May 2019 Contents
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May 2019 Track and Field Contents Writers of P. 1 President’s Message America P. 2 Leading Books of 2018 - Finalists (Founded June 7, 1973) P. 3 Roberto Luigi Quercetani RIP P. 4 CAS Upholds IAAF’s Female Eligibility Regulations PRESIDENT P. 5 Newly Released LA 2028 Olympic Budget Remains “In Line” With Bid Estimates Jack Pfeifer P. 6 A Victory for Female Athletes Everywhere 2199 NW Everett St. #601 Portland, Oregon 97210 P. 10 Paris Councillor Calls for Referendum on Whether to Cancel 2024 Olympic and Paralympic Office/home: 917-579- Games 5392. Email: P. 11 Gamecock Alumna Kryst Wins Miss USA Competition [email protected] P. 12 IAAF Letter to the World Medical Association SECRETARY- P. 13 Eastern Track League TREASURER P. 14 My First Sub-4 Tom Casacky P. 15 San Jose State Loses Historic Track to Make Way for Parking P.O. Box 4288 P. 16 OTC Elite Heads to Flagstaff for Altitude Training Napa, CA 94558 Phone: 818-321-3234 P. 17 What an Olympic Medalist, Homeless in Seattle, Wants You to Know Email: [email protected] P. 19 Nike Told Me to Dream Crazy, Until I Wanted a Baby P. 20 We Lost Another New York Sports Media Character this Week; Robert Elkin FAST P. 22 The Olympic Marathon Trials Are (Still) In Jeopardy-Here’s What USATF & the IAAF Can Dave Johnson Email: Do to Fix It [email protected] P. 24 Partial Fixtures List Phone: 215-898-6145 WEBMASTER Michael McLaughlin President’s Message - May 2019 Email: Gender Identity [email protected] The thorny subjects of hypoandrogenism and transgender politics reached a crescendo in re- Phone: 815-529-8454 cent weeks as the question of Caster Semenya’s eligibility to compete as a woman has been ruled NEWSLETTER EDITOR on yet again by an international body. Shawn Price A number of pertinent articles appear in this month’s Newsletter, including a particularly Email: lengthy and insightful one by Doriane Lambelet Coleman, an excellent runner in her own right [email protected] and now a law professor at Duke. Phone: 979-661-0731 In our view, the whole sustainability of a level playing field for women’s sports is at stake. The nation of South Africa, alas, sees it differently, as it continues to demand that Semenya and oth- ers be allowed to compete against women regardless of their testosterone levels. They and others portray it as a civil rights issue. The subject has reached the United States as well, where in the state of Connecticut two trans- gender runners now dominate the girls’ sprints. Will there come a time when transgender and hypoandrogenist athletes have their own divi- sion in the Special Olympics? Awards Breakfast June 7 in Austin TAFWA’s annual membership get-together and awards presentation will take place Friday morning June 7 at 9 AM at the University of Texas Club on the Texas campus during the NCAA Championships in Austin. We encourage you to attend. The gathering will include several prominent college competitors and their coaches, who will be available for interview. Breakfast is $10 for members. If you have not paid your dues of $30 for 2019, this can be done at the door. We will also accept dues at that time for 2020. Not everyone has Paypal. The club is located at 2108 Robert Dedman Drive, on the east side of Darrell Royal-Texas Stadium. This is TAFWA’s only gathering for 2019. Plans are also now underway for our event in 2020, to be held in Eugene during the Olympic Trials. Hayward Field Construction continues at the new Hayward Field in Eugene. We drove past the construction site along Agate Street on a recent visit to town. The footprint of the new stadium is considerably larger than the previous building. The curved portion of the horseshoe end has been begun along with the tower at the other end of the backstretch. A proposed date for the official opening of the new stadium has been a moving target. Word was that, thanks in part to excellent weather in 2018 and early 2019, construction was ahead of schedule. No longer. The date now being publicly stated is May 1, 2020. This is a matter of weeks before the Oregon state high school champi- onships, the Prefontaine Classic and the Pac-12 Conference championships are scheduled to be held. This year’s Prefontaine meet has of course been relocated to Stanford, while the Oregon state meet has been split into three smaller meets at two different locations, on two different weekends. Next year’s Pac-12 meet is currently listed as tentatively being held in Eugene. The Olympic Trials are scheduled for June 19-28. If there are unforeseen delays in construction between now and then, stay tuned. Ticket sales for the Trials and for the 2021 World Championships are being organized at the present time. Notices have been sent to longtime season-ticket holders at the old Hayward Field. No seating plan has been released. At latest word, those who wish to purchase prime seats at the Trials are required to appear in person in Eugene in June 2019 at a given time and date in order to secure tickets. Newsletter Schedule This month’s Newsletter is intentionally arriving the middle of the month. The next issue will be July 1, where we will report on the winners of this year’s TAFWA Awards. Leading Books of 2018 Track and Field Writers of America encourages our THE WIZARD OF FOZ coaches and teams to create libraries of track and field Dick Fosbury’s One Man High Jump Revolution literature that can travel with their teams from practice and By Bob Welch with Dick Fosbury competitions. Skyhorse Publishing New York, 2018 Our sport is rich and alive in literature, history and train- ing expertise. The written word can be inspiring, challeng- LET YOUR MIND RUN ing and give continuity to the baton of track and field being A Memoir of Thinking My Way to Victory passed onto future generations. By Deena Kastor and Michelle Hamilton Crown Publishing, A book can be a great training partner to what is often a New York, 2018 lonely sport. This has been an outstanding year in publish- ing books of a Track & Field nature. VARSITY SEVEN: An American Rift Valley By Peter Hawkins Our Finalists from this years Track and Field Writers Starr Press of America 2018 Selections are: Spokane, Washington, 2018 TIGERBELLE: The Wyomia Tyrus Story THE INCOMPLETE BOOK OF RUNNING By Wyomia Tyrus and Elizabeth Terzakis By Peter Sagal Akashic Books Simon and Schuster NY,2018 Kindle 2018 TAFWA Membership Dues for 2019 TAFWA dues for 2019 will remain at $30, and will buy you a series of excellent newsletters, the 2019 FAST Annual, and privileged entry to special TAFWA social events at the NCAA Championships in Austin (our yearly breakfast with athletes and coaches). Don’t miss out! You can send a check, payable to TAFWA, to PO Box 4288, Napa, CA 94558, or use PayPal, to the ad- dress [email protected]. TAFWA Newsletter - Page 2 - May 2019 Athletics Historian Quercetani Dies The IAAF is deeply saddened to hear that renowned athletics historian Roberto Luigi Quercetani died on Monday (May 13) at the age of 97. The doyen of athletics statisticians, Quercetani was a founder member of the Association of Track Field Statisticians (ATFS) and its president from 1950 until 1968 and the general editor of the ATFS Annual each year to 1969. RLQ, as he was affectionately known, was one of the most prolific and knowl- edgeable of athletics historians and statisticians. During his long lifetime he produced a colossal body of work – books that document track and field in minute and loving detail from the pioneering Handbook on Olympic Games Track and Field Athletics with Don Potts in 1948. His first major work in English was A World History of Track and Field Athletics IAAF Council member Anna Riccardi, Roberto L Quercetani and FIDAL Deputy Vice 1864-1964, a superbly written and au- President Alberto Morini in Florence, Salone dei Cinquecento (FIDAL) © Copyright thoritative account of how our sport developed over that century. Further versions were both updated and published in various languages and over the years he wrote books dealing with the history of individual groups of events. He led the compilation and publication of four volumes of Track & Field Performances Through the Years that covered world lists from 1921 to 1950, the years before the annual ATFS lists. A freelance journalist, he covered most of the world’s major athletics events for many years, especially from 1951 for La Gazzetto dello Sport and contributed to a wide range of publications. A lover of trivia, his final offering – written in his nineties – was entitled Intriguing Facts & Figures from Athletics History 1860-2014 and dedicated to his beloved wife Maria Luisa “for her untiring support and understanding”. Born in Florence in May 1922, Quercetani was only 10 when athletics entered his life. He was out walking with his fa- ther in August 1932 when he caught sight of a large cinema screen on top of a building announcing that Luigi Beccali had won the Olympic 1500m title in Los Angeles the previous day. That fired his imagination and he started collecting news- paper clippings relating to athletics. It was the start of a lifetime’s obsession with the sport’s facts and figures. Among his earliest treasured memories was of seeing Beccali set an Italian 800m record during halftime at a football match in his native city in 1933.