May 2015 Track and Field Writers of President’s Message America Awards Breakfast TAFWA’s annual Awards Breakfast will be held Friday morning, June 12, in Eugene, (Founded June 7, 1973) during the NCAA Championships, beginning at 9 AM. This year’s event, for the first time, will be held in Gerlinger Hall on the University of Oregon campus, two blocks from PRESIDENT Jack Pfeifer, 6129 N. Hayward Field. We believe this will make it easier for people who need to get to the meet Lovely St., Portland, OR promptly to do so. 97203. Office/home: 917- 579-5392. Email: [email protected] VICE PRESIDENT Contents Doug Binder. Email: [email protected]. P. 1 President’s Message and TAFWA Updates Phone: 503-913-4191. P. 4 William “Bill” Miller’s Sudden Passing TREASURER P. 6 Frank Bertucci’s Sudden Passing Tom Casacky, P.O. Box P. 7 Doping Revelations: The Consequences When Cheaters Win 4288, Napa, CA 94558. Phone: 818-321-3234. P. 9 India’s Milka Singh - Doping is Like A Cancer Email: [email protected] P. 10 Ashton and Brianne - The Journey SECRETARY/ P. 15 Heartfelt Coverage From the “Jamaica Champs” AWARDS CHAIR P. 20 The Jamaica Gleaner: Put A Stop to Athlete Factories Don Kopriva, 5327 New- port Drive, Lisle IL 60532. P. 22 Get Your Intervals In At the Narifta Airport, Terminal Three Home: 630-960-3049. P. 23 The 2021 World Outdoor Championships to Eugene Cell: 630-712-2710. Email: donkopriva777@ P. 24 Rio. Media, Bring Your Corporate Credit Card for Access.... aol.com P. 25 East Grandstands/West Grandstands, Pre’s Home is Going to Change NEWSLETTER EDITOR P. 27 Boston Not Strong Kim Spir, University of P. 29 Even Outside Magazine Runs a Story about T&F Doping Portland, 5000 N. Willamette Blvd., P. 32 Olympic Qualifying Standards Portland, OR 97203. P. 34 Photos That Changed The Boston Marathon Forever Work: 503-943-7314. Email: kim.spir@gmail. P. 40 Vic Holchak Passes com P. 41 Drug Cheats-Paying Money FAST P. 43 TrackTownUSA Announces A Second Round of Indoor Worlds Dave Johnson. Email: Ticket Sales in Portland, Oregon [email protected] Phone: 215-898-6145. P. 44 The Shorty Awards P. 45 Colin Henderson - Lessons Learned at the Penn Relays WEBMASTER Michael McLaughlin. P. 47 Mary Wittenberg Moves On Email: supamac@comcast. P. 48 Racing the Rain. A Review by Paul Duffau net. Phone: 815-529- 8454. P. 50 Partial Fixtures List Awards to be presented this spring:

• The inaugural James O. Dunaway Award, formerly the Abramson Award, for track and field journalism • The Sam Skinner Award, for cooperation with the press • The Pinkie Sober and Scott Davis awards for announcing • The Rich Clarkson Award for photography • The Adam Jacobs Award for blogging

In addition, members of the winning documentary-film team that won the Bud Greenspan Award this winter will be in attendance to accept in person, as they reside in Seattle, convenient to Eugene but not to New York.

TAFWA’s two book awards and our inaugural broadcasting award, named for H.D. Thoreau, were an- nounced and presented in New York in February.

Breakfast is $10 for members, $15 for members’ guests. Dues may be paid at the door. Dues remain $30. Copies of the 2015 FAST Annual will also be available at the door.

A flyer will be distributed in the press areas on Thursday as a reminder. We expect to have several prominent athletes and coaches on hand for your questions. Festivities should wrap up by 10:30 a.m.

USATF Social Event We are also hosting an event during the USATF Championships two weeks later in Eugene. This will not be a formal program with speakers or award presentations. Rather, it will be a private casual get- together for members only, at the home of two of our members, Tom and Janet Heinonen.

This will be on the morning of the last day of the competition, Sunday, June 28. Details will be an- nounced next month.

Parking at Hayward Field FYI TAFWA investigated the potential for renting our own small parking lot near Hayward Field, near campus, for our members. The university and other sponsoring groups no longer provide convenient parking for most members of the press for their events. Those priorities now go to TV, officials and VIPs. Such a rental is feasible, but we decided that the daily rate is too high.

If you have a concern about the parking situation at Hayward Field, let me know. I am willing to fight further on this issue if the demand is there.

2016 World Indoor As you know, the 2016 Indoor Worlds will be held in TAFWA’s current hometown, Portland, Ore. Will you be attending? If there is sufficient support for it, TAFWA would host an event in conjunction with the Worlds next March. Let us know your plans. Want to know where to get the funkiest meal or the best salmon or hear the newest indie band? Watch upcoming TAFWA Newsletters, or better yet, tune in to the TV show Portlandia.

Olympic Trials It’s also not too early to be thinking about next year’s Olympic Trials, also set for Eugene. It will be

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 2 - May 2015 TrackTown’s third consecutive Trials, the second time that has happened (72-76-80). This means that over the next 13 months, all of the major upcoming events – two NCAAs, 2015 USAs, 2016 Trials and World Indoor – will take place in Oregon. The 2016 USA Indoor Champs will also take place in Port- land, next March, one week prior to Worlds.

TAFWA plans to have four events in ’16 – Awards galas in NYC (Millrose Week in February) and Eu- gene (NCAA week), a luncheon and a private social event during the Trials. The latter will probably be held at the private home some of us rent in the hills above Hayward Field, where some of you attended the famous Cordner Nelson surprise birthday party seven years ago.

Details to come.

Abramson Award For years there were two Abramson Awards, a confusing state of affairs. One was given by TAFWA, the other by the Penn Relays. For the record, your current president received this year’s Penn Relays Abramson Award along with the splendid Relays watch that goes with it.

By-laws In order to become an official tax-exempt 5.01c3 organization, TAFWA needs to prepare and approve a set of by-laws. We’re looking for a member with the time, expertise and willingness to draft our by- laws. If interested, please email me [email protected].

USTFCCCA Partnership

The USTFCCCA (U.S. Track & Field and Cross Country Coaches’ Association), under the direc- tion of Sam Seemes, is onboard again this year in helping to underwrite the cost of TAFWA’s annual Awards Breakfast. TAFWA is grateful to the college coaches for their continued support.

Sam is expected to be in attendance again this year at the event so be sure to say hello. Because our event is held during the NCAA Championships, we plan to have coaches and athletes from the cham- pionships present, another good reason for our partnership and for your presence.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 3 - May 2015 New Yorker Bill Miller dies at 91

Two New York Times veterans: Bill Miller, left, and Frank Litsky, right, at the 2014 Penn Relays. (Spir) Bill Miller, one of the lions of track journalism in New York City for the last 70 years, died of heart failure in Nyack, N.Y., on May 20. He had been admitted to the hospital one day earlier.

Miller, a medical textbook publisher by profession, reported on scholastic track and field as a freelance writer for The New York Times beginning in 1947.

He was an excellent runner in his own right, competing in the quarter-mile for La Salle Academy, a Jesuit school on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, in the late ‘30s and early ‘40s, and for Manhattan College after serving in the Pacific during World War II.

Miller was a raconteur of the old school, sometimes taking 15 minutes to tell a story but disappointing his listeners that it wasn’t longer.

He once told this reporter a long baseball story that began with his days growing up in the Bronx as a boy, when he could walk to both Yankee Stadium and the Polo Grounds to watch the Giants and his be- loved Yankees. Eventually, he said that he finally persuaded his parents to let him take multiple trains and see his first game at Ebbets Field, and he dropped in the name Johnny Vander Meer. Bill said Yes, his first game in Brooklyn had been on June 15, 1938, the day Vander Meer threw the second of his

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 4 - May 2015 consecutive no-hitters as the Reds shut out the Dodgers, 6-0. A teenaged Bill Miller was there to see it. Miller’s favorite week of the year was the last week of April, when he journeyed to Philadelphia to run in, or work at, the Penn Relays. He ran the mile relay at Penn in the 1930s and worked at the Relays for The Times virtually every decade after that, writing the prep sidebar to accompany the lead stories by his friends Frank Litsky, Neil Amdur, Jim Dunaway and other legendary New York track writers. Bill knew them all.

For The Times, he wrote hundreds of track articles, on deadline, finally landing on the front page of the Sports section when Alan Webb became the first schoolboy to break 4 minutes in the mile indoors. He began writing about track as a teenager for his school paper at La Salle and later for the school paper at Manhattan.

As his health declined in recent years, Miller wasn’t having it. Frustrated when he couldn’t recall a name, he asked for help. When he couldn’t negotiate parallel parking any longer on the narrow streets of Washington Heights, his friend Jamie Kempton became his designated driver and brought him to his home away from home, the New York Armory, to continue attending meets and see his hundreds of beloved friends. This happened as recently as this past February, when he attended one more Millrose Games and, despite sometimes forgetting a name or a face, hugged everyone in sight.

He tried to see one more Penn Relays, last month, but his family said he was too frail to make the trip.

Nevertheless, Miller called the Relays office in advance and arranged for a press pass, just in case.

/JP/

Services Wake Friday May 22, 4-8 PM, Wyman-Fisher Funeral Home, Pearl River, N.Y.

Funeral Saturday May 23, 10 AM, Church of St. Aedan Rpman Catholic Church, 23 Reld Dr., Pearl River, N.Y.

Notes of condolence to the Miller Family, 45 Villa Road, Pearl River, N.Y. 10965

In lieu of flowers, donations should be made in Bill’s memory to St. Jude Children’s Research Hospital, 501 St. Jude Pl., Memphis, Tenn. 38105.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 5 - May 2015 http://mobile.philly.com/sports/?wss=/philly/ sports&id=302316731

Frank Bertucci, Penn Relays mainstay and former Inquirer and Daily News journalist, dies

Joe Juliano Inquirer Staff Writer Posted: Sunday, May 3, 2015, 1:10 AM image: http://media.philly.com/designimages/ partnerIcon-Inquirer-2014.jpg

Frank D. Bertucci, 68, a former Inquir- er suburban writer and Daily News copy editor who worked in various capacities over more than 40 years of attending the Penn Relays, died of a heart attack Friday night at his home in South Philadelphia.

Just over a week ago, Mr. Bertucci had finished another Penn Relays, where he wrote several advance sto- ries, including one spotlighting the common and uncommon names among the thousands of entries. He also supervised a crew of young writers who interviewed winning teams and individuals.

“Not sure what my streak is,” he wrote last weekend on his blog, Frank Thoughts, “but I think it’s solid since 1975. Can’t remember missing any since then.”

Mr. Bertucci worked in the sports information offices at the University of Pennsylvania and La Salle before join- ing The Inquirer in its Montgomery County Neighbors office. He worked there for 14 years, said his sister, Mary Lou Bertucci Rooney, and later spent 10 years at the Daily News.

“What a passion Frank had for the sports he covered and followed, and respect he had for the athletes and coaches,” said Lou Rabito, his editor with Neighbors.

Mr. Bertucci also was close to his family and friends, particularly his nephew, Austin Rooney.

“He was the world’s greatest uncle,” Mary Lou Bertucci Rooney said. “When Austin was 8 years old, they would go to all the [sports] Hall of Fames. They went to about seven places together until he turned 16. He also was a wonderful godparent. He always wanted to get together with family and friends.

“Frank sometimes had a dour expression, but deep down, he was the friendliest guy you ever met. If you had Frank as a friend, you had a friend for life.”

Mr. Bertucci’s interests included Shakespeare, mysteries, and new restaurants, particularly in the East Passyunk neighborhood near where he lived. After turning 65 and receiving his Medicare card, he often told friends of the trips he took on SEPTA - which he could ride free - to see where the routes went. TAFWA Newsletter - Page 6 - May 2015 Son of the late Frank J. and Mary (Marioni) Bertucci, Mr. Bertucci lived all his life on the same street in South Philadelphia. He graduated from St. John Neumann High School in 1964 and from Temple University in 1968. In addition to his sister and his nephew, he is survived by his brother-in-law, Robert Rooney, and several god- children.

A Funeral Mass will be held at 10 a.m. Thursday at St. Rita of Cascia Church, Broad and Ellsworth Streets, fol- lowed by burial at Holy Cross Cemetery, Yeadon. Viewing will be held at the Pennsylvania Burial Co., 1327 S. Broad St., from 7 to 9 p.m. Wednesday, and from 8:30 to 9:30 a.m. Thursday.

In lieu of flowers, donations may be made in Mr. Bertucci’s memory to the Williams Syndrome Association, 570 Kirts Blvd., Suite 223, Troy, Mich., 48084-4156.

http://www.runnersworld.com/general-interest/when-cheaters-win-the-consequences-are-far-reaching

When Cheaters Win, the Consequences Are Far-Reaching While fans struggle to make sense of recent doping revelations, athletes in the sport have had to deal with their doubts for years.

By Sarah Lorge Butler; | Image by Steve Baccon / Getty Images | Published March 30, 2015

Shalane Flanagan started the 2014 Boston Marathon with a 5:11 first mile. She had made no secret that win- ning Boston, the race she had watched as a child, was the dream that drove her—and she figured an honest pace from the gun was the best way to achieve it.

In close pursuit that day was defending champion Rita Jeptoo, 33, of Kenya. She stuck to Flanagan through tor- rid splits: 32:34 for 10K, 1:09:27 through the half. In the Newton Hills, Flanagan fell back while Jeptoo dropped a 4:48 for mile 24. Her winning time was 2:18:57, a new course record. Even though she ran a PR by more than 3 minutes and posted the fastest American time (2:22:02) ever on the Boston course, Flanagan’s efforts were good for only seventh place. “I don’t wish it was easier,” she said after the race. “I just wish I were better.”

Perhaps she didn’t have to be. On Oct. 31, the running world learned what might have been behind Jeptoo’s otherworldly performances—which included a repeat Chicago Marathon title last fall—when news broke that she had failed an out-of-competition drug test in September. In December, her “B” sample confirmed the find- ing.

For Flanagan, 32, who had spent the months leading up to Boston developing a race strategy solely to take the kick out of Jeptoo, the news of the positive test brought a measure of relief. “My dreams are valid,” Flanagan says. “When I say I want to win the Boston Marathon, it is a valid dream. Last year I felt so defeated.”

Progress or Pessimism? Revelations of performance-enhancing drug use in running came in a wave at the end of 2014. Close on the

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 7 - May 2015 heels of the Jeptoo revelation, a German documentary alleged systematic doping among athletes in Russia and corruption at the IAAF, the sport’s governing body, which may have failed to properly investigate irregular test results. In the U.S., Jon Drummond, a sprinter and coach, was hit with an eight-year ban, and Mo Trafeh, a multiple-time U.S. road-race champion, was handed a four-year suspension. ome see it as progress: Testing is working; cheaters are getting caught. Others wonder how many dopers are still going undetected. But elite ath- letes who say they are clean have long grappled with the knowledge that their competition might not be honest. “When you’re up against cheaters, it’s terrible, really,” says Roisin McGettigan, an Irish middle-distance runner who competed in the 2008 Olympics. “We’re so passionate about the sport, we love the sport. The sport is our livelihood. And yet we’re sitting there in the stands watching the cheaters take home medals.”

The consequences of doping go far beyond missed medals and lost prize money. Clean runners cope with a nag- ging sense of futility, and if they can’t come to peace with the uncertainty, it hastens their exit from competi- tion.

“I guess I just decided at some point that if I was going to keep going in this sport, I needed to give people the benefit of the doubt and assume that they have an incredible talent level,” says Lauren Fleshman, who finished seventh at the 2011 world championships 5,000m. “Because the alternative is being steeped in pessimism, and you have no motivation to keep [training].”

After his fourth place at the 2012 Olympic marathon, Meb Keflezighi recalled pushing, even when a medal was out of reach. “I was going to be satisfied with my fifth place finish, but then something came to mind; drugs. If any of the top three get caught down the road with a positive drug test, then the 4th place guy gets promoted to Bronze,” he wrote in a blog.

Anna Alminova and Roisin McGettigan battle in the 1500m at the 2009 European indoor champs. When Alminova was busted for doping in 2014, McGettigan was upgraded to a bronze medal.

Moments Lost Recently, McGettigan earned one of those upgrades. She had finished fourth in the 1500m at the 2009 European indoor championships by 0.16 seconds. Last July, as she played with her two young daughters outside her home in Providence, Rhode Island, word came that the winner of that race, Anna Alminova of Russia, had all her results since February of 2009 wiped from the books, due to irregularities in her biological passport. McGettigan would be upgraded to bronze.

When she walked into her kitchen that day, she found texts and tweets of congratulations. Her training part- ners, Olympians Molly Huddle and Kim Smith, held an impromptu backyard ceremony for her (with a substitute medal from a local 5K and the Irish national anthem played from an iPhone).

Last November, McGettigan got the real thing, as Athletics Ireland presented her with the medal. “It’s like a little fairy-tale ending,” she says. “You never imagine it would come out and you’d win the prize.” But the five-year delay in justice had severe consequences for McGettigan. “Crossing the line and knowing that you got the medal— that moment—I haven’t got that,” she says. Instead of taking a break after her indoor sea- son, she figured she needed to push a little harder. The more tired she got, the harder she pushed. Through the summer of 2009, she ran a series of subpar races. Her iron levels, she says, were “all over the place.”

Ultimately, she ran herself into a hole of crippling fatigue that she couldn’t climb out of. Unable to run as she had in the past, she retired— linking Alminova’s cheating to the end of McGettigan’s career. She learned the hard way about defining success on her own terms. “You have to,” McGettigan says. “It’s about the effort, your own [personal] records. That’s the stance my coach, Ray Treacy, takes. Molly Huddle and Kim Smith, they are

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 8 - May 2015 some of the best athletes in the world, and we just kind of know that there are people who have probably taken medals from them.”

Clean athletes competing in a world that lauds winners and overlooks everyone else have to reap rewards elsewhere. “Fortunately, I find value beyond the end result,” Flanagan says. “I find value in the process and the people that I meet.” She talks about her father, Steve Flanagan, who helped her train on the Boston course last winter. “We had a lot of joy and a lot of great memories from that.”

But there’s only one time to stand on a podium, to feel a wreath placed on your head, to hear your country’s national anthem. Dopers take all that, leaving clean athletes only the memories of their training, without the finish-line elation. “They’re stealers of dreams and stealers of moments,” Flanagan says. “Yes, you can be handed the medal later, but the moment is gone. It has passed.” http://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/sports/more-sports/others/Doping-is-like-cancer-Milkha-Singh/ articleshow/46770426.cms

NAVBHARAT TIMES

Doping is like cancer: Milkha Singh PTI | Apr 1, 2015, 04.23PM IST

NEW DELHI: India’s legendary sprinter Milkha Singh on Wednesday said that doping is like cancer and govern- ment needs to take some strict measures to curb this menace.

“Doping is like cancer. If you visit the changing rooms or bathrooms of the athletes you will find syringes. They know that if they dope then they will have more strength. To stop this menace, it is important that govt takes some strict measures,” said the 86-year-old at the launch of a multi-sport fitness programme, Milkha Surefit, which aims at identifying and nurturing sports potential of young school children.

“Govt needs to sack the coaches and doctors of the athletes as it is not possible to dope without their knowl- edge. It is a shame for the parents and the country as a whole and needs to be dealt with firmly,” he added. Milkha said he was deeply pained and cried like hell after missing the Olympic medal during the Rome Olym- pics. He now wants to see an Indian winning an Olympic gold in athletics before he breathes his last.

“I ran in Olympics in 1960. It has been 55 years since, still we could not produce another Milkha out of the 120 crore people of India. Before I die, I want to see an Indian winning an Olympic gold medal in Athletics which slipped out of my fingers,” he said.

“I ran in 80 international race, I won in 77 of them but I failed to win that Olympic medal in Rome. I had cried like hell that night. I had wasted 12-13 years of my hard work. It was my and my country’s bad luck.”

Milkha had finished fourth after clocking 45.60 seconds in 1960 Rome Olympics 400m race. The ‘Flying Sikh’ said it is because of lack of will power and sincerity that India could not win an Olympic gold in athletics.

“People blame govt but we have stadiums, infrastructure, coaches, funds. We have everything, what we lack is will power and hard work. You have to love a thing like mad then only you can do something in that.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 9 - May 2015 There are three things -- athletes, coaches and Association. If all of them are sincere, we will have many more Milkha Singh. The problem is we are not sincere enough. We don’t take responsibility.”

Milkha Singh doesn’t see any Indian winning the Olympic gold in athletics at next year’s Rio Games.

“I don’t see any men or woman earning India an Olympic medal in athletics next year. In Asia, there was a time when we were the number one but now it has gone down. We have to see where we are, compared to China and Japan,” he said.

On National sports award controversies, he said: “I had said no to Arjuna award because this awards should be given on merit. It should go on the basis on performance not nepotism.”

Milkha won the gold medal in 1958 and 1962 Asian Games and was the only Indian man to win an individual athletics gold in the Commonwealth Games before Vikas Gowda broke the jinx, giving India their second athlet- ics gold medal at the 20th Commonwealth Games in men’s discus throw competition at Glasgow.

http://www.oregonlive.com/trackandfield/ index.ssf/2015/04/its_all_about_the_journey_ for.html#incart_2box

It’s all about the journey for Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen-Eaton, the planet’s most athletic couple

By Ken Goe | The Or- egonian/OregonLive on April 01, 2015 at 7:00 AM, updated April 01, 2015 at 9:32 AM

Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen-Eaton are at the top of their game. Aston Eaton won 2012 Olympic gold in the decathlon. Theisen-Eaton is the 2014 Commonwealth Games champion. Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen-Eaton warm- up on the track before heading indoors for technical training. More photos can be found by following the link above. Thomas Boyd | The Oregonian/Oregon- Live.

EUGENE - The world’s most athletic couple is not satisfied.

Not with medals. Not with records. Not after standing on the award stand wrapped in a flag. Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen-Eaton can be better. They know it. Technique can improve. The jump can go longer or higher. The throw can travel farther. At the top of their profession, they are relentlessly focused on staying there TAFWA Newsletter - Page 10 - May 2015 through the 2016 Summer Olympics in Rio de Janeiro.

On this cool, sunny day recently on the Hayward Field infield, Eaton is fuming about the discus.

Eaton won 2012 Olympic gold in the decathlon. He set the decathlon world record of 9,039 points at the 2012 U.S. Olympic trials.

To get the record, he ran the 1,500 meters - his 10th event in two days - in 4 minutes, 14.48 seconds, fans in the packed stands at Hayward coming to their feet as he neared the finish line.

The roar of the crowd continued as Eaton turned to the scoreboard to see his time. When the time flashed up his eyes brimmed over. It was one of those goose-bump moments that make sports worth watching.

But now Hayward is mostly still as Eaton and coach Harry Marra work on discus technique.

World-class combined-event athletes Ashton Eaton and Brianne Theisen-Eaton train in Eugene, with coach Harry Marra in preparation for upcoming meets.

The discus is not Eaton’s best event, and so one in which, perhaps, there is the most room for improvement. On the track, in the 100, the 400, the 110 hurdles, and in the long jump, Eaton is good enough to compete in open events. Marra sees hope with the discus.

“Ashton, that’s a home run,” he says. Eaton shakes his head. “No, it’s not,” he says. “It’s going to the fence and he’s catching it.”

Marra spent a decade as Team USA’s decathlon coach. He has guided seven decathletes past 8,000 points, the event’s equivalent of a .350 batting average or 2,500 yards rushing.

There might not be a better technical multi-events coach alive. He likes the improvement he sees in Eaton’s fundamentals.

“It’s not going anywhere,” Eaton complains after another throw.

Marra smiles. “It’s March,” he says. “It doesn’t have to go anywhere until August.” • • • As a reigning world champion, Eaton already has qualified for the IAAF World Track & Field Championships this summer in Beijing. Theisen-Eaton almost certainly will represent Canada in the heptathlon. She was the world championships silver medalist in 2013 and won the Commonwealth Games gold a year ago.

Next year, the Rio Olympics loom.

The Eatons met at the University of Oregon, where they were teammates. Eaton was a three-time NCAA decath- lon champion and Theisen-Eaton won three NCAA heptathlon titles. They often train together, each serving as another set of eyes for the other. It’s maybe the most accomplished two-athlete training group anywhere. Ever. “Harry sees the stuff,” Theisen-Eaton says. “But Ashton feels the stuff.” Coaching the Eatons is a full-time job for Marra. But even though they’re the only two athletes he currently coaches, Marra doesn’t work for them. He is employed by Oregon Track Club Elite. He doesn’t hang out with the Eatons away from practice, and doesn’t want to.

“Maybe after all of this is said and done I’ll be their friend,” Marra says. “I don’t dislike them. But it’s my job to teach them how to run, jump and throw. I don’t want that compromised.”

The Eatons are all business at practice. So is Marra, who comes to every workout with a detailed plan. TAFWA Newsletter - Page 11 - May 2015 “If I didn’t,” he says, “they would chew me up.”

It’s hands-on, focused, intense, and sometimes draining. It works within the prism of the Eatons’ marriage be- cause they have learned where the boundaries are. Theisen-Eaton is the cook. Eaton is the kitchen cleanup crew. He has video games. She has favorite television shows, such as “The Bachelor.”

They have learned what to say, what not to say, when to pipe up and when to be quiet.

“When he is trying to give me input, it’s usually because I’m struggling with something,” Theisen-Eaton says. “When I try to help with something, it’s because he is struggling.”

Sometimes the help is welcomed. If not, it’s better to let it drop.

Sometimes, there isn’t anything left to say.

They’ve been together all day, already seen it, already lived it. When they come home, they are physically, emo- tionally and mentally drained.

“When you’re training seriously, you don’t really do extra-curricular activities,” Eaton says. “You sit at home, read, go on the Internet, watch a movie.” Then they go to bed. When the new day dawns, they do it all over again. • • • The shot put looks deceptively simple from the grandstands. There is one heavy ball, thrown with one arm. As Marra breaks it down under Hayward Field’s west grandstand, it becomes unbelievably complicated. Marra at work is a lesson in biomechanics. Much of the impetus for a put comes from the lower body. The footwork has to be right, the hips have to engage, the body weight has to transfer. It takes place in a 7-foot circular ring, which means there is a lot happening in an enclosed space. In practice, it’s a lot like a baseball swing. In fact, the Eatons warm up by swinging a bat.

Massage therapist Don Butzner records video of each throw on an iPad. The video is dissected after each practice attempt.

A technical imperfection at any point in any of the moving parts detracts from the throw. And since so many things have to happen for the throw to be perfect, perfection remains out of reach.

Shot-putters spend their career refining the technique. For athletes in the multi-events, it’s a small part of one practice. There are nine other events for Eaton and six for Theisen-Eaton that require just as much focus and -at tention to detail. It’s exhausting, as much mentally as physically.

“One of the things that we’re learning as we get older is that the improvements come less often,” Eaton says. “And they’re less significant. The range of improvement is smaller.”

Time hurries. Perspective changes. The horizon narrows.

Eaton was 24 when he set the world record and won Olympic gold. He is 27 now, and will be 28 when the world comes to Rio de Janeiro next summer. Former world record-holder Dan O’Brien won his only Olympic gold medal and the last of five world outdoor championships at 30. No multi-event athlete goes on forever.

“There is a sense of running out of time,” Eaton says. “Between now and Rio, I’ll only do three or four decath- lons. And then you go on to 2017. Say I win Worlds. So I’ll do five.”

Major League Baseball players have 162 games each season to get the swing right. For a multi-event athlete, every competition has to count. TAFWA Newsletter - Page 12 - May 2015 One thing that separates the multi athletes who win Olympic medals is that for them, every one does. Marra remembers seeing Eaton in 2009 at the USATF Outdoor Championships. Former UO assistant Dan Steele was Eaton’s coach then. Steele told Marra to watch the kid, who had a chance to be someone special. Eaton’s athleticism took Marra’s breath away. But it was watching Eaton adjust during a difficult high jump competition that impressed him most. Steele called Eaton over for a technical consultation after he missed a clearance.

“Ashton was in a high-pressure situation, trying to make the U.S. team for Berlin,” Marra says. “I don’t know what Steele said to him. I don’t remember, and that’s not the point.” The point? Eaton was calm and completely focused on his coach, drinking in every word. There were no jitters. He wasn’t distracted. Eaton was a 21-year- old college student, but the stage wasn’t too big. Marra remembers thinking: “This guy could be great.” • • • Theisen-Eaton arrived in Eugene a year after Eaton did, which means as brilliant as her career trajectory is, she is No. 2 in her own house.

By the time Theisen-Eaton won her third NCAA outdoor title, Eaton already had three of his own. Theisen-Eaton set the Pac-12 heptathlon record in 2012. Eaton set the world decathlon record a month later.

She made the 2012 Canadian Olympic team. He won the gold medal.

“I had to learn to get over the fact he was more accomplished than me,” Theisen-Eaton says. “I had been doing the same things he did up until he broke the world record. But because he was a year ahead, he would always be doing one thing better. “It’s almost like once he already had accomplished something, it wasn’t as significant.”

Life experience brings life lessons. Theisen-Eaton’s last two years -- winning silver atthe 2013 World Outdoor Championships in Moscow, and gold in the 2014Commonwealth Games in Glasgow -- have helped her step out from her husband’s shadow.

Athletics Canada recently named Theisen-Eaton co-outstanding athlete of the year with high jumper Derek Drouin.

As it turns out, Theisen-Eaton is accomplished at the world level, too.

“They play off each other really well,” Marra says. “Brianne is an athlete and Ashton is an athlete.”

And in many ways, they are athletically different. Where Eaton is spectacular on the track from the 400 down and plays catch-up in throwing events, Theisen-Eaton is solid across all seven heptathlon events.

“She doesn’t have a weakness,” Marra says

In a practice session under the west grandstand, Marra and Theisen-Eaton bear down hard on the javelin. Marra believes the javelin - the sixth of the seven heptathlon events - could be a difference-maker in Rio if the battle for gold comes down to Theisen-Eaton and British stars Jessica Ennis, the 2012 Olympic champion, and Kata- rina Johnson-Thompson.

Ennis holds the world heptathlon record in the 100 hurdles of 12.54 seconds. Johnson-Thompson has high jumped 6-5 1/2 and long jumped 22-9.

“Holy cow, that’s big time stuff,” Marra says. “But Bri can throw far. If she does, if she wins the javelin, she can look over at her competitors and say, ‘OK girls. Who is going to run now?’”

Theisen-Eaton has something else going for her that Ennis and Johnson-Thompson do not. “The best training situation in the world,” she says. TAFWA Newsletter - Page 13 - May 2015 • • • While Theisen-Eaton was building up for the Commonwealth Games, Eaton took a sabbatical from the decathlon last year.

He trained for and competed in the 400 hurdles, a completely new event for him.

He held his own on the summer circuit in Europe against athletes who train full time only in the 400 hurdles, another measure of his extraordinary athletic ability.

“Our approach last year was to have as much fun as possible,” Marra says.

It paid off for all concerned. Eaton says he enjoyed traveling on the continent and competing regularly. There were no expectations. The pace of competition was completely different.

“Instead of sitting in my hotel room, taking adequate breaks and making sure I wasn’t doing anything stupid to tax myself before a meet,” he says, “I thought, ‘I’m running one event and I usually do 10. It’s going to take 50 seconds. I’m usually competing for 24 hours. I can afford to explore a bit.’”

So Eaton saw the sights and made friends.

He was part of a traveling group with some of the U.S. hurdlers, becoming buddies with Lolo Jones, Queen Har- rison and Nia Ali. “It made me realize why I did track in the first place,” Eaton says. “Because it’s fun. The compe- tition was fun. The athletes are fun. The traveling is fun. The training is fun.”

It’s as good an explanation as any for what drives track & field’s power duo. Well, that and the sheer satisfaction of doing what they do better than anyone else on the planet.

They certainly aren’t in this for the fame.

Eaton didn’t appear on a Wheaties box after winning Olympic gold, the way many other U.S. Olympic stars have. The Eatons were approached for a possible reality television show. But, eating, sleeping, playing video games and putting the shot don’t provide the kind of fireworks that produce ratings.

Don’t go looking for “Keeping Up With the Eatons.”

They don’t need the attention, or even seem to want it.

There are no hangers-on when the Eatons practice. No flunkies, no gofers. When it’s time to work with the hurdles under the west grandstand, Eaton helps set them up.

Imagine Mike Trout wheeling out the cage for pregame batting practice.

When they are done with hurdles, Eaton helps carry them off the track to put them away. Then it’s on to the next event.

Because as good as the world’s most athletic couple is, there still are improvements to make.

The work is never done.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 14 - May 2015 http://www.nytimes.com/2015/04/06/sports/tracks-heartbeat-is-fast-as-ever-in-jamaica.html?_r=0

Track’s Heartbeat Is Fast as Ever in Jamaica APRIL 5, 2015 Photo

Sports of The Times | By MICHAEL POWELL Track’s Heartbeat Is Fast as Ever in Jamaica

Competitors in the 100 meters late last month at the celebrated five-day high school competition in Jamaica known as Champs. CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times. (Editor’s Note: see the photo slideshow by follow- ing the link above.)

KINGSTON, Jamaica — Sound rises like a cliff wall — drums, trombones, trumpets, the ubiquitous vuvuzela, the odd French horn and 10,000 fans screaming.

On the blue track below, 15-year-old boys have shot out of the blocks for the 400 me- ters, postures erect, arms slicing through the tropical air like knives. Faster, faster, they curl around the track as if astride that wave of sound. This is the high school competition known as Champs, in which long-limbed schoolchildren from valleys and fishing villages and industrial cities descend on this capital city. For five days, they lay down astonishing times, often only a few ticks off world records.

For this track-obsessed island nation — its sprinters won four events at the London Olympics in 2012 — even a 400-meter preliminary counts as a moment to im- mediately find a television set. Three days later, for the finale, the cement bowl of a stadium will be packed with 33,000 fans, all but levitating. I came here to interview the mellifluously named Usain Bolt, certifiably the fastest man in the world. He is preparing for another Olympic push, his last. There are serious questions to ask about his plans and his future.

To understand how Jamaica came to dominate sprinting like the Swiss dominate the clock business — and therefore to make sense of Bolt, who came flying out of the country village Sherwood Content — it helps to take the measure of the national mania that is Champs, in which Bolt ran as a schoolboy.

Late one evening, after watching a day of races, I hopped in a taxi, a rattling contraption piloted by Sam Carty, a reggae musician with gray-flecked dreadlocks. He had the Champs races on the radio.

Did you run as a schoolboy? He nodded and said, “Of course. I ran the 100 meters in 10.6,” he said of a time when the world record was 9.9 seconds. “I still run to satisfy myself.”

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 15 - May 2015 He steered his taxi onto a dirt patch. The last sprint of the night at Champs was about to commence, and he needed to concentrate.

I walked into Champs for the first time on a recent Wednesday, the second day of the competition. Purple thun- derheads piled high above the ridges of the Blue Mountains. The crowd clapped rhythmically as a teenage girl, Tamara Moncrieff, hurtled down the track toward the long-jump pit. Moncrieff went on to win a championship two days later. “I cleared my mind, I hopped, I stopped, and I jumped,” this shy young woman explained then. “And I got the record.”

I sidled over to Orville Austin, a 54-year-old hospital technician who sits high in the grandstand. He attends every year. Who do you root for?

“Kingston College!” he said, showing me his purple tie.

Hundreds of middle-aged adults were dressed in the colors of their alma maters. To read off the school names — Calabar, Kingston College, Wolmer’s, Glenmuir, Camperdown, Oberlin, Happy Grove — is to summon a surge of memories. Each school has colors, chants and high-pitched cries. (The Wolmer’s cry calls to mind a seal bark.)

Do you live around here? “Canarsie,” Austin replied. That is in Brooklyn.

A bag at his feet was filled with school ties, which he was going to distribute to friends upon his return. Mem- bers of the Jamaica diaspora, whose numbers are vast and often accomplished, are known to wear such ties to cocktail parties.

Several friends attended Kingston College’s archrival, Calabar High School, a perennial athletic power. (The track announcer pronounced this “Caaal-a-Bahrrr,” with a Scottish roll of the R.)

“Mine is a very deep hatred for Calabar,” Austin said.

He texted a Calabar friend with a photo of himself: “Look what I’m wearing: A T-shirt! It’s 84 degrees, and Kingston is beating Calabar.”

He chortled.

I walked into a thicket of teenage boys from St. Catherine’s who had completed their races. Dressed in sky blue slacks and matching backpacks, they lingered in the grandstand to cheer for the St. Catherine’s girls, who ran in the early evening. They joked and laughed, moving effortlessly between rapid-fire patois and crisp, British- inflected English.

How’d it go today, I asked 15-year-old Thor Samuels. He beamed. “I love running,” he said. “I feel like I’m riding the wind.”

There is much joy to be heard and seen, although races are no teenage lark. The corporate sponsors, as well as college and pro scouts, line up six deep. The teenagers acknowledge great pressure to set record times and per- haps obtain scholarships in the United States or, better, a pro contract. Top high schools compete ferociously, sometimes offering refrigerators to poor families if their children will transfer.

Girls and boys can run three races each day. Some collapse, grabbing at cramped muscles.

“It’s too big, if you ask me,” Kingston College Coach Neil Harrison said. “Every year it gets more intense.” Harrison is one of Jamaica’s most successful track coaches. He has a restless eye for talent. Several years back, he was in the Turks and Caicos Islands and noticed the center fielder in a baseball game sprinting after a double

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 16 - May 2015 into the gap. By autumn, Harrison had that boy at Jamaica College, running under his tutelage. Now the runner sprints for the British national team.

Harrison shrugged. “We Jamaicans know running straight through,” he said.

To better understand that heritage, I hailed a taxi the next morning and set off up the hills to Manor Park, where the breezes are persimmon-scented and there are sweeping vistas of the glittering Caribbean Sea. Dennis Johnson was waiting on his veranda. A handsome man of 75 with snow-white hair and sideburns, he is a godfather of Jamaican track. Once upon a time, he was recruited to race at San Jose State. In 1961, he three times equaled the world record in the 100 yards, at 9.3 seconds.

(Another Jamaican, Herb McKenley, won three silver medals and a gold in the 1948 and 1952 Olympics com- bined. Norman Manley, one of the island’s most revered statesmen, ran the 100 yards in 10 seconds flat at the 1911 Champs, a record that stood for 41 years.)

Johnson studied under the esteemed San Jose State coach Bud Winter and returned to Jamaica as an apostle of the scientific method of running.

He helped found a college to train coaches. To reach more remote outposts on this poor and mountainous is- land, Johnson loaded up his van. “We spread the gospel of sprinting,” he said.

Many struggle to explain the success of Jamaican sprinters. Some Jamaicans argue for genetics while a local professor champions the extraordinary dietary effects of green bananas and yams.

Johnson rolled his eyes.

“It’s not magical yams,” he said. “It’s a poor island, and if you have a pair of cleats, you can compete. We brought in the best coaches and the best training.”

The results are on display at the national stadium. The Champs athletes run erect, arms thrusting forward, not side to side. Their cores are powerful; their strides carry no hint of wobble.

Johnson walked me to the door. “Every little kid running in kindergarten believes they could be Usain Bolt,” he said. “We’re going to dominate sprint for the next 50 years.”

Great expectation comes married to worry, so I had a last stop before talking to Bolt.

In 2013, Renee Shirley, a former executive director of the Jamaica Anti-Doping Commission, revealed that the group had failed to conduct out-of-competition blood tests on athletes in the months leading to the Olympics.

She and another prominent former official of the commission, Dr. Paul Wright, have characterized Jamaica as halfhearted in confronting the menace of doping. For her candor, Shirley was consigned to a purgatory.

This is sad twice over. She adores her island’s track and field accomplishments. And recent test results underline the wisdom of waving a yellow flag of caution.

Several of Jamaica’s most illustrious runners, including the Olympic gold medalists Asafa Powell and Sherone Simpson, have tested positive for stimulants.

(It’s worth noting that Justin Gatlin, the leading sprinter in the United States and perhaps the leading challeng- er to Bolt in the 2016 Summer Games, is coming off a four-year suspension for the use of more serious banned drugs. At age 33, when most sprinters are retired, Gatlin is again laying down top times.)

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 17 - May 2015 Shirley wants to see a testing regimen applied to Champs.

“A teenager runs the 400-meter race and shows up three hours later for a 200-meter race?” she said. “Who is to say someone is not handing them an energy drink that might have unlabeled prohibited substances?”

“You need a sense of urgency,” Shirley said. “This is a beautiful sport.”

Time to search for Bolt.

I sat in the soft-shadowed lobby of the Spanish Court Hotel. Bolt was late, and his coach did not answer texts. I looked up from my phone, and there he stood, a muscled sweep of a man in a pastel yellow running shirt, blue striped shorts and Pumas.

We walked upstairs. “Usain!” A young chambermaid ran into the hall. “Can I hug you?” Bolt opened his arms, and she embraced him.

I asked if this happened often. He nodded; it’s a perk. He acknowledged that he needed to stay away from pro- longed hugs. “I am dating fully now; I think I’m almost there official with a girl,” he said.

He took a seat on the veranda. As a child in Trelawny Parish, he played soccer and cricket. Running was easy, like breathing, and not to be taken seriously. Then he traveled down country and laid down astonishing times.

His Champs record in the 200 meters still stands.

“It was just fun,” he said. “I never thought I could make a career of it.”

A coach persuaded him otherwise.

Bolt’s workouts are rigorous and extend 11 months a year. (He takes a month off after the end of the season. “Now my coach wants me to do active rest, with more running,” he said with a roll of his eyes.)

A preliminary heat in the 100 meters. “Every year it gets more intense,” a coach said of the meet.CreditChang W. Lee/The New York Times

He bench-presses 200 pounds and saves his running for the cool of evening, two and a half to three hours each day. “I do abs and core work every day,” he said.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 18 - May 2015 I started to ask about performance-enhancing drugs. He smiled and interrupted. “Drugging?” he said. “I have been asked that so many times. It’s just one of those things. Other athletes have tainted the sport. It takes a while to get back to the point where people say, ‘O.K., I believe in this person.’ ”

His running is magnificent; he accelerates, and the world’s best sprinters fall away like so much shucked corn. His times are revolutionary. His joy is infectious.

He has taken drug tests, and antidoping officials have never publicly charged him. As to belief: Who would not hope?

Bolt, 28, can see the shadow of athletic old age. “In track and field, I’m middle age,” he said. “You don’t want to be one of the athletes who stick around for too long.”

He plans to compete in June on Randalls Island in New York — the site of his first world-record time, in 2008 — and then at the world championships in Beijing in August. He had expected that the 2016 Olympics in Brazil would be his last call. Puma, his sponsor, persuaded him to take a one-year victory lap. He will try to make it memorable.

“I will work hard to put more strain on my records,” he said.

Then that will be that.

“You don’t want the young guys to start beating you,” he said, smiling faintly. “It takes away your glory.” He shook hands and slipped down a staircase to a waiting car, which was to carry him to his afternoon workout.

On Saturday, the ticket line formed hours before the gate opened for the Champs finale. Horses carrying officers trotted about. I stopped by Fatty’s Food Court to pick up jerk chicken and coconut bread wrapped in tin foil. I squeezed into a bleacher seat. The grandstand was a sedate neighborhood, everyone pressed in tight. There was none of that recorded “Make Some Noise!” baloney as at Madison Square Garden. The sound was organic and rolled like the ocean.

Lines of Wolmer’s girls came dressed in matronly aquamarine school uniforms; the Calabar boys were snappy in their green and black. Children blew on vuvuzelas; mothers readied ThunderStix.

Fans unfurled vast school banners, which stretched across 30 rows of seats. Music played. Drums thumped. Dis- cus throwers took balletic spins; high jumpers prepared to leap. And the fans bounced and screamed as sprinters went into their race-ready prayer stances.

A flight to New York forced me to leave at dusk. Already fans were trying to scale the walls and climb the light towers. I ran into Orville Jackson, the hurdles coach for Calabar, by way of Laurel, Md., where he drives a tractor-trailer.

This is amazing, I told him. He grinned. “It’s like religion, man.”

The hills turned deep blue at night’s touch. At the airport, expats packed the lounge. They craned their necks, looking at the television sets.

This would be the last chance before we boarded to watch those high-stepping kids sprint under that soaring Jamaican sky.

Correction: April 20, 2015 A Sports of The Times column on April 6, about the high school track and field competition in Jamaica known as Champs, misstated the color of the tie worn by Orville Austin, a supporter of Kingston College. It was purple, not navy blue.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 19 - May 2015 http://jamaica-gleaner.com/article/focus/20150329/put-stop-athlete-factories

Put A Stop To Athlete Factories Published:Sunday | March 29, 2015Ainsley Walters | Photo: Ricardo Makyn

Boys and Girls’ Championships passed this weekend with its usual fanfare of ‘world’s big- gest high-school track and field meet’ tag line, old boys and school faithful beating chests, slapping backs and high-fiving with eyes on the ‘transfer market’ ahead of the new school year.

That’s exactly what major inter-secondary schools competitions have become: a horse- trade of so-called student athletes. This has, at times, resulted in pupils attending up to three institutions, made to repeat grade levels, some reaching age 18 in fourth form and unable to compete as fifth-formers, eventually quitting school altogether after their athletic worth is no more.

It goes even further. Scarce sixth-form spaces have been allotted to ‘student athletes’ who do not meet the Inter-Secondary Schools Sports Association’s (ISSA) requirement of attaining passes in four Caribbean Secondary Education Certificate subjects to compete as sixth-formers.

This is done at the expense of students who meet schools’ minimum educational standard for sixth form, six or more subjects in some cases, but are bypassed in favour of student athletes’ four subjects, forcing parents to seek sixth-form space at alternative institutions at great cost, depriving pupils of a chance to continue at institutions they had attended for five or more years.

In other instances, student athletes who meet ISSA’s minimum qualification are parachuted into sixth form from other schools via the transfer market, displacing existing students with similar qualifications, hopeful of transitioning to sixth form in an environment of friends and teachers with whom they are familiar.

The argument in support of the sixth-form abuse is that the grade level is a private venture undertaken by indi- vidual schools paid for by tuition fees, excusing it from the realm of public schools and funding from the Minis- try of Education.

Don’t sixth-formers use the same facilities provided for the rest of the school from Government’s subvention no matter how meagre it may be? In a classic case, two or so years ago, one such institution below Cross Roads pushed its marquee athlete intosixth form with three subjects, hoping he would have acquired a fourth by resit-

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 20 - May 2015 ting exams in January, ahead of Champs registration.

Alas, that came to naught, and the chap afterwards left school - a sixth-form space wasted while students who had the minimum number of subjects had to continue their education elsewhere. How did Jamaica’s inter-secondary school sports system become transformed into a professional sports league with paid coaches replacing physical-education teachers amid the hiring of spotters to poach student athletes from lesser and rival schools?

Old boys’ networks have sprung up to take control of sports departments of some high schools by way of pump- ing cash into sports programmes, some from questionable sources worthy of investigation by the Major Organ- ised Crime and Anti-Corruption Agency.

In a carefully crafted system of manipulating all-too-willing principals, from which ISSA’s hierarchy is drawn, these old boys effectively fund sports programmes, pay coaches, poach student athletes from other schools, offering full ‘scholarships’ of room and board, lunch money, pocket money, tuition fees, not to mention jobs for parents, household appliances, and even motor vehicles.

No subjects Has anybody ever stopped to wonder how some of these student athletes who leave school without subjects have ready access to overseas connections and are either back in Jamaica as deportees or languishing in prisons abroad?

In other cases, some who do make it on a community college partial scholarship to the United States refuse to work to support themselves because they didn’t have to when they were given old boys’ ‘scholarships’ in Jamai- ca. They quickly quit school to join their overseas benefactors, eventually ending up in prison.

Minister of Education Ronald Thwaites recently attempted to put what has amounted to a Band-Aid over a festering sore by mandating that ISSA set up a ‘clearing house’ to insist on parents’ permission, approval from the releasing and receiving schools, as well as adherence to pre-existing requirements. The only thing new in this proposed clearing-house system is approval from the releasing school. All else remains the same.

What about the educational standards that poaching schools had put in place from the GSAT level, denying a student living next door to a traditional school a place in first form because he or she had failed to attain an average of 80, 90, or whatever percentage is required to gain a coveted placement? In most instances, it is that same ‘underperforming’ student from that ‘failing’ primary school, who got a GSAT average of 60 but was not considered good enough to gain an educational placement at that ‘traditional’ high school, who is now being poached.

When that student’s sporting potential is unlocked by a physical-education teacher at a ‘failing’ high school in Class Three at Champs, he or she suddenly becomes attractive, the target of the same marquee school that had refused him or her, and the myth is propagated that he or she can only become an athlete of worth if transferred to that institution.

Where does the educational standard come into play that had ruled out that student a year earlier? How do those students suddenly become 80- or 90-average candidates? Whose interest is being served in poaching these students?

Why should marquee schools be allowed to move the goalpost and lower the hurdles after first form so as to enable old boys to parasitically move in after the system has already creamed off the best of the academic lot by way of GSAT?

It should also be noted that this raid on schools became far more prevalent after a period during which the likes of Charlie Smith, Norman Manley, Dunoon, Tivoli and Bridgeport High dominated the Manning Cup from 1995 TAFWA Newsletter - Page 21 - May 2015 to 2002.

How will these ‘lesser’ secondary schools ever be able to improve and hold their heads high if, in the first place, they were denied academically sound children by way of GSAT, followed by a raid on students who could eventu- ally put these schools on the map, making them attractive for future generations of teachers and students alike because of their sporting achievements? Dubious claims are made of private tutoring by poaching schools to bring transfer students up to scratch, prob- ably to meet ISSA’s requirement of a 45 per cent average in four subject areas.

Minister Thwaites, your shot was well intended but fell short of the boundary. A true test of student welfare would be to mandate in the new clearing house that all secondary schools’ adhere to their required averages, at each grade level, similar to what is done at grade seven entry for GSAT. This would certainly set the cat among pigeons.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/ travel/travelnews/11535624/ The-airport-where-you-can- sprint-to-the-boarding-gates. The airport where you can sprint to the boarding gates Tokyo’s Narita Airport has a spring in its step now that athletes’ tracks pointing in the direction of departures have been installed

The airport where running tracks ensure you never miss a plane

By Natalie Paris : 5:22PM BST 14 Apr 2015

Did Tokyo officials have passengers’ mad sprints to the boarding gates in mind when they laid these running tracks? An attempt to help passengers catch their flights on time, perhaps?

Strips of springy track have been installed, much to the bemusement of visitors, at Narita Airport’s newly-opened Terminal 3. Although they look like something Usain Bolt might dash down - and they will no doubt encourage some fliers to jokily take their marks - the tracks were actually designed to celebrate the 2020 Olympics being held in the city They are useful too, with several blue tracks pointing in the direction of departures and a red track leading to arrivals.

The new terminal, which is a base for low-cost airlines, opened on April 8. Those designing it aimed to save money by using the tracks in place of the usual airport signage. “To cut costs, we opted not to install the typi- cal moving walkways or illuminated signs,” the terminal’s website states. “Instead, to offer an exciting walking experience that is easy on the feet, we implemented running tracks used for track and field, and added signage for user-friendly guidance.”

It is hoped that the terminal will be popular with those arriving to watch the Olympics. “It would be our great honor if Narita International Airport Terminal 3 is frequently used and forever loved by economically savvy travellers,” the website continues. “When the time arrives for the 2020 Olympics in Tokyo, we look forward to seeing people from all around the world having fun walking on these blue tracks.” TAFWA Newsletter - Page 22 - May 2015 http://www.european-athletics.org/news/article=svein- arne-hansen-surprised-world-championships-decision/ index.html 16 April 2015 13:29 Svein Arne Hansen surprised by World Championships decision

Getty Images

European Athletics President Svein Arne Hansen has expressed his surprise at the decision by the IAAF to award the 2021 World Championships to Eugene.

“I would like to congratulate USA Track & Field and Vin Lananna, who has led Eugene’s bid, but I must say I am very surprised by the complete lack of process in the decision the IAAF has taken,” said President Hansen.

“The IAAF knew that Gothenburg was a serious candidate for the 2021 World Championships. Swedish Athletics and the city had put in a lot of effort over the years to prepare the bidding application but they have not even been given the chance to bid for the event.

“I have already spoken to Swedish Athletics Federation President Björn Eriksson and he is deeply disappointed about what has happened. “I completely understand the disappointment of Björn and Göteborg & Co. CEO Camilla Nyman. I know that 2021 was the most important year for the city because it is when they will celebrate their 400th anniversary. “This type of decision would just not happen within European Athletics as we have a comprehensive bidding process that all candidates must follow.”

London will host the 2017 World Championships before Doha hosts the event in 2019. This means it is the first time a World Championships will be held outside of Europe for two consecutive editions.

“This is, of course, not good for the development of our sport on the continent. European Athletics expects the World Championships to come back to Europe in 2023.”

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 23 - May 2015 http://www.aipsmedia.com/index. php?page=news&cod=16237&tp=n#.VVESl_lVgSX

HEADQUARTERS Media lumbered with unacceptable and exhorbitant charges in Rio

By Gianni Merlo, AIPS President

Carlos Arthur Nuzman, President of the Rio 2016 Organising Committee walks during a Rio 2016 Olympic Games: 500 Days to Go Press Conference on March 24, 2015 in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. (Photo by Getty Images)

LAUSANNE, April 17, 2015 - Unfortunately the IOC’s Agenda 2020 has not given any thought to the problems faced by the media, a very important branch of the Olympic movement. For this reason during the AIPS congress last month in Paris we took the opportunity to remind the president Thomas Bach that in the most difficult time of the double boycott, especially in 1980, the media has saved the Olympic movement. But it looks that everybody prefers to forget this.

Forgotten - The Agenda 2020 positively introduced new criteria to save resources and money for the NOCs and the organizers in general. This was a positive and important step, but for the media the costs to attend and cover the Olympic Games have almost doubled! We look as if we are the children of a lesser God. We do not want any special privileges, only access to fair prices.

Crazy cost - In Rio de Janeiro the cost for media of a room in the Village is not acceptable: USD 254 per night. We give an example from the past: Beijing 2008, where a room cost USD 125 per night. We can confirm this amount because it is what AIPS paid. The numbers speak for themselves. The small regional newspapers are the pillars of the promotion of sport, but for many of them now, the Olympic Games have become a forbidden paradise.

Untruths and business - We sincerely hope that the IOC can understand our point of view and that it will take some steps to help the media in this difficult situation. The organizers of Rio de Janeiro 2016 through their Rate Card are seeking high fees for Internet access. It seems we are still in the last century and I respectfully under- line that this is unacceptable, and we are sure that IOC can understand why. The Rio organizers, in a presenta- tion made at our Congress in Milan 2009, promised free Internet. They were hiding their real projects. They were speaking about a Media Village for more than 18.000 people at the price of 150 dollars per room. This proj- ect has fallen through. Why? The new village, smaller, and built by a friendly new company cost 40% more, but the organizers are asking the media to pay the full amount of money one year before so they can also speculate with our money. It is unacceptable.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 24 - May 2015 Discrimination - There is another issue that we wish to bring to your attention. Some NOCs continue to dis- criminate against our colleagues with the distribution of the Olympic accreditations. We propose that to avoid this unpleasant situation the IOC invites the individual NOCs to consult with the AIPS member National Sports Journalists’ Associations before setting the final accreditation list. We know and we appreciate very much the good work that the IOC office has done to avoid media accreditations being issued to non-media associates of certain NOC officials. There still however are some problems to solve, and AIPS is willing to cooperate with the IOC in the name of transparency.

http://www. dailyemerald. com/2015/04/18/ changes-are-com- ing-to-historic- hayward-field-in- preparation-for- the-worlds/ Changes are coming to Historic Hayward Field in preparation for the World’s

Christopher Keizur — April 18, 2015

The sun sets behind Hayward Field during the Oregon Relays. The University of Oregon hosts the annual Oregon Relays at Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore. on Friday, April 17, 2015. (Ryan Kang/Emerald)

Though he was jet lagged, TrackTown USA President Vin Lananna stepped onto the track during the final day of theOregon Relays to thank the fans for all their support over the years.

News had broken two days before that Eugene had been selected as the host for the 2021 World Championships after an under-the-radar meeting with the International Association of Athletics Federations in Beijing.

“World’s best fans, world’s greatest athletes, world’s best event — we are excited about it,” Lananna said. TAFWA Newsletter - Page 25 - May 2015 The news breaking came as somewhat of a surprise after the city lost out against Doha, Qatar in a bid for the 2019 event.

“The last time when we had it out in the public forum, the result wasn’t that good,” Lananna said of why they didn’t make the process as open this time around.

The biggest thing that must now be addressed is the venue itself, which will have to undergo huge renovations to meet the seating requirement. Seating will have to be around 30-35,000 capacity for the meet. Hayward cur- rently seats 10,500 people, with the ability to expand to 21,000.

Infrastructure, amenities for the crowd and accommodations for the international media will have to be ad- dressed as well.

By the end of the renovations, the costs will be somewhere in the tens of millions, according to projections. “I think we have a very capable group of people who should be able to figure this out,” Lananna said.

One important thing that will have to be kept in mind is the historic aspect of Hayward Field. The gravitas and atmosphere of the venue were some of the selling points of the bid, so losing that in the pursuit of seats would defeat the purpose.

“We have a very strong group of people that are very immersed in the history of this place and all have a very strong affiliation and affinity for Hayward Field,” Lananna said. “I’m sure we will capture it all.”

The good news for fans of throwing events is that Lananna declared the hammer throw will be moved to the infield.

Construction won’t begin until the plans are finalized, and it hasn’t been decided whether it will be done in stages or all at once. Some Oregon events at Hayward may have to be shifted around, though the plan is to keep the Prefontaine, NCAA Championships and Olympic Trials unaffected.

Changes are coming, but so is a world championship. And as Olympic sprinter Allyson Felix said in Monaco, “It’s about time.”

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 26 - May 2015 http://grantland.com/the-triangle/the-bos- ton-olympic-debacle/

The Boston Olympic Debacle VAHRAM MURADYAN 2024 SUMMER OLYMPICS APRIL 17, 2015 by CHARLES P. PIERCE

The very first American to win an Olympic medal was James Brendan Connolly — or Séamas Breandán Ó Conghaile, as he was born — who grew up as one of 12 children in South Boston, the son of parents who’d emigrated from the Aran Islands and settled on E Street on the opposite side of the Atlantic. In 1896, that glorious nut Pierre de Coubertin decided to relaunch the Olympic Games in Athens. Connolly, then a 27-year-old Harvard freshman, wanted to compete. At that time, Harvard was run by a committee of Yankee ice sculptures and they made trouble for him. Connolly dropped out and went anyway, and competed in the Games’ first finals to win the hop, step, and jump. (He also took second in the high jump. His medals were both silver; the Olympics didn’t begin handing out gold until later.) Thus did James Brendan Connolly, of the E Street Connollys, become the first Olympic champion in more than 1,500 years. When he returned, Harvard tried to get him back. Connolly refused. And that was the first time the city of Boston collided with the “Olympic Movement” — which has since evolved from being the province of the elite and snobbish to being the province of the elite and snobbish and crooked. We really should have quit while Jimmy Connolly was ahead.

Ah, but that reckons without the apparently limitless ambition of Boston’s assembled plutocrats. On January 8, the United States Olympic Committee announced that Boston had been chosen as the nation’s official entry in the bidding for the 2024 Olympic Games. The bid has all the earmarks of a sprightly unicorn hunt. Costs would be low. Infrastructure improvements would benefit the city long after the Games were over. Existing venues largely would suffice — beach volleyball on the Common! — although a 60,000-seat stadium would need to be built in Widett Circle, not altogether far from where James Connolly and his 11 siblings grew up. In theory, it sounds wonderful. In practice, well, hell, this is Boston, where scheming and scamming are bred so deeply in the bone of the place that smugglers and rabble-rousers picked a fight with the British Empire and, later, generation after generation of immigrants came ashore to conduct a symphony of local corruption once shrewdly summa- rized by the philosophy of local ward boss Martin “The Mahatma” Lomasney: Never write when you can speak, and never speak when you can nod. The Olympic dreamers should have listened to the ancient wisdom of the Mahatma. Because once the proposal saw the light of day, the laurel really hit the fan.

Almost instantly, a resistance movement sprung up, to the point where you half-expected the members of the opposition to dress up and throw the members of the organizing committee into the harbor. There was a pal- pable distrust for the rosy scenarios painted by the project’s booster, and a richly deserved reluctance to hand the city over to the IOC, which seems to exist only to make other groups of international grifters look good. No Boston Olympics, the primary anti-Games group, and other ad hoc outfits managed to turn the entire city around on the project, and by February, the project’s approval-disapproval polling had inverted itself entirely, with opposition gaining 13 points in less than a month. (No doubt the virtual collapse of the MBTA during the ferocious winter gave people pause when they considered how the creaky old system would handle a blizzard of foreigners.) At the end of March, suddenly desperate, the organizing committee, with the backing of Boston mayor Marty Walsh, agreed to support a statewide referendum on the Olympics that would coincide with the 2016 presidential election. This was not unprecedented. Denver bailed on the 1976 Winter Games after resi- dents voted against hosting them. But the enduring mystery is not why some cities vote themselves out of the running to host the Olympics, but why any city wants to host them at all. TAFWA Newsletter - Page 27 - May 2015 I am of the opinion that all Olympics should be held in otherwise authoritarian countries. (Or, to be open-mind- ed about the whole thing, in Barcelona.) A good, established dictatorship is usually the way to go. This is because agreeing to host the Olympics is agreeing to turn your city into an authoritarian state anyway, and we might as well just hand the work of organizing one over to the people who do it full time. The Olympics control your traffic. The Olympics control where you can walk or ride your bicycle. The Olympics overwhelm your infrastruc- ture for their own purposes; a plague of be-blazered buffet grazers descend on your finest restaurants. For two weeks and change, every host city transforms itself into an armed camp with corporate sponsors. In 2004, the Democratic Party held its national convention in Boston. (You may recall that a jug-eared rookie from Illinois gave a helluva speech.) People howled. The city was rendered logistically inaccessible, and that was for less than a week. The Olympics are four times as long, vastly more sprawling, and infinitely more inconvenient. The local committee proposes, for example, to hold the canoeing and kayaking events way out in flannel-shirt country in the Berkshire foothills. People are going to be stranded so long on the state roads out there that they’re going to have to buy houses.

And then there’s Boston itself, which was laid out in the 17th century and hasn’t changed a lot, except that it’s harder to get around than it used to be. There are parts of downtown that have survived relatively unchanged since the days when Samuel Adams himself was a brewer. The expressway situation has improved dramatically since they finished the mother of all money pits, the Big Dig — and, it must be said, since the Big Dig hass- topped killing people. But the city itself remains an unwieldy beast to traverse. Let’s say, for example, that you want to watch a little badminton at Agganis Arena at Boston University, and then figure you’ll catch a little modern pentathlon at Franklin Park. You’d best leave your dental records with your loved ones back in Amster- dam so they can identify your desiccated corpse when it’s found in an abandoned cab halfway between the two venues.

And then, of course, there is the simple fact that nobody except authoritarian billionaires ever would get into business with the IOC, which, if it weren’t for the horror show at FIFA, would be recognized as the world’s worst and most entitled group of defrocked royalty and international swindlers since the demise of the Romanovs. After all, it took one of our former governors, Mitt Romney himself, to straighten out the mess that happened when the IOC tried to buy Utah in 2002. As recently as 2012, IOC members engaged in a festival of ticket- scalping. We just got ourselves out from under that whole Whitey Bulger business. Why in the name of James Michael Curley would we want to invite another organized crime operation in and give it the run of the city? Far be it from any native son of the Commonwealth (God save it!) to wax righteous about thievery, influence peddling, and general ethical mayhem in high places, but the IOC likely can tax even our capacity to endure and encourage chicanery of all sorts. What is to be done? I know! I know what to do! Let’s have an election!

It is entirely possible the upcoming referendum that could derail the Boston Olympics will be straight, above- board, conducted completely according to Hoyle, and suffused with the spirit of democratic fair play. It might be an election that makes Aristotle proud. But I will be terribly disappointed if my home state doesn’t rise to the occasion and make a hash out of the whole business. I expect gigantic ad buys, pundit bloodbaths, and so much ratfucking that E. Howard Hunt will come back from the dead. Speaking of which, my old Irish grandmother passed away in 1970. If she doesn’t get to vote in this thing, I will be terribly disappointed.

You want to bring your Euro-trash electoral hooliganism to this country? Come to Massachusetts, boys, and see how the real professionals do it. We have consultants who will steal your overstuffed shirts and sell them back to you by lunchtime. We have people who can get 3,000 votes out of a precinct that has 1,500 people registered and do it so that no court in the land could gainsay the count. I mean, seriously, do these people have any idea what they’re getting into?

So, in many ways, this is the best of all possible outcomes. The future of the world’s greatest sporting event depends on an election held in the home office of American political legerdemain. You want to bring your circus to our town, you take us as we are. You play by the law of our jungle, by the rules of our game. Then, maybe, you can stage your party here. I think James Connolly, of the E Street Connollys, would know exactly what I’m talk- ing about. TAFWA Newsletter - Page 28 - May 2015 http://www.outsideonline. com/1969286/how-bad-distance-run- nings-doping-problem

How Bad Is Distance Running’s Doping Problem? After last year’s Boston Marathon winner tested positive, the running community asked: Does Kenya have a doping problem? Does the world?

By: Peter Vigneron | Apr 19, 2015

Last November, news broke that Rita Jeptoo, the three- time winner of the Boston marathon had tested positive for EPO. Photo: AP

Last November, on the eve of the New York City Marathon, the running world received some shocking news: Rita Jeptoo, the three- time winner of the Boston marathon, and the most dominant marathon runner in the world, had tested positive for EPO. Jeptoo, who is a 34-year-old Kenyan, would face a two-year ban. Anti-doping officials have been especially worried about drug testing in Kenya and Ethiopia, the two countries that produce most of the best male runners in the world and a good portion of the best female runners. Neither country has an effective national anti-doping agency, and independent agencies can’t conduct blood tests in either country because there isn’t a World Anti-Doping Agency-accredited lab in the region. But neither country has ever seen many athletes test positive, and for years many people assumed that Kenyans won marathons simply because they were better runners. After Jeptoo’s positive, that assumption began to seem naïve.

Less than a month later, a German investigative journalist namedHajo Seppelt released a documentary alleg- ing that Liliya Shobukhova, a 2:18 marathoner from Russia, banned in 2014 under the biological passport, had attempted to cover up a positive test by bribing an official at the International Association of Athletics Federa- tions. The two stories hit like one-two punches, prompting many to reconsider a long-simmering question about whether running—like cycling in the mid 2000s—is on the verge of a major, sport-wide doping scandal.

To answer that question, it’s worth remembering how bad the situation was in professional cycling during the early part of last decade. Between 1998 and 2012, one third of the top ten finishers at the Tour de France tested positive for or admitted to doping, and many in the sport believe that a lot more were involved but never caught. By contrast, there’s little proof that most international competitive distance runners are cheating. Even so, “cleaner than cycling” is a dismayingly low bar to clear, and there is strong evidence that some runners are engaged in systematic doping and winning big races as a result.

The best information about doping’s prevalence in running comes from WADA and the IAAF, which have made two big scientific efforts in recent years to estimate how widespread the practice is. In 2011, Swiss researcher Pierre-Edouard Sottas, who is now a consultant for WADA, analyzed more than 7,000 blood samplesfrom some 2,700 track and field athletes. The samples were anonymous but sorted by region, to allow for changes in blood chemistry that are produced by altitude. The sample included athletes from all disciplines, not just distance run- ners. Sottas used the same analytic tools available to testers under the biological passport, and he found that samples from 14 percent of the athletes he examined showed signs of blood manipulation. But there were huge variations between regions. Sottas found that 48 percent of athletes in one region had suspicious results, and in

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 29 - May 2015 another, he estimated a prevalence of 1 percent.

Also in 2011, researchers working for the IAAF and WADA asked athletes at the World Championships and Pan- Arab Games to complete anonymous surveys about their performance-enhancing drug use. According to a New York Times article published in 2013, 29 percent of the athletes surveyed at the World Championships said they had doped within the past year. That number was even higher—45 percent—at the Pan-Arab Games.

Currently, only a small fraction of professional runners are banned. On the IAAF’s most recent list, which in- cludes all track and field athletes, Russia leads with 57, followed by Turkey with 43, India with 38, Kenya with 14, and the United States and Morocco with 11. Notably, only one Ethiopian and no runners from Japan, two marathon superpowers, are currently serving bans.

Last month, I contacted the IAAF to discuss its 2011 surveys about doping prevalence. The study’s authors had submitted their work to WADA and the IAAF, but the IAAF had refused to publish their results. In 2013, the frustrated authors leaked their findings to the New York Times. I wondered whether the IAAF had any plans to release the data. IAAF spokesman Nick Davies told me that that decision “depends on [WADA’s] approval not ours.” When I asked WADA director general David Howman about the study, he said that the IAAF retained rights to the data and had prevented WADA from releasing it on its own. “We’re not allowed to publish it,” he said. “We’re legally precluded from doing something on it.” Davies didn’t respond when I fol- lowed up to ask whether Howman was right.

WADA director general David Howman Photo: AP

It’s a small point—the research had already been made public—but it may reflect the IAAF’s aversion to being transparent about anti-doping. Part of WADA’s job is to monitor organiza- tions like the IAAF, and the agency is currently investigating the bribery allegations raised in Hajo Seppelt’s documentary. But Howman says taking drug testing away from conflicted organizations like the IAAF would cost hundreds of millions of dollars each year, and with an annual budget of less than 30 million, it’s unlikely that will ever happen.

Which brings us to another problem: drug tests don’t catch most cheaters. “We generally feel that there’s more doping going on than is being detected by sample collection and analysis,” Howman says. Across all sports, only two percent of athletes record positive tests on an annual basis. Further confusing things, Howman argues that countries with robust anti-doping agencies like Japan and the U.S. are both less likely to have cheaters and more likely to identify them. “We realize that there might be a situation where a country is actually running a good anti-doping program and catching more people than others,” Howman says. “Saying it’s got a bigger prevalence of doping is a mistake.”

So are Kenya and Ethiopia among the countries where half of the runners are on drugs? No one can say for sure, but none of the people I spoke with for this story thought so. Effective doping regimes require a level of medi- cal and technological sophistication that is in short supply in most of East Africa. Kenyan runners, for example, would need to travel to Nairobi to find doctors willing to provide them with drugs, or otherwise have the exper- tise to store and inject drugs on their own in training camps, many of which are relatively remote. That said, last week a Kenyan TV station filmed an undercover reporter purchasing EPO in Eldoret and Kapsabet, cities where hundreds of runners live and train.

Shortly after Jeptoo tested positive, Runner’s World asked David Epstein, an investigative journalist for Pro- TAFWA Newsletter - Page 30 - May 2015 publica who has reported from Kenya, whether he thought doping was endemic there. “It would probably be hard to have a mass EPO doping program,” he said. “Do I think it’s the prime influence behind the phenomenon we’ve seen in Kenya? I don’t think so. Do I think there is doping going on in Kenya? Absolutely. It’s going on everywhere.”

Epstein’s assessment makes sense to me. I spent several months in Kenya in 2008, and my impression was that the level of talent there was even higher than most people realize. On several occasions I came across young men with little formal training who would be among the best amateur runners in the United States. One 18-year-old I met had a personal best of 14:50 for the 5K, not good enough to keep him from working as a farmer but as fast as any 18-year-old runner in the U.S. Halfway through my trip I learned that the gardener at the school where I was staying had run a 2:23 marathon at altitude in Nairobi. The owner of the school, a 26:37 10K runner, once told me that he felt the youth-development system in Kenya was profoundly ineffective, and that with a little organization it wouldn’t be difficult to produce sub-27-minute 10K runners in large numbers. That sounded a little hyperbolic to me, but this guy wasn’t prone to hyperbole. Only two Americans have ever run under 27 minutes for 10K.

None of that means that Kenyans don’t dope, but it may help put Kenya’s dominance in context. If it were pos- sible to magically remove all of the dopers from the sport, I’m skeptical that the finishing order at major mara- thons would look much different than it does now: mostly Kenyans and a couple Ethiopians. ______

Still, there are problems. Two weeks ago, Athletics Kenya, Kenya’s national running federation, suspended Fed- erico Rosa and Gerard Van de Veen, two prominent agents from Italy and the Netherlands, respectively, from working in the country for six months on suspicions that they were doping their runners. A few days before that news broke, Benjamin Limo, a former world champion at 5,000 meters, announced that he had resigned his position at Athletics Kenya because he felt the organization had failed to address cheating. “AK is not ready to fight doping and it happens that majority of athletes affected by such vices come from almost one camp and AK is doing nothing to curb the vice,” Limo told reporters.

Limo appears to be referring to Rosa’s camp, which is the most prominent in the country. His athletes include Asbel Kiprop, the Olym- pic 1,500 champion, and former marathon world record holder Wilson Kipsang (both of whom have been outspoken against doping). Limo also represented Jeptoo and Mathew Kisorio, a 58-minute half marathoner, when both tested positive (Jeptoo for EPO, Kisorio for steroids).

Rosa told Outside that he was totally un- aware of Kisorio’s sterioid use*, but last November he told Competitor.com that he was not involved in doping either runner. Kisorio has also told reporters that Rosa was unaware that he was taking drugs. But even Rosa said that he believed doping had become more common in Kenya over the past several years. “When I used to work back in the late 90s, early 2000s, it was really difficult to convince an athlete to take even a tablet for fever or bring [them] to a hospital,” Rosa said. “It was a completely different mentality.” And today, he continued, there is more money available at mid-level marathons, many of which don’t conduct any testing.

Liliya Shobukhova, a 2:18 marathoner from Russia, was banned in 2014 under the biological passport. Photo: Aurelien Guichard/Flickr

The financial incentive to dope is a major concern of the Abbott World Marathon Majors, the group of six marathons, including Boston and London, that offer a $500,000 prize to the runner who finishes highest in the group’s races. Both Shobukhova and Jeptoo were AWMM champions, and Shobukhova was awarded her prize TAFWA Newsletter - Page 31 - May 2015 before testing positive. None of that money has been returned. “We saw that there could be difficulties with an athlete who wins the World Marathon Majors, gets paid out, and because of the way in which athletes’ biological passport works, you then find that two years later their results are ruled out,” says Nick Bitel, AWMM general counsel.

In response, the group has decided to disburse money in $100,000 installments over five years, lessening the risk that a dirty runner will walk away with the full prize and adding incentive for athletes to stay clean after winning. The group has also provided substantial backing for a planned WADA-accredited lab in Kenya, and recently announced that it is funding out-of-competition testing for an estimated 150 runners who compete in AWMM races. But that testing pool will operate through the IAAF, which is still weathering questions about its credibility. (In December, I wrote about whether the IAAF can be trusted to promote running and keep the sport clean at the same time.) It is unclear what safeguards are in place to ensure that the IAAF handles those tests appropriately.

Even so, the AWMM measures are the most progressive in the sport, and Mary Wittenberg, President and CEO of the New York Road Runners, which organizes the New York City Marathon, hopes other races will follow that model. “We know [doping] is an emerging issue, at minimum,” Wittenberg says. “It’s a moment for us as a sport to take this head on, and assume that it’s a very significant issue.”

*This sentence was updated to include a response from Federico Rosa.

http://www.hmmrmedia.com/2015/04/ which-olympic-champion-wouldnt-have- qualified-under-the-new-standards/#

Which Olympic Champion Wouldn’t Have Qualified Under the New Standards?

April 19, 2015/4 Comments/in Editorial Page /by Martin Bingisser

I thought the IAAF was moving in the right direction after they released the new World Championships qualifying struc- ture in November. As Kibwé wrote about last fall, the World Championship standards looked like they could help resurrect the hammer in America. They were tough, but gave athletes leaving college an achievable goal so that they would continue with the sport. But that honeymoon was short-lived. This week the IAAF announced the qualifying standards for the 2016 Olympics and the sport as a whole has taken a giant step backwards.

Bring the Best to the Starting Line We can debate about whether large or small fields are better for the sport, but I think everyone would agree that you should at least have all potential medalists at the starting line. If you are missing some contenders, how is it truly the Olympics? The biggest problem with the new standards is that they will do just that: leave potential field event medalists at home. If you don’t believe me, just think about this for a second: TAFWA Newsletter - Page 32 - May 2015 2012 Olympic Champion Keshorn Walcott wouldn’t have even qualified had the standards been as high as they are now.

If the qualifying standard been so high in 2012, Olympic javelin champion Keshorn Walcott might not have been in London at all.*

Walcott had thrown just 82.83 meters before the Games, under the new Olympic standard, and then improved two meters in London to take the gold.

If you look at more stats it gets even crazier. First of all, the javelin standard is now 83 meters when merely 84.58m won gold in London. The hammer throw standard is 78 meters while 74 meters qualified for the final in London and 75 regularly makes the final at a major championship. In fact, there has never been a major championship where it took 78 meters to even make the final. It’s the same in the other throws. And the jumps. Almost across the board the standards reach historic highs. Plus there is no back-door B Standard that athletes can use to qualifying. The result is that many potential medalists and finalists will be watching the Olympics from home.

The cool website TrackStats has a great comparison of the 2013 to 2015 standards. Even without the 2016 stan- dards included you can get the picture. In the men’s discus just 10 throwers met the standard. But in the 100 meters 70 athletes reached the standard. So what did the IAAF do? They made the discus standard tougher and the 100 meter standard weaker. If you can explain that logic to me hopefully you are heading to the Middle East to sort out the conflicts there next.

This sucks for the athletes, but it also hurts the sport. Walcott was one of the big stories of the games after win- ning gold at age 19 from a country with no throwing tradition in an event that favors experience. We are losing out as a sport if we leave these people at home. And the gold medal loses a little of its luster with it. Just look at men’s soccer where the Olympics have basically become a glorified junior tournament. The same thing happened in baseball and now the sport is gone from the Olympics.

The Short-Term Effects of Unrealistic Standards In addition to hurting athletes and fans, the biggest short-term effect of such unrealistic standards is an in- crease in cheating. We saw this in 2013 when the standard for the hammer was 79 meters. Doping, long imple- ments, light implements, you name it. Where there is a will, there’s a way and athletes will find a way to reach a standard if it is not realistic to reach through their own efforts. I wrote about this in 2013 and with the Olym- pics on the line the stakes are even higher.Promotes cheating.

The Long-Term Effects of Unrealistic Standards If standards stay this high, the field events will slowly die off. Some in our sport might see that as a good thing, but we lose the diversity which makes our sport unique. And I’m not just making loud statements. If you look at it, things can go downhill fast. High standards mean more athletes will give up the sport before reaching their peak. High standards mean less Olympians that can help motivate the next generation. High standards means less funding for field event athletes, as many federations and sponsors base their funding on qualifying for teams.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 33 -May 2015 Continuing to marginalize the field events will just continue to marginalize the sport as a whole. Let’s bring some sense to the standards.

* Update: Bob Hersh, IAAF Senior Vice President, has pointed out that Walcott would have indeed qualified. Under the full IAAF qualifying procedures, which have not yet been fully released, athletes without the standard will be allowed to qualify if the minimum field size is not met. The minimum field size has also not been final- ized. So it is hard to evaluate with certainty that this would be the case.

Also complicating the matter is that the waiting list is often ignored as a qualifying method by many countries. Most major countries elect not to send athletes that do not meet the official standard. The result last -sum mer was a decreased field size in nearly every field event and just 16 participants in the women’s shot put. It is hard to think things would be much different as most major countries, the US being an exception, only allowed athletes to compete in the Olympics with the A standard under the old procedures. B standard athletes were ignored. Federations tend to defer to the IAAF in defining what is good without looking at these small details. I doubt things will change for the 2016 Olympics.

But what remains unchanged by this fact is the effect of higher standards on sponsors, funding, cheating, and all other aspects outlined above is unchanged by the waiting list. High standards are still hurting our sport even if Walcott maybe might have had a chance to qualify anyway.

http://deadspin.com/behind-the-photo-that-changed- the-boston-marathon-forev-1698054488

Behind The Photo That Changed The Boston Marathon Forever David Davis | 4/20/15 9:04am

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 34 - May 2015 Everyone knows someone who’s run the marathon. Today’s big-city races—in places like Boston, New York, Berlin, and London—draw Olympic hopefuls competing for hundreds of thousands of dollars and hordes of weekend warriors raising money for their favorite charities or just hoping to check off “complete a marathon” on their bucket lists. Marathoning has birthed an industry of energy supplements and performance gear, training manuals and glossy magazines, corporate sponsorships and fitness expos. And nearly half of marathon entrants are women.

It’s an incredible change from 50 years ago. The very few marathons that did exist – even Boston’s, the old- est continuously run marathon in the world – attracted less than one thousand runners. The entrants were all amateurs; finishers at Boston were rewarded with a bowl of Dinty Moore beef stew. Oh, and the runners were all male. Women were banned from running marathons.

Even in the heart of the women’s liberation movement, the governing body of amateur sport, the Amateur Athletic Union (AAU), did not sanction the participation of women in distance running. The longest race for female runners at the Olympics was 800 meters – or less than half a mile. The universal thinking among sports’ male powerbrokers was that women were not physically equipped to endure the rigors of the marathon distance of 26.2 miles. They claimed that the strain would cause women’s uteri to fall out or that they would become musclebound and grow hair on their chests.

In the wake of Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique, a small band of women runners began to chip away at these absurd notions. In December of 1963, Merry Lepper and Lyn Carman hid in the bushes near the starting line of the Western Hemisphere Marathon, in Culver City, Calif., before jumping into the field. Carman dropped out midway through, but Lepper managed to complete the race in the unofficial time of 3:37:07. In 1966, Bobbi Gibb employed the same strategy at the Boston Marathon and unofficially finished in 3:21:40.

Lepper received only local media coverage for her pioneering marathon. Gibb’s effort was written about exten- sively because it had occurred at storied Boston. “Hub Bride First Gal to Run Marathon,” was the headline of the Record American. Sports Illustrated described Gibb as “tidy-looking,” and noted that her “remarkable feat” and “personal triumph” may “do much to phase out the old-fashioned notion that a female is too frail for distance running.”

A bandit is born

Kathrine Switzer, a field hockey player at Lynchburg College in Virginia, noticed Gibb’s historic endeavor. Later that year, after Switzer had transferred to Syracuse University, she started working out with the men’s cross- country team. Arnie Briggs, a mailman at the school and a running devotee, took her under his wing, and soon Switzer was running upwards of 10 miles per training session, albeit at a slow pace.

Briggs was a veteran of many Boston Marathons, and he liked to regale Switzer with its lore. She was intrigued and, after working her way up to a run of 25-plus miles, persuaded Briggs that she was ready for the marathon. He agreed to accompany her, but insisted that as card-carrying members of the AAU, they had to enter the race properly. All that required was getting a medical certificate, paying the entry fee of $2, and filling out an applica- tion form. She did so using the non-gender specific name of “K.V. Switzer.”

As Switzer recently told me (via Skype from her home in New Zealand), “I wasn’t trying to prove anything, but I knew that I could do it. I ran 31 miles in practice with Arnie. I had read about Bobbi Gibb from 1966. I knew that she had run and run really well.”

Switzer’s boyfriend at the time was Tom Miller, a husky hammer thrower who was training for the 1968 Mexico City Olympics. When he heard that Switzer was planning to run Boston, he decided to enter too. Another run- ner from Syracuse, John Leonard, also signed up.

Snow, sleet, and bitter temperatures greeted Switzer and the 740 other entrants who lined up at Hopkinton, TAFWA Newsletter - Page 35 - May 2015 Mass. on April 19, 1967. (Compare that to the 2014 total of 35,755 participants.) One runner who did not have a bib number was Bobbi Gibb, who again decided to run unofficially at Boston.

Switzer had trained during the winter in upstate New York, so she was unfazed by the cold. Her concession to the weather was not to wear shorts and “a really cute top,” as she was prepared to do. She stayed bundled up in grey sweats and pinned her bib – number 261 — on her sweatshirt. ______“Hey, Jock, you’ve got a broad on your hands today.” ______She was most concerned about being discovered at the start, when longtime Boston Marathon race directors Will Cloney and Jock Semple ushered the runners into the starting area and checked off their bib numbers. But she was fortunate: perhaps because of the frigid conditions or perhaps because she was dressed in oversized sweat clothes, she passed undetected. Now she was part of the field. The plan was that the Syracuse foursome would run together. They started slowly at the gun, well back of the leaders.

In Ashland, at about the two-mile mark, the press and officials’ bus began making its way toward the frontrun- ners. As it passed the back of the pack, a reporter spotted Switzer, her dark hair swirling in the rain, and yelped to Semple, “Hey, Jock, you’ve got a broad on your hands today.”

Switzer said that what happened next was her nightmare. The bus halted, and out charged Cloney and Semple to defend the sanctity of their race. First Cloney, outfitted in a fedora and overcoat, physically tried to stop Switzer, but she avoided his clutches.

When that attempt failed, she found herself charged by John Duncan Semple, an irascible, 63-year-old Scots- man who had retained his thick burr after arriving in America in 1923. Semple was a celebrity in Boston’s tight- knit sports circles: he was a physical trainer who massaged and tweaked the muscles and limbs of Celtics and Bruins players (as well as those on visiting teams and Olympic athletes) in an office in the annex of the Boston Garden that Sports Illustratedreporter Myron Cope described as the “Salon de Slobs.” Cope noted that Semple was “one of the nation’s few remaining great masseurs, an expert practitioner of the dying art of hand manipu- lation.”

His “other” job was caretaker of the Boston Marathon. Semple had a long love affair with the race: as a competi- tor, he had recorded numerous top-10 finishes in Boston; by the 1940s, he was the Boston Athletic Association’s point person for the marathon (and the coach of the BAA’s running club); beginning in 1963, he served as co- director of the race.

On Patriots’ Day 1967, “Mr. Boston Marathon” was a very angry man. Runner No. 261 had violated the sacred code of the institution that was his baby. She deserved to be punished – and if Cloney couldn’t do the job, then Jock Semple would. “This wasn’t just about me being a girl,” Switzer said. “Jock probably would have left me alone if I was just running along like Bobbi. It was the number that got him. I had made him look like a fool.” Semple evaded Briggs and lunged at Switzer, grabbing at the cardboard bib pinned to her sweatshirt. “He was pulling at me and screaming, ‘Get the hell out of my race and give me that number,’” Switzer recalled. “Arnie was screaming at Jock, and then Tom smashed Jock out of the way.”

As reporters scribbled on their notepads, the photographers perched on the accompanying photo truck also captured the contretemps (including Sports Illustrated’s legendary lens-man Walter Iooss Jr.). But only one photojournalist jumped off the truck to get a better angle.

______

Harry Trask had graduated from high school at 16 and, with his family needing him to earn money, took a job in the mailroom at the Boston Traveler newspaper. He was a self-taught photographer who worked himself up to a staff position at the paper by the early 1950s. He won the Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for his images of the Andrea TAFWA Newsletter - Page 36 - May 2015 Doria ocean liner sinking after it collided with another ship off the coast of Massachu- setts. Trask got the pictures by getting into an airplane and directing the pilot to fly over the water at a height of 75 feet, capturing the sequence only nine minutes before the ship sank.

Trask, at rear with cigar and beret, on the photo truck before the race. (Courtesy Kathrine Switzer

Trask was upset on the morn- ing of the marathon. He was resigned to sitting in the open photo truck for over two hours in the bitter cold, which he later described as “not a great assignment.” And, when he went to pick up his equipment in the pressroom that morning, the state-of-the-art gear – the cameras equipped with motor drives — was taken by other staffers shooting the Red Sox at Fenway Park. (The game was canceled due to the weather.) Trask was stuck with a 35-millimeter camera that he had to manually wind to advance the film. In retrospect, this may have been an advantage. Because Trask did not have a camera with a motor drive, he had to rely on dexterity and instinct, and decided to get closer to the confrontation. He also was well acquainted with Jock Semple and his furies. “Wherever Jock was, there was going to be action,” Trask later said. “It was worth the risk.”

Trask left the truck and, on foot, snapped pictures of the incident as fast as he could. He abandoned the course, took a taxi to the newspaper offices, and immediately headed to the darkroom. He was excited, but in the days before digital cameras, he didn’t know for sure if he’d gotten the shots on film. “I might have some pretty good pictures. I’ll see when it comes out of the soup,” was his line before his pictures were developed.

______What emerged from the wetting agent was a three-part drama in black and white. The first image showed Semple angrily pawing at Switzer as Briggs (wearing bib No. 490) tried vainly to intervene, while the second fea- tured the strapping Miller (390) shoving Semple away with a perfectly timed body block. In the finale, Switzer is regaining her balance and striding forward, her bib intact, while Semple stumbles toward oblivion. Despite the cold and the manual camera and the movement of his subjects, Trask had nailed it. The contrast between Semple, wearing a dark suit and a snarling expression, and Switzer, in light-colored sweats and looking completely shocked, couldn’t have been more pronounced.

In the aftermath, Semple climbed back onto the press bus, met by absolute silence. Switzer regrouped and car- ried on, shaken and angered, but unbowed. She also had to deal with an enraged boyfriend. “Tom said, ‘You’re getting me in all kinds of trouble. I’m never going to make the Olympic team,’” she recalled. Miller abandoned his companions, only to be passed by them later. Switzer managed to complete the race in 4:20, with Briggs and Leonard alongside.

Footage of the 1967 race. Kathrine Switzer, “a leggy lady,” can be seen at 0:13. ______The winner of the 1967 Boston Marathon was New Zealander Dave McKenzie, who set a new course record in 2:15:45. Bobbi Gibb, meanwhile, unofficially finished well in front of Switzer in 3:27:17.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 37 - May 2015 But McKenzie and Gibb’s heroics were immediately overshadowed by Switzer and Trask’s indelible photographs. Switzer remembers first seeing the three-photo sequence later that night. They were driving back to Syracuse on the New York State Thruway when they stopped for coffee. “This guy was sitting across the counter holding a newspaper and we could see our pictures front and center,” she said. “I ran over to him and said, ‘Oh my God, that’s us! That’s us! This is going to change my life.’”

Trask’s three-photo sequence of Semple trying—and failing—to stop Switzer. (AP Photo)

The dam breaks Her run, and the photos, changed the lives of all female runners. The AAU suspended Switzer (as well as Miller), but the uproar over the incident turned her into an international icon and transformed women’s distance run- ning into a cause célèbre. As Julia Chase-Brand, herself a pioneering runner, recently observed in Marathon & Beyond magazine, “The iconic photos of this encounter clinched it: American women were not going to be pushed off the roads, and now a sports issue became a feminist issue—which of course it always had been.” A chorus of runner-activists actively lobbied for reform with their feet and with their voices. Slowly, they were heard. In 1970, the Road Runners Club of America held the first women’s marathon championship (won by Sara Mae Berman). In 1971, the Western Hemisphere Marathon in California allowed women entrants, with Cheryl Bridges recording the landmark victory. The following year, Jock Semple opened the Boston Marathon to women, with Nina Kuscsik the winner. Switzer finished third.

On June 23, 1972, President Richard Nixon signed the Education Amendments of 1972 into law. One provision, Title IX, mandated more equitable treatment for female student-athletes, and women’s distance-running pro- grams gradually became the norm. Finally, in 1984, the women’s marathon was added to the Olympic program. American Joan Benoit triumphed in Los Angeles, in 2:24:52, as she defeated Norway’s top-ranked Grete Waitz. Yet another all-male bastion had collapsed completely.

By then, Harry Trask had left journalism behind. He taught photography in Boston-area schools for years, then retired to help one of his seven children run a bait and tackle shop. He died in 2002. The Boston Traveler even- tually folded; the Associated Press acquired the newspaper’s photo archives, including Trask’s pictures from the marathon. (Joan Trask was kind enough to provide details about her husband’s life.)

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 38 - May 2015 The Boston Marathon sequence did not earn Trask another Pulitzer, but the galvanizing images were featured in 100 Photographs That Changed The World, published by Life Books in 2003. (Interestingly, of the 10 sports photographs reprinted in the book, four involve track and field. The three others: Jesse Owens winning gold at the 1936 Berlin Olympics; Roger Bannister breaking the four-minute mile barrier in 1954; and Tommie Smith and John Carlos on the podium at the 1968 Mexico City Olympics.)

Kathrine Switzer and Tom Miller were married in 1968. Switzer described it as a “very competitive marriage,” and they divorced in 1972. (Miller died of a heart attack in 1992.) Switzer and Jock Semple reconciled and became friends. She helped him promote his book, Just Call Me Jock (1981), and visited him in the hospital just before he passed away in 1988.

As she had predicted, what she now calls the “great shoving incident” changed the direction of her life. She pur- sued competitive distance running for years, winning the New York City Marathon in 1974, and also worked for Avon, helping to organize races and running programs for women. She used her journalism degree from Syra- cuse to write books on running and exercise and to become a television commentator.

Switzer will be broadcasting at the 119 th Boston Marathon on Patriots’ Day this year, as she has for the past 37 years. She has witnessed the rise of the African marathoners, both male and female, not to mention the bomb- ing at the 2013 race. She is training to run it again in 2017, which will mark the 50th anniversary of her break- through. She will be 70 then; her ambition is to beat her time from 1967.

Thanks to Harry Trask, she is as irrevocably linked to the Boston Marathon as Jock Semple once was. Her bib number is now at the center of a campaign that she has launched to empower women to “find solace, strength and freedom in running or walking.” She recently returned from Spain, where she helped to organize the second annual 261 Women’s Marathon.

I asked Switzer whether she wished she’d gotten bib number 262 in 1967, to be in sync with the 26.2-mile distance of the marathon. “It is what it is,” she replied. “It’s a random number. But someone told me that 261 is a really important number because 26.1 in a marathon is the moment you know you can finish. That’s when you know you’re going to do it.”

For Switzer, in 1967, that moment occurred when she, Arnie Briggs, and John Leonard ran down Hereford Street and then rounded the corner onto Boylston. The finish line was in sight. Strides later, hours after she had outrun the grasping arms of retrograde history, her race was complete.

“These moments change your life and change the sport,” Switzer said. “Everybody’s belief in their own capability changed in that one moment, and a negative incident turned into one of the most positive.” ______David Davis is the author of Waterman: The Life and Times of Duke Kahanamoku, coming this fall from the University of Nebraska Press.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 39 - May 2015 http://www.globerunner.org/index.php/04/vic-holchak-rip/ VIC HOLCHAK, RIP Posted on April 29, 2015 by Pat

It is with sadness that I report the demise of friend and col- league, Vic Holchak.

I lost contact with Vic around a decade ago, as interest in track and field athletics waned, and we couldn’t find media outlets to sponsor our globe-trotting any more. I’d occasionally try to contact him across the eight hours’ time difference between my London base, and his home in west Hollywood, but somehow we never managed to link up.

I got to know Vic when the Mobil GP circuit began in the mid- 1980s. We would meet regularly over the next 20 years, mostly on the European circuit, but also at Olympic Games and World Champs, and also in London, where he had been a drama student, and still had contacts. He never talked about his act- ing career, and it took some time before someone spotted him in a TV movie. That wasn’t too difficult, because Vic was two metres tall – 6’6.

He was self-deprecating about his acting qualities, but what was as unmistakable as his height was that great voice, just made for acting or preferably in his case, sports broadcasting. During his early years on the track circuit, he reported regularly for ABC Sports, but then created his own phone-in programme. Vic was a great interviewer too; we, the other journos, would often listen in as he grilled someone, and we still use some of his catch-phrases, ie “Let me get this straight,” as he put someone on the spot….

The early days of the circuit were great fun, we mixed with all the stars, and had a good time away from the sta- dium too, visiting some of the great cities of the world – London, New York, Paris, Tokyo, LA, Barcelona, Rome, Oslo, Helsinki, Stockholm, Berlin, etc, as well as the totemic locations like Eugene, Rieti, Koblenz. One of the most amusing incidents I shared with Vic was in mid-1985. The day after Said Aouita broke the 1500m WR in Berlin, Vic hired a car, to go to the European Junior Champs, across the border in East Germany, as it still was then. I hitched a ride with him, and when we got back to the infamous Checkpoint Charlie later that night, there was no one there but us. The border guards disappeared with our passports, and we waited in the little wooden hut which served as the border post.

Two old West German women came in, and seeing no one else presented their passports to me. I merely indi- cated the closed hatch behind which the guards had disappeared. They went off down the corridor, and I looked up to see Vic shaking with laughter. When I looked at him quizzically, he indicated my shirt. This was all done like a mute-show, no one had spoken a word. What I didn’t realise was that I was wearing a short-sleeved buff coloured shirt, with epaulettes, which could easily pass as Army dress. For ages after, he referred to me as Staff- Sergeant Butcher, and we were still laughing at it the last time I saw him, which was on a visit to LA, when I dropped in to see him at his home in La Jolla, west Hollywood in 2006.

Vic was great company, with lots of stories, and not just about sport, he had wide interests including, obviously theatre and cinema. But sport, mostly track and field was his great love. He is much missed.

You can read a fuller obituary here, including details of Vic’s broader interests and accomplishments:http:// obits.dignitymemorial.com/dignity-memorial/obituary.aspx?n=Victor-Holchak&lc=4802&pid=172740010&m id=6150883 TAFWA Newsletter - Page 40 - May 2015 http://www.runnersworld.com/elite-runners/liliya-shobukhova-owes-irina-mikitenko-530000

Liliya Shobukhova Owes Irina Mikitenko $530,000 - Which marathoners have lost the most money to proven drug cheats?

By Peter Gambaccini; | Image by Photo- Run | April 29, 2015

These days, Irina Mikitenko (left) might not be as keen to pose with Liliya Shobukhova (right) as she was before the 2010 Chicago Marathon.

Suspended Russian marathoner Liliya Shobukhova has cost Germany’s Irina Mikitenko $530,000 and Kenya’s Edna Kiplagat $507,500 in lost prize money, calculations by Runner’s World have determined. Those are addi- tional amounts Mikitenko and Kiplagat would have earned if not for the presence of the Russian star, who was later revealed to be a drug cheat.

Shobukhova won the Chicago Marathon in 2009, 2010, and 2011. She also wonLondon in 2010 and was second there in 2011. She won $500,000 World Marathon Majors checks for the 2009-2010 and 2010-2011 series.

But in April 2014, it was announced that the Russian had “abnormal hematological curves” in her biological passport and, pending appeal, would be stripped of all of her major marathon victories. She was suspended from competition for two years by her Russian athletics federation.

A Court of Arbitration for Sport hearing scheduled for today to consider an IAAF request to lengthen Shobuk- hova’s drug-related suspension to four years has been canceled, the Associated Press reports, with little explana- tion. Shobukhova may have reached an out-of-court settlement with the IAAF and her Russian athletic federa- tion, though no details have been revealed.

The adjudication of Shobukhova’s case may be nearing a close, and Mikitenko and Ethiopians Astede Baysa and Ejegayehu Dibaba should gain full recognition as Chicago champions of 2009, 2010, and 2011, respectively. An- other Ethiopian, Aselefech Mergia, would be named the official 2010 London champion. (Mergia finished third in that race; second-place Inga Abitova has already been removed from the results for a drug offense.)

But there’s the matter of the money Shobukhova took home, literally at the expense of others.

Mikitenko, who won the 2008-2009 World Marathon Majors series, was in second, for which there is no prize, when Shobukhova topped the series in 2009-2010, and Kiplagat was second in 2010-2011.

That’s $500,000 apiece that Mikitenko and Kiplagat were denied by Shobukhova, now known to have been a drug cheat during the period in question. Because of Shobukhova’s tainted triumphs, Mikitenko had also lost $25,000, the difference between her $50,000 for second and the $75,000 first prize, in Chicago in 2009. She earned $10,000 for fifth place in Chicago in 2010, but with Shobukhova out, that would have gone up to $15,000 for fourth. That adds up to $530,000 Mikitenko missed directly due to the Shobukhova. TAFWA Newsletter - Page 41 - May 2015 Kiplagat’s $507,500 shortfall includes the difference between the $22,500 she got for third place in London in 2011 and Shobukhova’s second place $30,000.

These $530,000 and $507,500 figures are just the prize money totals. They do not take into account larger- ap pearance fees that might have been gone to Mikitenko and Kiplagat if Shobukhova wasn’t recruited, nor do they include possible performance bonuses in the athletes’ shoe contracts.

Authorities with the London and Chicago races, the World Marathon Majors, and the IAAF have not announced plans to retrieve any of the money given to Shobukhova.

For Kiplagat, matters could have been even worse. She finished second to Bostonand Chicago champion Rita Jeptoo in the 2013-2014 World Marathon Majors standings. Jeptoo was within days of being presented with her WMM prize last fall in New York when it was announced that she had tested positive for EPO, a result later verified in a “B” sample test; she’s now serving a two-year ban. When appeals are exhausted, Kiplagat is expected to get that $500,000.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 42 - May 2015 Wednesday, May 6

Ticket plan announced for 2016 IAAF World Indoor Championships PORTLAND, Ore. – All-session tickets for the 2016 IAAF World Indoor Track & Field Championships go on sale to the public on Thursday, May 28 it was announced by TrackTown USA President Vin Lananna.

The 16th edition of the biennial meet – which features more than 600 athletes from as many as 214 different countries from around the world – will be held March 17-20 in Portland. It begins at the Moda Center with the men’s and women’s pole vault on March 17, followed by three full days of competition in a temporary 7,000-seat stadium at the Oregon Convention Center. The pole vault will be free to the public.

Before those tickets are available online and via the Tickets West call center, however, TrackTown USA invites those in the Portland area to come down to Pioneer Courthouse Square from 3-7 p.m. on Wednesday, May 27 for a special opportunity to purchase tickets in person at the Portland 2016 Countdown Celebration.

Besides the chance to buy tickets one day in advance of the public ticket launch, you can enjoy the “TrackTown Experience” with a festival atmosphere of live music, food, beverages, youth activities, photo opportunities and the unveiling of an 18-foot tall digital clock, locally designed and built as a legacy to the event, that will count down the days until the official start of the 2016 IAAF World Indoor Track & Field Championships.

The Countdown Celebration will feature a panel of world-class track and field athletes, including Bernard Lagat (USA), Sally Kipyego (Oregon Track Club Elite, Kenya), Renaud Lavillenie (France) and Genzebe Dibaba (Ethio- pia). Lavillenie holds the world record in the pole vault with a clearance of 20 feet, 2 ½ inches (6.16m). Dibaba is the world indoor record-holder in three events: 1,500m (3:55.17), 3,000m (8:16.60) and 5,000m (14:18.86).

Lananna and representatives from USA Track & Field and the Portland Mayor’s office will also speak at the Countdown Celebration. Pioneer Courthouse Square will be the hub of all public activities during the meet and the site of all athlete medal ceremonies.

Due to high demand in the sports-crazed metropolis of Portland, event organizers believe the 2016 IAAF World Indoor Championships will be one of the hottest tickets ever in the sport of track and field.

In addition to the men’s and women’s pole vault at the Moda Center, the competition at the OCC will feature two sessions on Friday, March 18, two sessions on Saturday, March 19 and one session on Sunday, March 20. Only all-session ticket packages are available. The maximum number of ticket packages that can be purchased is six.

The all-session ticket packages are available at three price levels: • Lower Bowl Seating ($385) • Bleachers – Straightaway ($295) • Bleachers – Turns ($225)

So, don’t delay. Mark your calendar to be at Pioneer Courthouse Square in Portland on Wednesday, May 27 from 3-7 p.m. to buy your tickets for this historic event and take part in a celebration of the sport of track and field.

Curtis Anderson | TrackTown USA Director of Communications w 541-343-6129 c 541-600-0145 [email protected]

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 43 - May 2015 http://www.runnersworld.com/elite-runners/lauren-fleshman-wins-shorty-award

Lauren Fleshman Wins Shorty Award

She captured the best athlete distinction at the social media awards.

By Hannah McGoldrick | Published April 21, 2015

Lauren Fleshman is no stranger to social me- dia. With nearly 38,600 followers on Twitter, more than 8,000 Facebook fans, and (coinci- dentally) 26.2K followers on Instagram, the pro runner is popular across all platforms.

Last night, she was honored for her social ef- forts with a Shorty Award.

The Shorty Awards, in their seventh year, honor “the best in social media” and recog- nize brands and individuals who produce quality content on Twitter, Facebook, Tum- blr, YouTube, Instagram, and Vine. Fleshman entered the individual competition, in which fans nominate their favorite person on social media by submitting tweet nominations.

Even Fleshman seemed surprised when it was announced she won for Best Athlete on Social Media, tweeting this when her name was announced:

Fleshman beat six other athletes, including tennis standout–and marathoner–Caroline Wozniacki and NBA star Kevin Durant.

In recognizing Fleshman, the Shorty Awards tweeted that her win came on a day noted for running.

To accept her award, Fleshman proceeded across the stage as only a runner would.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 44 - May 2015 http://www.thedp.com/ article/2015/04/hender- son-what-penn-relays- taught-me

Henderson | Little moments of humanity amid chaos at Penn Relays ______By COLIN HENDERSON 04/27/15 1:29am

Track and field is all about small moments and enormous stakes.

It’s about a series of little snippets of action that accumulate to become something much greater than the sum of its parts.

Think about a pole-vaulter making an approach. With only one false step, his chance at victory — and all of the glory that comes with it — flies out the window.

In the days leading up to this year’s Penn Relays, my colleague called the event “a world affair,” and I couldn’t agree more. But at the same time — much like track and field as a sport — it is so much more and so much less. The event’s rich history has been thrown around all weekend as a means to justify its importance, and rightfully so.

In terms of attendance, it’s the largest annual track meet in the world. For each of the past 12 years, it has boasted total attendance of more than 110,000 across its three days. It has showcased international track super- stars like Usain Bolt and — this year — Justin Gatlin and Asafa Powell.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 45 - May 2015 But as impressive as all of that is, it would be a disservice to the event as a whole to reduce its importance to a bunch of fun facts one could find on the inside of a program.

What make the Relays truly special are the small yet beautiful moments of humanity during the course of the weekend’s annual proceedings. And these moments are all over the place.

On Saturday, nearly 50,000 people packed the stands in anticipation of the much publicized “USA vs. the World” sprint relay races. Around 2 p.m, the athletes for the men’s international 4x200-meter relay took to the track, and the energy in the stadium was palpable.

Heading into the day, I was as excited for this race as the next track enthusiast, especially with Olympian Wal- lace Spearmon set to anchor for the United States. However, when 2 p.m rolled around, I found myself unable to concentrate on the race.

That’s because I was transfixed by what was going on in — of all events — the college men’s high jump.

Prior to approaching the bar, each athlete went through his own little preparatory routine, and no two were the same. Some looked up to the sky in prayer, while others simply took a small step back before taking off. Of particular interest to me was Penn freshman Mike Monroe’s routine. Before making his approach, he would shadowbox the air and repeatedly smack himself in the face with both hands.

All of this seems somewhat trivial, but I couldn’t take my eyes away for one main reason: It demonstrated the unique humanity in each of the athletes. These small differences can be seen all over the place in Franklin Field, on the track and, especially, in the stands. And the Relays celebrate these differences; after all, it wouldn’t be a very interesting event if everyone ran the 5,000-meter and nothing else.

But despite all of these minute differences, everyone in attendance — runners and jumpers, young and old, Americans and Jamaicans, alike — had gathered together in the name of track and field. And what was even more moving than the United States’ exciting victory in the 4x200m, was the crowd’s sportsmanship afterward, with Jamaican fans congratulating the U.S. contingent on a great race and vice versa.

There is an almost magical quality to the Relays’ ability to bring people together, and nobody understands this better than the athletes.

When Penn senior Conner Paez finished up his race in the 5,000, you could see a deep level of disappointment in his eyes. And I would bet that it had nothing to do with the time he ran, but rather that he might never be a part of the truly special event again.

One of the headlining collegians this year was Oregon sophomore Edward Cheserek. Already with six national titles to his name, Cheserek is widely considered to be one of the most dominant collegiate runners of — at least — the past decade. This dominance was fully on display on Friday, when he led his school to victory in the men’s DMR with an outstanding final leg.

On Saturday, Cheserek took the baton again, this time with a lead in the men’s 4xMile. To almost any spectator, the race was over. It was a near certainty that Cheserek would finish the job for Oregon.

Only that isn’t what happened. To the shock of the crowd, Cheserek was passed by Villanova’s Jordan Williamsz. But how could that happen? How could the top collegiate runner in nation give up a lead on track’s biggest stage? Because at that moment, he wasn’t just the reigning NCAA champion or the reigning king of collegiate track and field. He was so much more and so much less: He was human.

And as Penn Relays has taught me, that is something worth celebrating.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 46 - May 2015 ------Forwarded message ------From: Race Results Weekly Date: Tue, May 12, 2015 at 10:27 AM

WITTENBERG LEAVING NYRR FOR NEW VIRGIN SPORT VENTURE

By David Monti, @d9monti |

PHOTO: NYRR president and CEO Mary Wittenberg presents the Rudin Award to 2014 TCS New York City Marathon winner Mary Keitany of Kenya last month in London (photo by Jane Monti for Race Results Weekly)

NEW YORK (12-May) -- Mary Wittenberg, the president and CEO of New York Road Runners (NYRR) --the largest not-for-profit road race organizer in the United States which stages the TCS New York City Marathon and dozens of other events-- is leaving her post after 17 years with the organization and 10 years as president and CEO. After Sunday’s massive AirBnB Brooklyn Half-Marathon she will lead the launch of a new company called Virgin Sport, part of Richard Branson’s massive Virgin business empire. She will continue to be based in New York where she lives with her husband and two children.

Wittenberg, 52, an avid runner who as Mary Robertson won the Marine Corps Marathon in 1987, joined the NYRR in 1998 becoming its first chief operating officer under her predecessor, Allan Steinfeld, one of the NYRR’s founders. In 2005 the former law firm partner with Hunton & Williams in Richmond, Va., became president and CEO.

“Mary’s been a trailblazer in our industry and the positive impact she’s had on New York Road Runners and the TCS New York City Marathon has been historic,” said NYRR board chairman George Hirsch. “Mary has proven that she is one of the top sports executives in the world and we’ll miss her vision and leadership.”

Under her management, the NYRR enjoyed strong growth in their events. In 1998, the TCS New York City Mar- athon had 31,333 finishers. It has since grown by 61% to 50,432 last year, making it easily the world’s largest marathon. Wittenberg also oversaw the creation of several new events which are popular with both recreational runners and top athletes. Those include the UAE Healthy Kidney 10-K, founded in 2005; United Airlines NYC Half, founded in 2006; and AirBnB Brooklyn Half-Marathon, which was re-invented as a mass-participation race in 2012 and will be America’s largest half-marathon this year. Wittenberg also helped found the Abbott World Marathon Majors, a super-league of the world’s top commercial marathons, in 2006.

Perhaps most important to Wittenberg was her initiative to expand the NYRR’s involvement in youth running programs. Now with school-based programs like Mighty Milers (a running program for children of all fitness levels from pre-kindergarten through eighth grade), and Young Runners (a running program designed for chil- dren of all fitness and athletic levels in grades 3-12), the NYRR has approximately 200,000 children enrolled in running programs, both locally and nationally.

With Wittenberg’s departure, two NYRR veterans, Michael Capiraso and Peter Ciaccia, will lead the organiza- tion going forward. Capiraso assumes the title NYRR President and CEO, while Ciaccia, will have the title NYRR President of Events and will also be the race director for the TCS NYC Marathon. Hirsch will remain board chairman. Both Capiraso and Ciaccia will join the Board of Directors.

“I look forward to working with Peter and the entire staff as we take the next step in the evolution of NYRR’s mission,” said Capiraso through a statement. “With the support of our board of directors and our many stake- holders from runners to partners to city leaders, we are excited to build on the NYRR legacy and get more people of all ages to Run for Life.”

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 47 - May 2015 In addition to her accomplishments as a sports executive, Wittenberg became a tireless proponent of running for people of all ages and abilities. In many ways, she became the face of running in the United States.

“My days at NYRR have been fueled by the inspiration all around me and it has been an immense privilege to serve our runners and community while working side-by-side with so many amazing partners and talented and deeply committed staff, volunteers and Board of Directors,” said Wittenberg through a media release. “NYRR is fortunate to have Michael and Peter ready to take the baton with the invaluable benefit of George Hirsch, with his many years of experience, working closely with them as he and the Board have with me these past ten years. I am predicting this next leg of NYRR’s run will be the best yet.”

NOTE: Race Results Weekly Inc. provides professional athlete consulting services to the New York Road Run- ners --Ed.

Paul Duffau writes: I’ve attached a review that I just completed of John L. Parker’s Racing the Rain. John was kind enough to send me an advanced copy and I thought the membership might be interested in the youth of Quenton Cassidy before Once a Runner. The review ran originally at my website, www.paulduffau.com and was picked up by T&FN.

Racing the Rain: A Review of John L. Parker’s newest novel

Racing the Rain delivers the goods on young Quenton Cassidy with Parker’s flair for inspirational running scenes, an intriguing cast of characters, and a verdant setting above and below the surface of the Florida Gold Coast.

John L. Parker returns in Racing the Rain to flesh out the character of Cassidy, beginning with the young boy that would toe the line barefoot to run his first race, not against people, or even himself, but just to feel the wind and the joy of the act of running. Quenton Cassidy, the famed hero of Once a Runner, received the gifts of speed and the courage of a miler from the gods, but until those talents were nurtured by coaches and mentors, they lay quiescent.

Parker opens the novel with scenes from an American childhood that will seem alien to most of his young read- ers, but that resonates with authenticity for the age; and, of course, there’s a race.

The boys in the story—Cassidy, his friends Stiggs and Randleman—roamed freely as the story unfolds, the early years touched on at the highlights, until Racing the Rain settles into the early teenage years when Cassidy turns serious about sports even as he searches for his identity.

For Cassidy, identity gets bound by the character of the Florida Gold Coast and by Trapper Nelson. Trapper, who as Cassidy thought of it, “. . . was supposedly bigger and stronger than Paul Bunyan, had more powers than Su- perman, knew more about animals than Tarzan . . .” is the first to suggest that Cassidy pursue running, and was wise enough to wait for the seed to germinate. Trapper lives alone in the Everglades and the two form a relation- ship built on a mutual appreciation of each other and the Glades.

Parker’s ability to write a race scene that leaves your pulse pounding was the backbone of Once a Runner. In Racing the Rain, he adds a graceful skill in describing the natural world of Cassidy, whether describing a foray to capture bait fish amongst the cattails in the tide pools, scuba-diving in coral “so exotic they seemed not the product of the natural world, but of some schizophrenic jeweler,” or the feel of the oppressive summer heat as he works for Trapper maintaining an exotic menagerie. Parker’s affinity for Florida helps him paint the scenes with details that allow the richness of the place and time shine through. TAFWA Newsletter - Page 48- May 2015 As an author, Parker also added some misdirection to his repertoire as he gently builds a training program for young runners under the guise of telling the story. Gone are the sixty quarter miles, replaced by the guiding wisdom of Archie San Romani through Trapper, and later, from his coaches, especially Mr. Kamrad. The running is interspersed with basketball. It’s on the court that Cassidy first stars, learning the lessons of diligent practice and focus to reach beyond the barriers that had been applied to him.

Parker does a smooth job of bringing the previous book’s characters back to round out the scenes. Readers of Once a Runner will recognize many of the characters, not the least Mizner and a young Jack Nubbins and the race finale takes place at Southeastern University, the setting for Once a Runner.

Parker continues to blend in the science of training with his racing, but does so subtly. He sets basketball as the prestige sport, with cross country and track distant also-rans in the school hierarchy of popularity, not so differ- ent from the reality for most runners. As the plot develops, so does Cassidy’s character. The reader watches the writer deftly molding young Cassidy into the man that he will be in Once a Runner, the athlete with an almost visceral rejection of stupidity masquerading as authority. The tension builds through the second third of the novel as Cassidy is forced, by a combination of his own talents and decisions as well as the internal pressures of the sports programs with the prestige to decide on his future.

The result is less a one dimensional running book like Once a Runner and more a coming of age story for Quen- ton Cassidy, teenager. As such, it should have wider appeal to more readers. And yet, there’s that Parker touch, and the runners will recognize the magic that Parker brings to running fiction, that makes it special to all of us that once dreamed of being that runner. ______Paul Duffau writes novels about running and works with junior high cross country runners part-time. His first novel, Finishing Kick, was recognized by Running Times in their Summer Reading list July, 2014. His newest novel, a high-octane adventure set in the mountains of Montana, is Trail of Second Chances. He blogs on the running life, running book, and interviews people that he finds interesting at www.paulduffau.com .

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 49- May 2015 Partial Fixtures List 2015

May 2-3 World Relay Championships, Nassau, Bahamas May 21-23 NCAA Div II Championships, Allendale, Mich. NCAA Div III Championships, Canton NY NAIA Championships, Gulf Shores, Ala. May 28-30 NCAA Div I Regionals East – Jacksonville, West – Austin May 29-30 Prefontaine Classic, Eugene June 10-13 NCAA Championships, Eugene June 12 TAFWA Spring Banquet, Eugene June 12-13 Caribbean Scholastic Invitational, Havana June 13 adidas Grand Prix, NYC June 19-21 New Balance Outdoor Nationals (HS), Greensboro NC June 25-28 USATF Championships, Eugene June 28 TAFWA Breakfast Social, Eugene, Ore. June 30-July 1 World Youth Trials, Lisle, Ill. July 15-19 World Youth Championships, Cali, Colombia July 20-26 Pan Am Games, Toronto July 23-26 U.S. Masters Championships, Jacksonville, Fl. July 31-Aug. 2 PanAm Juniors, Edmonton Aug. 4-16 World Masters Championships, Lyon, France Aug. 22-30 World Championships, Beijing Nov. 21 NCAA XC Championships, Louisville, Ky.

TAFWA Newsletter - Page 50 - May 2015