Issue ... Down the Backstretch, you might remember, discussed the marathon weather issue last fall. We suggested -- and our readers agreed -- that moving the date Grandma's to earlier in the year and pushing TCM later would make for faster and safer racing conditions.

You can read our TCM editorial HERE.

The Grandma's editorial that followed it is HERE.

We've also moved the results of two informal polls we took on the matter up on the DtB sidebar.

A response from Grandma's Marathon executive director Scott Keenan is HERE.

As he did in that DtB response last fall, Keenan says in today's News-Tribune story that Grandma's has no intention of moving its race date from its traditional third Saturday in June.


Elite Fields for Grandma's and Garry Bjorklund ... The Grandma's Marathon men's field, HERE, has the makings for a Kenya versus Ethiopia dual meet. (Where have Grandma's Russian men gone?) The women's field, HERE, has a nice mix of Kenyan, East European, and American talent, including defending champ Mary Akor.

We're pleased to see the growing depth of the Garry Bjorklund Half Marathon fields, thanks to its increased prize money in recent years. The Bjorklund men's field field is posted HERE, the women are HERE.

Roehrig, Studt Named Athletes of Week

The best multi-event athlete in Minnesota Golden Gopher history and an emerging U of M shot put star are the current Big Ten Athletes of the Week.

Liz Roehrig, who set new school records in the heptathlon and high jump last week at the Kansas Relays, and Aaron Studt, who threw a PR 62-7 1/2 in the shot put at the Tommie Twilight meet earned the awards, the school has announced.

Roehrig accumulated 5740 points in the heptathlon, bettering her own Gopher record of 5621 and falling just 10 points shy of an automatic Olympic Trials A Standard. The mark currently ranks the junior second in the NCAA. A three-time All-American, Roehrig set the school high jump record during the heptathlon. Roehrig cleared 6-0, improving the Minnesota record she has held since her freshman season. She is one of only five jumpers in the NCAA to clear the 6-0 mark this season.

Studt's 62-7 1/2 was a personal best by over three feet. The effort is also the third-best throw in school history and the Big Ten’s top mark this season. The sophomore got a second victory last weekend as well, throwing the shot 60-10 1/2 at the Carleton Relays.

Also ... The Gopher media department recently published two feature stories on U of M tracksters. There's a piece, HERE, on the Gophers' Polish triple jumper Anna Arciszewska. There's also another story, HERE, on Gopher captain Pete Miller.

Send The Right Message

By Jim Ferstle

In the Fall of 1988 Dr. Helen Kelly, a Twin Cities pediatrician received an office visit from a wrestler and his mother. This occurred shortly after Ben Johnson was busted at the Seoul Olympics, testing positive for anabolic steroids. The reason for they were there, the mother told Dr. Kelly, was to request that her son could get a prescription for the drugs Johnson used. It was a not so subtle reminder that in the world of drugs in sports the best intentions can often have unintended consequences.

Sports governing bodies, such as the IOC, were employing a "crime and punishment" model in an attempt to rid the Olympics of drugs. They thought they could scare athletes into not taking drugs by warning them of the alleged negative side effects of healthy individuals consuming substances prescribed for various illnesses. They thought they could scare athletes by claiming to be able to catch them if they cheated by using drugs. Thus when Johnson was caught in Seoul the message they thought they sent to Olympic athletes was: "Don't cheat because you'll get caught." Instead the message many athletes took away from the Seoul doping scandal was that anabolic steroids "worked" and where could they get some?

The same thing happened years later when major league home run king Mark McGwire was discovered to be using a steroid precursor, androsetenedione, during his march to the single season home run record. Once exposed, McGwire's use of the "nutritional supplement" sent sales of "andro" skyrocketing. The message, again, was that this stuff works, where can I get some?

Across the "pond" in the United Kingdom, a new doping drama is playing out. Sprinter Dwain Chambers, who was banned from the sport because he was caught taking the "designer steroid," THG, as part of the crackdown on the BALCO lab in northern California, is making a comeback. Banned for two years for his BALCO transgressions, Chambers tried to win a spot on an American football team, but failed. This winter he returned to his former sport, winning the 60 meter dash in the British trials meet for this year's IAAF World Indoor Championships in Spain last weekend. According to UK Athletics rules, the athlete who wins an event in the trials and has met the qualifying standards to compete at the World meet should be selected for the team.

For the last several weeks the British papers and electronic media have been filled with the extensive debate over whether or not Chambers should be allowed to represent his country at the World Championships. The British Olympic Association(BOA) has a rule that convicted doping offenders may not compete for Great Britain in the Olympics. Numerous high profile Brits have called for lifetime bans for any athlete having committed a serious doping offense. In the crosshairs of this debate is Chambers. The message the sports authorities want to send is that if you cheat and are caught you lose your privilege of being able to participate in sports. Those, such as Flora London Marathon race director, Dave Bedford, a former world recordholder in the 10K, believe that such draconian punishments are necessary to deter today's ethically challenged athletes from giving in to the temptation to use drugs.

As with the unanticipated fallout from the Seoul doping scandals, however, the message being sent to athletes in the Chambers affair is probably quite different. The underlying message that emerges from the debate regarding Chambers eligibility is the weakness of the testing system and of the crime and punishment model for combating doping. The unintended message being delivered is that the current testing system, with its gaping loopholes, is not robust enough to catch a convicted doping offender who is perceived to be able to return to the sport wiser about how to avoid testing positive again. Once a cheat always a cheat is the assumption. We were lucky to catch them the first time, so let's not take a chance that he will elude us again.

The drug testing system is supposed to act as a deterrent for athletes who are tempted to dope. Because it is a human system with limitations, strengths, and weaknesses, it cannot be a singular line of defense against doping. It's primary job is to enable clean athletes to protect their own reputation. Enable them to refute the oft repeated mantra of the doping proponents that "everyone is doing it(doping)." It is not some real world extension of the fictional forensic television programs where the good guys always win by using science to catch and punish the bad guys. There is no real world CSI sports doping.

In the US there has been a constant swinging of the pendulum between the rights of athletes and the laws governing the testing, prosecution, and punishment of athletes. The entertainment sports in the NFL, NBA, MLB, etc. are often criticized as being too soft in their ability to test and the punishment offenders. The NCAA has a similar secretive, seemingly "cheater friendly" approach where athletes are deemed not to be at a very high risk of ever getting caught, and, if they do make a mistake, the punishments are not thought to be adequate to fit the crime. But merely upping the consequences of failing a doping test has not proved to be the "magic bullet" in the anti-doping arena. There is no convincing evidence that lifetime bans will significantly curb athlete drug use.

There is more evidence to support the notion that if you remove the incentive that athletes believe they have to cheat to win you will be doing more to solve the problem. If Chambers were, for example, able to return to the sport, be tested and monitored, and not only be clean, but be perceived to be clean, then you send a far stronger and effective message to every athlete. The message being that you can compete and win at the highest levels of the sport without having to resort to doping. The attention can be focused on the competition, on the athletes, not the gossip, rumor and innuendo of who is doing what or what drug do I need to take to rise to the top.

The athletes deserve a system that protects them from the finger pointing and suspension of belief that every time they dramatically improve it's due to some pharmaceutical assistance. We're all human. We succeed. We fail. Just because we gave in to temptation and broke the rules doesn't deserve the lifetime scarlet letter of disgrace or being branded a cheat. The system has to be strong enough to include rehabilitation, comeback stories not just from physical injuries, but from psychological breakdowns as well. The sad message that echoes from the Chambers affair is that many don't believe the current system allows for that sort of "feel good" story where a banned athlete repents and returns to glory without the use of drugs.

Unfortunately it is very human not to be able to forgive without the belief that the person you are forgiving is truly worthy of that gift. But until we get to that point the system will be unbalanced in favor of those who believe that the only way to get ahead is to bend, finesse, or break the rules. And if all our time is spent debating the complexities of trying to regulate human behavior through these rules, what gets lost is the activity we had hoped to enjoy, to celebrate. Athletics is an exercise in exploring our own and others' ability to perform. If all that gets lost in name calling and endless debate over rules, we've lost the essence of the sports we enjoy. It is just play after all, not an advanced course in public relations, pharmacology, or jurisprudence.

Opinion: Improving State Meet Qualifying

I’ve groused about the MSHSL's State Cross Country Championship qualifying format for awhile now. (To catch up, click THIS, from last fall, and THIS, from last spring.) But now, I’m going to do something about it!

No, nothing rash, I’m simply going to offer a constructive plan for a better way to select teams for the State Meet.

My beef boils down to this: the current two-teams-from-each-Section format is too quality-blind. Too many good teams – potential trophy-wining and top-10 finishing teams – have been left off the State Meet starting line in the past with the current system. I’d like to find an objective way to put all of the best teams on the starting line at State.

So here’s my constructive advice for the MSHSL …

(1) Continue to divide the State into eight Sections.

(2) Award each Section Champion an “automatic” berth in the State Meet to its winner.

(3) Have each team that finishes in the top-8 at the previous year’s State Meet, earn their Section an additional, "bonus," team at State.

The Proposal would place the eight Section Champions in the State Meet every year. Sectional competition has been an important element of State-qualifying, across the MSHSL spectrum of sports, and it should be continued.

The proposal would reward strong Sections with additional teams based an objective measure – the previous year’s State Meet performance. If the system looks familiar, that’s because it’s similar to the way NCAA Division III selected teams for its national championship until recently.

If we put the proposal into practice beginning with this year’s State Meet results, here’s what, for example, the 2008 Class AA Boys State Meet starting line would look like:

1AA Champion
2AA Champion
3AA Champion
4AA Champion
5AA Champion
6AA Champion
7AA Champion
8AA Champion

6AA Runner-up … earned by Wayzata’s 1st place finish
3AA Runner-up … earned by Rosemounts’ 2nd place finish
8AA Runner-up … earned by Brainerd’s 3rd place finish
4AA Runner-up … earned by Stillwater’s 4th place finish
3AA 3rd placer … earned by Eastview’s 5th place finish
2AA Runner-up … earned by Willmar’s 6th place finish
8AA 3rd place team … earned by Moorhead’s 7th place finish
6AA 3rd place finisher … earned by Eden Prairie’s 8th place finish.

Put another way … 3AA, 6AA, and 8AA would get three teams at State next year; 2AA and 4AA gets two teams, 1AA, 5AA, and 7AA get only their Section champs to State in 2008.

At the 2008 State meet, all the teams on the starting line could earn their Section bonus teams for the 2009 meet. So, for example, if the order of finish at State for the top-8 went …

6AA
3AA
8AA
1AA
6AA
6AA
2AA
8AA

… then, in that scenario, 6AA would get four teams at the 2009 meet (their automatic team and three top-8 bonus teams) 8AA would get three teams (1 auto & 2 bonus), 1AA, 2AA, and 3AA would get two teams (1 & 1) and 4AA, 5AA, 7AA would each get their single automatic team.

The system assumes that the quality of a Section will endure across seasons, as one season’s results affect the next season’s qualifying teams. The system will respond to changes in the competitive landscape -- a Section with, say, four teams in the meet in one year could have only one the next.

While a Section could never have less than one team at State, a single Section could conceivably (if improbably) have nine teams at State, if they continued to earn more and more bonus teams each season with top-8 performances at State and earned all eight bonus teams.

The proposal could be tweaked or augmented in the following ways …

(1) You could cap the total number of teams a Section could earn.

(2) You could add teams to the starting line beyond the current 16, to allow more bonus teams or to allow two automatic teams per Section plus bonus teams. (A 24 team meet, for example, could put all the Section champions on the starting line, plus 16 bonus teams selected by top-16 finishes at State.)

(3) You could, in the 16-team format, offer bonus teams to only the top-6 teams from the previous year and leave two “wild card” teams to be chosen by a coaches’ panel based on results from the season in question.

I think almost any of these variations would make a better system than the one we have now.

My bottom line is that I’d like to see the best teams race at State year-in and year-out. I think the format above would allow that in a fair, objective way. It’s not a perfect plan – a top team could still fall through the cracks of the system – but it would be an improvement over what’s in place now.

Let us know what you think, by commenting below. Do you have your own plan? Let us know about that. Let DtB be a marketplace for cross country ideas!

Hot Marathons: What About Grandma's?

We apparently struck a nerve.

Our opinion post suggesting the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon move its event back two weeks to make marathoner-friendly weather a more likely occurrence prompted more comments than any other item we’ve posted. Our Down the Backstretch poll asking readers when in October they would schedule TCM gathered more votes than any other poll we’ve ever conducted. Weather and TCM seems to be on a lot of people’s minds these days, not surprisingly.

In our admittedly unscientific poll, a total of 107 people voted. A plurality of 45% of those voters thought the race should be held the third weekend of October. 81% of all voters preferred a date later than TCM’s traditional first-weekend-in-October spot on the calendar.

The comments on the editorial reflected the poll voting. They also brought Grandma’s Marathon into the discussion. Although we didn’t mention the mid-June race in the post about moving Twin Cities, readers made the connection immediately.

A reader named “dd,” who was typical of the sentiments, said: “I would be even more in favor of moving Grandma's to late May -- I think the chances of heat and humidity are getting far too good (that is, bad!) in mid-late June. People are going to start avoiding these, especially the sub-elite range that makes a race a good one for people looking for qualifiers, etc.”

Despite Grandma’s location on Lake Superior next to all that cold water, there is a disconcerting temperature trend there too. In the last five years (2003-2007), Grandma’s start-time temperatures have averaged 59.6 degrees, according to the event’s media guide. The average temperature for the event in the 20 years previous to that (1983-2002) was 51.9. It is true that some of the hottest Grandma’s were in the first years of the event – 1977 to 1982 -- but the event was also held later in the month in its earliest years of existence.

With many of the same caveats I noted in my TCM piece – that big events are scheduled well into the future, that many factors go into to choosing the best date for an event, that traditions do matter, that events must be mindful of other activities on the calendar (Memorial Day and graduations come to mind in this case), that despite what we know is a changing climate the recent warm race-days may be attributed more to blips in the weather rather than deeper factors – I’d prefer an earlier-in-the-year Grandma’s

My bottom line is to have marathoners race on what is likely to be the best weather-day of the season. Recent trends at Grandma’s -- and globally – suggest late May or early in June would put people in better weather when the gun fires.

If I was an athlete training for the race of my life next spring, I’d be worrying about the weather once the calendar flipped to June … and each and every day after that.

What do you think? Let us know on the DtB poll or with a comment below ...

Opinion: Let's Move TCM Back Two Weeks

The sea ice surrounding the North Pole is shrinking.

A couple from Minnesota just sailed the Northwest Passage.

President Bush now concedes that the global climate is changing.

Al Gore is a rock star.

And, the forecasted start-time temperature for Sunday’s Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon is 74 … with a dew-point of 67 dripping degrees.

October is the new September … or late-August in this year’s case.

Isn’t it time for the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon to move to a date later in Minnesota’s fast-warming autumn?

Pour yourself a cold drink and consider this: If race-day temperatures turn out as warm as the forecast, 2007 would mark the sixth straight year that race-day high temperatures are hotter than the mean temperature for TCM-Sundays -- 62 degrees. No matter what happens on Sunday, the last five race-days have already made for the hottest five-year string of temperatures in the 26-year history of the event.

The inconvenient truth is that the three hottest TCMs have all come since 2002.

Perhaps more significantly, especially for elite athletes who do most of their TCM racing in the “cool” of the early morning -- three of the four warmest low-of-the-day temperatures for the race have come in the last five years.

Today’s TCM runners start out warm, wind up hot, and end up slowed.

Sure, there’s no reason race-day 2008 couldn’t dawn 32 degrees and crisp, as it did on October 6, 1985 when Phil Coppess set the still-standing men’s course record for the event. I’d bet someone a little bit of money that it won’t, though … and the odds would be with me.

TCM may have hit an especially hot patch in the weather in recent years, but everyone from farmers to fishermen realizes that it's getting warmer. It makes sense that race organizers would want to take climate change into account, too.

A two-week-later race-date -- holding the event on the third week of October instead of the first -- could offer just the buffer from the temperature trend that would warm the hearts and cool the brows of marathoners. Winning times should get faster, PR performances should be more likely, and, as an added bonus “The Most Beautiful Urban Marathon in America” might even be spangled with a bit more fall color than it is now.

Informal conversations with a TCM board members, staff, and committee members suggest that moving the event later into the month is a new idea, but not necessarily an unwelcome one.

The marathoners I tested the notion on loved it.

Moving the marathon later into October doesn’t appear to present obvious, deal-breaking down-sides. Pushing the event into November would play with fire – or, more correctly, snow and ice – a little too dangerously. But mid-October should balance the downsides of late-summer and late-fall in the same fashion that TCM’s originators thought early-October would do so back in cooler times.

When October was still October, that is.

A later date would likely put TCM in conflict with the Chicago Marathon more frequently. (Both races fall on the same sticky Sunday this year, but Chicago is typically a mid/late-October event.) Regular, direct conflicts with Chicago won’t impact TCM’s elite field; Chicago, with a bankroll like the Yankees, competes on a different strata for elites than does TCM. Expo exhibitors might need to choose between the events, but their needs should be the tail rather than the dog when it comes to a decision like this.

TCM’s dates won't change quickly, even if the will to change is strong and immediate. Twin Cities’ expo contract with RiverCentre locks the event into its traditional first-weekend-in-October slot for the next three years. It’s a change that would be slow in coming even if a bold decision was made now.

It’s a change that should come, however. October is likely to get even hotter. But that doesn’t mean the Medtronic Twin Cities Marathon can’t make itself cooler.

What do you think? Let us know on the DtB poll or with a comment below ...

High School League Redraws Sections

Also in our "somewhere in the pile on our desk" department ...

... is news that the Minnesota State High School League has redrawn its state-qualifying sections for next school-year and beyond. Section assignments were determined, the MSHSL explained, by school enrollment and activity classifications, and by using these methods to determine classification.

You can check out the groupings for each MSHSL sport by clicking here. (You can even see maps!) There's been an interesting discussion of the implications of the changes in cross country on Dyestat's Minnesota forum.

Half Way There?

Last fall, I wrote this "Editor's Comment" in Minnesota Running & Track about problems I saw with the MSHSL's State Cross Country Meet qualifying system. Basically, I saw the MSHSL's 16-team, two-from-each-section, formula as unfair to too many good teams which often cluster in strong sections.

It is true that the newly redrawn sections, had they been in force last year, would have resulted in a more representative State Meet in the especially problematic Boys Class AA division. Last year, you'll remember, only seven of the top thirteen teams in the final coaches' poll in Boys Class AA made it to State.

Using a quick-and-dirty method whereby ranked team's beat unranked teams (based on the post-section-meet polls) in the redrawn sections, 10 of the top-13 ranked teams teams make it to State through the new sections. Wayzata (#4), Roseville (#10), and Burnsville (#11) moved on in the new qualifying environment.

-- Wayzata made it because they were 2nd in a Rosemount-free 6AA.

-- Roseville qualified in a Mounds View-less 4AA

-- Burnsville moved on behind Rosemount from their new 3AA neighborhood.

No ranked teams that made it to State in 2006 would fail to advance with the new section alignment.

Still on the outside looking in, however: #5 Hopkins, #8 Edina, and #13 Moorhead.

-- Hopkins ends up 3rd in 6AA -- behind Eden Prairie and Wayzata -- despite the #5 state ranking.

-- Ditto Edina -- 4th in 6AA despite being the state's #8 in the poll.

-- Moorhead, at #13, still finishes behind Brainerd and Alexandria in an unchanged-at-the-top 8AA.

So, the fundamental problem still lurks ... If you're a really good team (like Hopkins and Edina in "virtual 2006") in a super-good section (like 6AA in "virtual 2006") you can still get left out of State when you deserve to go.

I think the MSHSL still needs to find a way to offer spots on the starting line at State to strong teams from demonstrably strong sections who are still likely to be left out of the most important meet of the season despite the new sectional changes.

The best teams in the state deserve the best from the MSHSL.