Stars, Drugs, and Track

The message to take away from this story on the state of track & field in the United States? Stars are good for the sport. Drugs are bad for it. It's not exactly a magic formula, but until we have a handle on the latter the former will live under a cloud of suspicion.

On Recruiting

The New York Times has a great feature on the football recruiting process for one of the best prospects in the nation, Jamarkus McFarland, a defensive tackle from Lufkin, in East Texas. His choice came down to the heated Red River rivals, Oklahoma and Texas and he has verbally committed to Oklahoma.

It is hard to fathom what being recruited at that level must be like. My own experience twenty years ago, in a non-revenue sport like track & field (I was recruited by a handful of small football programs, but not with much zeal - smart programs) leads me to believe that for a big-time football or basketball player the frenzy must be both ego-boosting and seriously pressurized. By the fall of my senior year I was receiving letters and phone calls every day, mostly from DIII schools but from a number of DI programs as well, albeit mostly the Ivies and their ilk. And even for an athlete of relatively limited talents in a sport that does not exactly carry with it a great deal of status I learned quickly that recruiters run the gamut from the unctuous purveyors of sleaze to the genuinely kind, almost avuncular. One Ivy League coach called me weekly and by the time the recruiting process was done we could spend an hour on the phone. But the school was too close to home and I had decided on Williams, which was actually comparably low-key in the recruiting process.

My favorite recruiting story: I had just gotten home from football practice one afternoon when the phone rings at my Dad's farmhouse. I answer and it is the secretary from a major ACC basketball powerhouse track program. I was being recruited by their blood rival, which was another basketball power but not an especially prominent (read: "good") track program (and going to a subpar program was the only way I was going anywhere near the ACC). I assume my being on the rival's recruiting list explains the call. The secretary asked me to hold for Coach X, and as soon as he got on the line he addresses me in a Southern drawl out of central casting. He asked me about some of my performances, and then there was a pause so pregnant it could have been half of the girls in the sophomore class at my high school before he let out with this gem: "Son, that just won't fly with us." I was taken aback (being insulted is generally not part of the recruiting process, which usually involves lots of smoke going up lots of derrieres) and since I was clearly not in any position to blow a scholarship at this Tobacco Road redoubt I simply responded, "But coach, YOU called ME." I still root ardently against that team during basketball season.

Hamstrung (Big Time Self Indulgence Edition)

I know from hamstring injuries. Although my track career also saw its share of knee problems -- I stopped high jumping after my sophomore year because of my left knee -- my hamstrings were my bete noir. At the NESCAC track championships at Tufts my junior year, when I was seeded first in the triple jump, I tore my right hamstring during the long jump. Almost upon takeoff I simultaneously felt and heard a brutal popping sound, and that was it.

I spent the summer rehabbing, mostly in Michigan, where I spent an unlikely summer working as a bartender at a dude ranch. In July of that summer Michigan held a giant sports festival, the Great Lake State Games (for those of you from the east it was very much akin to the Bay State Games -- I competed in those twice -- or the Empire State Games). My goal was to be well enough to long jump in the track meet in East Lansing. I did so, placed second, and ther than having my car engine blow up on me, recovered pretty well.

Paranoid my senior year about that hamstring I was extra careful. My only real injury problem my senior year came with a minor but excruciating partial tear of my left patella tendon, which eventually sidelined me during one event at NESCACs outdoors, but otherwise I was able to work through. We returned to Tufts for the All New England Championships where we got to face off against the big boys in New England track and dield (and where we always did very well). I had qualified in the long jump as well as the triple, and on the Friday evening long jump finals I knew something was awry. I had a knot in the area where the hamstring and glute meets on my left leg. My steps were awry and my speed was off, and so I did not qualify for finals, which was a bummer, but the real prize for me was the triple jump. I was in good health, I felt good, and I believed that if I pulled it all together I would qualify for nationals. Qualify for nationals, have a good day, maybe a litle luck, and All American is not an impossibility.

It did not take long the next day for those plans to go to hell. During warmups I felt the tightness again, and should have gone to the trainer for a massage, but I was in the first flight and was among the early jumpers in the random draw. I took off down the runway, exploded a huge hop phase, and drove my left leg up for the crucial step phase. That's when I felt the familiar tug and heard the familiar sound, this time in my left leg. Somehow I finished off the jump, though pretty much by collapsing into the pit. In a way I wish I had not -- the jump was decent as it was, and would have been exceptional had I not torn the hamstring before finishing the final two phases of the jump. That was the one. Athletes at a peak of performance are the ones most vulnerable to tearing the hamstrings. I was so close.

And torn it was, pretty much a full rupture. My college track career ended with me face down on the infield at Tufts University for the second year in a row. It was, suffice it to say, devastating.

Gretchen Reynolds' piece Hamstrung Results from a recent issue of the New York Times' sports magazine Play thus spoke to me. I I excerpt the article in its entirety since I received it via their email newsletter and cannot seem to track down an independent link to it:

It’s been quite an Olympics for the hamstrings. They’ve determined the outcome of more events than Michael Phelps’s freakishly long arms. Sanya Richards blamed a “grabbing” hamstring for her loss in the 400 meters; sprinter Tyson Gay’s hamstring pull at the U.S. Olympic Trials reduced him to a non-factor in Beijing; and Chinese hurdler Liu Xiang’s heartbreaking exit from the Games, while directly caused by a sore Achilles tendon, “almost certainly was related” to a severe hamstring injury he suffered a few months back, says Dr. Bryan Heiderscheit, an assistant professor of physical therapy at the University of Wisconsin School of Medicine and an expert on hamstring injuries.

Injured hamstrings, Heiderscheit says, are especially common in sports that involve fast, hard spurts of running, such as the track and field sprints, but also football and soccer. “The million dollar question is why,” he says. Despite reams of research, there’s no answer.

What is known, though, is that a hamstring injury is self-perpetuating. An athlete who’s suffered one is at an enormously increased risk of another. Again, researchers don’t know why that is, although a new study by Heiderscheit and his colleagues is suggestive. In the work, 11 athletes hobbled by hamstrings underwent a M.R.I. examination. In all but two of them, the hamstrings showed “substantial changes in the tissue,” even a year and a half after the injury, Heiderscheit says. Some sections of tissue were enlarged and scarred; others atrophied. The whole was, in effect, remodeled. How that metamorphosis contributes to later injury and, more important, how to use the M.R.I. findings to avoid re-injury “will require a lot more study,” Heiderscheit says.

In the meantime, the hamstrings will have plenty more chances to affect the medal counts in Beijing. “I hope no one else goes down,” Heiderscheit says. “But I won’t be surprised if they do.”

That's not quite where my tale ends. I rehabbed again, though with nowhere near the same enthusiasm. I tried to compete a bit later that summer, with very mixed results, and I jumped the next year for the Greater Boston Track Club while I coached in Concord, Massachusetts, again with fairly mixed outcomes. I was never the same, but then again divorced from the context of track at Williams, it never would have felt the same anyhow.

Three years later I had my last bit of sporting glory, playing rugby for Rhodes University in South Africa. I had lost a lot of speed but could still get around well enough to start at wing. Every so often that haphazardly rehabiltated left hamstring would catch on me, but it was not until the last game of the season, a humiliating defeat to a club based at a police base (university boys in the Eastern Cape taking on Afrikaner policemen is a recipe for an asskicking, and we got flambeed). Towrd the end of the game I had the ball around midfield and felt the familiar sensation once again. this time the hamstring was as much scar tissue as muscle, and predictably I went down, though for reasons that still baffle me (we were shorthanded, I do know that) I stayed in the game and hobbled around utterly uselessly for the remainder of the game. I got caught at the bottom of a maul and some big bastard "mountain climbed" me, stomping directly on the hamstring.

For a month my leg was night-black from ass to calf, my last real sporting scar. Today I can run around, if I warm up right I'm still faster than most guys even though I was never really fast per se, but before long I'll feel a little hitch and will know that either my day or at least my ability to go all out are done.

I regret nothing, despite the creaky knees and worthless hamstrings and cranky back that sports left me with. I'll be one of those guys who gets his knee replaced at 50, both by 55, working on hip replacement before retirement. It was all worth it. I'd do it again in a heartbeat, working harder, smarter, better. But I'm always sympathetic to the guy with the hamstring injury. Their pain takes me back to moments of pain, but also to days of joy.

Rogge's Bizarre Rant

Courtesy of longtime reader and dcat friend Donnie Baseball comes this article from Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports. It seems that Jacques Rogge, the president of the International Olympics Committee has gone after ubersprinter Usain Bolt for his celebratons at the end of some of his races in these Olympics. Suffice it to say that Rogge is a fatuous gasbag. We could spend days explaining why, but here is a taste from Wetzel's column:

Jacques Rogge is so bought, so compromised, the president of the IOC doesn’t have the courage to criticize China for telling a decade of lies to land itself these Olympic Games.

All the promises made to get these Games — on Tibet, Darfur, pollution, worker safety, freedom of expression, dissident rights — turned out to be phony, perhaps as phony as the Chinese gymnasts’ birthdates Rogge was way too slow to investigate.

One of the most powerful men in sports turned the world away from his complicity. Instead, he has flexed his muscles by unloading on a powerless sprinter from a small island nation.

Rogge’s ripping of Usain Bolt’s supposed showboating in two of the most electrifying gold-medal performances of these Games has to be one of the most ill-timed and gutless acts in the modern history of the Olympics.

[There's more (I hope this large excerpt does not violate fair usage, but the column is pretty spot on):]

Oh, this is richer than those bribes and kickbacks the IOC got caught taking.

All the powerful nations — including the United States — have carte blanche at the Games. They can pout and preen, cheat, throw bean balls, file wild complaints, break promises that got them a host bid, whatever they want. They can take turns slapping Rogge and his cronies around like rag dolls as long as the dinner with a good wine list gets paid.

A single individual sprinter? Even if you don’t like his manner, that’s whom Rogge deems it necessary to attack, to issue a worldwide condemnation?

“I understand the joy,” Rogge said. “He might have interpreted that in another way, but the way it was perceived was ‘catch me if you can.’ You don’t do that. But he’ll learn. He’s still a young man.”

Perceived by whom? Old fat cats making billions of Olympic dollars on the backs of athletes like Bolt for a century now? They get to define this? They get to lecture about learning?

Bolt is everything the Olympics are supposed to be about. He isn’t the product of some rich country, some elaborate training program that churns out gold medals by any means necessary.

He’s a breath of fresh air, a guy who came out of nowhere to enrapture the world with his athletic performance and colorful personality. This is no dead-eye product of some massive machine.

He was himself, and the world loved him for it.

On his own force of will, Bolt has become the break-out star of these Games. He saved the post-Michael Phelps Olympics. It wasn’t so much his world-record times, but the flair, the fun.

No one at the track had a problem with this guy; they understood he is everything the sport needs to recover from an era of extreme doping. The Lightning Bolt made people care about track again, something that seemed impossible two weeks ago.

“I don’t feel like he’s being disrespectful,” American Shawn Crawford told the Associated Press. “He deserves to dance.”

Apparently, Rogge would prefer 12-year-old gymnasts too frightened to crack a smile.

It got better when, in the same press conference, he pretended to forget all the lies China told him to get this bid, all the troubles, all the challenges, and praised the host nation. Yes, these have been an exceptionally well-run Games from a tactical standpoint, and the Chinese people have displayed otherworldly kindness.

None of which denies the promises broken, the innocent jailed, the freedoms denied — the kind of issues someone with Jacques Rogge’s standing should be talking about.

He has no spine for that. Not for China. Not for any big country. He had to criticize someone, he had to make headlines, he had to show he was a tough guy. So who better than someone from somewhere that can’t ever touch him back?

Yes, Usain Bolt is the problem of the Olympics. He’s the embarrassment. He’s the one who needs to learn.

Sure, Jacques, sure.

As Donnie Baseball sums it up: "It reminds me of what I really don’t like about the Olympics. All the fun seems to have been sucked right out of the quadrennial spectacle."

The 100 Meter Dash

Marcus Hayes of the Philadelphia Daily News sums up a good deal of what I feel about Usain Bolt's incredible race for history vis a vis Michael Phelps -- not that it is a zero-sum game -- in this column. A sample:

Everybody runs.
Not everybody swims.

It's that simple.

You marvel at Michael Phelps, Mr. Olympics 2008, Mr. Olympics for all time.

You identify with Usain Bolt, the Fastest Man Ever.

Phelps, an American, obliterated records in five solo swims here. His eight gold medals, a probability achieved, made him a safe and simple face with which to brand these Games, the new Mark Spitz. His 14 career golds vaporized the old mark by five.

But not everybody swims. Certainly, not everybody swims well, and virtually nobody swims more than one stroke, maybe two.

But everybody runs.

Bolt, a Jamaican, on Saturday morning ran the most significant race in Olympic history.

He lowered the 100-meter world record he unexpectedly set in May by 0.03 seconds.

Everybody has run. You start when you're about a year old. Eventually, everybody runs 100 yards or meters: in gym class, training for some sport, from parents or the boogeyman.

Because everybody runs, the case can quite easily be made that Usain Bolt categorically won the singular sporting event, running faster than anyone else ever has (without the aid of wind), that every other person on earth with the physical capability has tried. He won the most competitive sporting endeavor there is. He ran the single event that is elemental to nearly all (land-based) sports.

I'm reminded again of a Farleyism I am sure I have shared with you in the past. Dick Farley was the college football hall of fame football coach at Williams. Before he took the head gridiron job, he was the Williams head track coach, and after that he became an assistant with the team, a position he still holds. Farley was legendary for his witticisms, most notably for his bon mots, his "Farleyisms" (so dubbed by us, not by him). My favorite probably was his constant rejoinder to us, and especially to his football players, "you're only here because there is no division 4." One time at a meet at UMass he was coaching me up between triple jumps. The 5000 meter runners were huffing their way through that race and he simply asked me, rhetorically of course, "would any of these guys be doing this if they could run the hundred?" That sums it up in a nutshell.

Bolt From the Blue

It has been buried by the Micheal Phelps juggernaut, but the unfortunate time lag between Beijing and the US, and by dumb programming decisions by NBC, but for all of Phelps' dominance, the single most awesome moment athletically in this Olympics has been Jamaican Usain Bolt's stunning, otherworldly victory in the 100 meter dash. Bolt crushed his own world record, lowering it from 9.72 seconds to 9.69. But more impressive than that is how Bolt did it -- and how he emerged this year.

Bolt, a precocious talent in the 200 pretty much had to beg his coach to be allowed to run the 100. This year is his first year as a competitive 100 meter runner at the world class level, which is to say that Bolt has probably not run the 100 in ten meets. He is 6' 5", which is massive for the dash, and event traditionally dominated by muscular, stocky guys built like NFL running backs. In the race Bolt got out to what was for him a decent start. At his height, and with his inexperience, the blocks are the most precarious moment of the race for Bolt. But by 30 meters he race was over. By 60 the race was a laugher. And by 80 meters Bolt, in the Olympic Finals, was celebrating, posing, igh stepping, and decelerating. And yet he still ran the premier distance in track and field, indeed the gold standard for speed in any sporting context, faster than anyone else had ever run it. Not so long ago I remember the world record in the 100 being Jim Hines' 9.95, a mark that stood from 1968 to 1963 and I remember when that mark stood at 9.93 for some time, from 1983, when Calvin Smith set the mark until Carl Lewis (my vote getter for greatest Olympian ever, by the way) set the clean record (following the ignominy of Ben Johnson) of 9.92. (Here is the progression of the record.) Today we take a sub-10 second hundred for granted, forgetting how ridiculously fast such a race is.

We have entered a new realm in the 100, and perhaps in the 200 if that really is Bolt's better event. Bolt ran a 9.5-something race the other day but the joyousness of winning Olympic gold took over. Michael Phelps' eight golds is awesome, and his world records are undeniable. But the worth of swimming world records seems to have undergone a devaluation in recent months. But Usain Bolt's world record is the single greatest one-event performance in this Olympics, and while not Bob Beamonesque, represents one of the greatest single accomplishments in the history of the Olympics.

Come Fill Your Glasses Up!

Williams has a new head track and field coach. My old head coach, Pete Farwell, who some time ago stepped down from head track coaching duties to focus on his championship cross country teams and coaching the distance runners on the track team, took the program over again this year after some controversy caused his successor to step down. After a national search, one-time Williams assistant coach Fletcher Brooks has been hired to take over the program. A former All American shot putter and football letterman at Allegheny College, Fletcher is also the brother of my friend and former teammate Ethan Brooks, who had a nice career in the NFL, including a couple of years as a starter for the Baltimore Ravens. Fletcher will be leaving MIT, where he has been head coach of the women's team and has worked with the men and women throwers.

I have no doubt that Fletcher Brooks will lead the Ephs to more glory in the years to come. As an alumnus not only of the school, but also of the program, I have high expectations for him to have a long and successful tenure at the head of the Williams College track and field program. All he has to do every year is beat Amherst, win Little Three, ECAC, and DIII New Englands and contest at the All New England meet, produce All Americans, and make noise nationally. Basically, all of the things that Williams track has been accomplishing just about every year since 1990 or so.

[Gratuitous and self indulgent shot of the winning long jump at the 1993 Williams Relays.]

Go Ephs!

Wow!

9.72!

Self-Indulgence Alert: Glory Days

Today dcat turned, gulp, 36. By the standards of my profession as a college professor, I still qualify as being young, precocious, even. But if actuarial tables are to be believed, the odds are pretty good that even if I feel like a twenty-something, I'm at or near the midpoint.

There was a time in my life when my default wardrobe involved sneakers and, when possible, shorts. The reason was simple -- for athletes, there was always the possibility that a pickup game might break out. Basketball, football, baseball, even something like frisbee or golf (whether legitimate or through shenanigans such as sneaking on to the course). The idea that in my life in the next few hours a basketball game might break out is only slightly more plausible than that the Virgin Mary will appear burned into my toast or that our youngest kitten will not take a dump the second after I clean the litterbox. (In fact, my eighteen-year-old self just experienced time-space humiliation over the fact that one of the only points of comparison I could muster was with cleaning the litterbox of ONE OF my cats.)

A couple of weeks ago I was invited to play in a charity softball game against our university softball team. I hurt my back. In warmups. And yet my mind remembers being an athlete even as my body has amnesia. I played through the pain -- in fact, I pitched for our team, was active in the field and at the plate, and as a result I was flat on my back for the rest of the day and was pretty much useless for the next week.

But there was a time when things were different. I can still remember those times. In fact, I can even prove that they existed:

This picture was taken exactly 14 years ago today. On this jump I became the third-ranked long-jumper in Williams College's long track and field history and I won the Williams Invitational long jump title. Later that day I also won the triple jump championship. In the decade-and-a-half to follow I have moved down the list as better jumpers have inevitably supplanted me, though I believe I am still in the top five among long jumpers and I know I remain in the top ten on the Williams indoor and outdoor long, high, and triple jump lists.

1993 sometimes seems like a long time ago. I'm not that guy any more. I wish I could go and tell that guy a few things. I wish I could listen to that guy for a little while and remember him better.

Forgive this self-indulgence. Remembrances from some modest Glory Days can be pathetic, but they also remind us of who we are. In my mind I am still flying through the air, defying gravity and, for a brief minute, time itself.