This is the third installment of Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson’s discussion of the 2015 World Track and Field Championships. Here are part one_ and part two._
**Nicholas Thompson: **Wow. What an extraordinary end to the world championships. You must be doing somersaults! The Jamaicans dominated the sprints, Mo Farah won two more gold medals, Canada won more medals than China, and the skinny guy on your screen saver won, too. Are you sober?
Malcolm Gladwell: My God. I’m not sure that I’ve ever watched a better track-and-field meet—and I don’t just mean that in a self-interested Canadian-Jamaican-English sort of way. My highlights? Ashton Eaton running forty-five seconds for four hundred metres in the decathlon on his way to the world record. To put that in perspective, that’s a four-hundred-metre time that could win the national championships in all but three or four countries in the world, and medal in every national championships in the world. And he did it in the middle of maybe the most gruelling of athletic contests while simultaneously performing in nine other completely different events. David Epstein e-mailed me after that to say, "For the first time, the winner of the decathlon may be the best athlete in the world.” I think he’s right. Let the basketball fans go on and on about LeBron James. All I can say is please. LeBron could train for the decathlon for ten years and he’d still only last five minutes against Eaton.
N: Agreed. And LeBron is a good parallel, since he’s so good at so many aspects of his game: defense, three-point shooting, driving. But all of those are much more closely related than, say, throwing a discus and running a mile. Also, Eaton won it all and he did it in style, too. To break the world record, he needed to run a 4:18 fifteen hundred metre in the last event. And he ran 4:17! (That means that his Kipsang number is somewhere north of one.) I like, too, that he’s a very different athlete from many previous decathlon champions. In my lifetime, most of the winners have been these big, broad-shouldered dudes. But Eaton is relatively small. He’s the size of a cornerback (6’1”, a hundred and eighty-five pounds) as opposed to the size of an outside linebacker. And yet he somehow does well enough in the throws—and magnificently well enough in the jumps and sprints—to be the greatest ever. Even Caitlyn Jenner—who held the world record forty years ago as Bruce—has now called him that.
M: Number-two highlight? Want to guess?
N: Bolt, Farah, Kiprop, or the Jamaican women’s four-by-four-hundred relay? All your main men were great, and the relay was wild. But I’m going to go with Kiprop, since his win seemed, in some ways, the least probable. I always thought that Bolt and Farah had their races in hand. I doubted for Kiprop with about three hundred metres to go.
M: The men’s fifteen hundred was fantastic, although I didn’t doubt Kiprop for a moment—even when the announcers said that he was suffering from the flu. But that’s not what I was referring to. My highlight was the badass women’s-five-thousand-metre victory by Ethiopia’s Almaz Ayana. She was up against Genzebe Dibaba, who is, hands down, the greatest female middle-distance runner of all time, and who had beaten her this season on numerous occasions. And what did Ayana do? Halfway through, she put the hammer down. She was flying. I have never seen a championship distance race—male or female—executed with that level of audacity. No one runs that hard that early.
N: Her last three thousand metres, if run by itself, would have been the sixth fastest at that distance of all time. I was watching the race while washing dishes. I looked away for a minute and then had to do a double-take to try to figure out why a woman in a green uniform, who clearly wasn’t Dibaba, was all by herself on the track. Had Dibaba lost a shoe, pulled a hamstring, or gotten spiked? No, she just couldn’t keep up.
M: Compare that to the men’s five thousand, where a collection of the world’s greatest five-thousand-metre runners basically folded their cards and conceded the race to Mo Farah the moment that the gun sounded. I think I said this when we had our exchange during the 2012 Olympics: distance running, in elite meets, has a game-theory problem. For underdogs to defeat a favorite, at least one of the underdogs has to force the pace early on—but in doing that, that person takes on a burden that diminishes his chances of winning. And who wants to take a step that diminishes the chance of winning? Because none of the secondary runners will accept a slightly lesser chance of victory, then, they all, collectively, resign themselves to an almost certain chance of defeat. That was the men’s five thousand in a nutshell. But in the women's race? Ayana basically said: to hell with that. She is my new hero. I think I’m swapping Kiprop for her as my new screen saver.
N: She was divine, and it was nice to have some unpredictability. (The men’s hundred, two hundred, eight hundred, steeplechase, five thousand, and ten thousand were won by the same people who won at the Olympics three years ago.) I also think that Ayana showed the men, quite clearly, the way to beat Mo Farah: wait until he’s dropped to the back of the race (or wandered off to get a cup of water off to the side!) and then start to burn. A lot of the guys in the race have run faster times than Farah has; given a few seconds head start and solid pacing, they can win. Typically, in men’s and women’s races, the final lap is much, much faster than the few laps before it. In the men’s five thousand, they jogged around like guys circling a lake with dachshunds on leashes. Then they blasted out a fifty-six-second lap, and then a fifty-two. Incidentally, I asked Vin Lananna, who will be the coach of the U.S. 2016 Olympic team, how to beat Mo Farah. He replied simply, “It is clear that you cannot outkick him. He ran 1:48ish for his last eight hundred, so allowing a slow pace that sets up a kicker's race is not advisable.” In the women’s race, Ayana’s fastest lap was her fourth-to-last.
M: “Not advisable!” I wish the rest of the field in the men’s 5K and 10K had heard that. By the way, did you notice that little bit of frostiness between Dibaba and Ayana at the end? I loved it! The only way that could have been better is if Ayana had been Eritrean: a little national rivalry mixed in with the personal rivalry would have been delicious. (I remember, parenthetically, interviewing the great Eritrean-born marathoner Meb Keflezighi about what it felt like to race against the great Ethiopian marathoners, and all of a sudden his normally sunny disposition turned deadly serious. Do not underestimate the bad blood in some of these national rivalries.)
N: It’s true. In all sorts of other sports, like soccer especially, you’re often seeing world politics play out: Armenia will play Turkey, the United States will play Iran, Algeria plays France, Germany recently played Greece. But there are relatively few countries that are good at track, and, with the exception of Ethiopia and Eritrea, we haven’t had races with geopolitical consequences in the sport since the Cold War. (And not even then, to a certain degree, because of the boycotts at the 1980 and 1984 Olympics.)
M: This might be a good time to reflect on what track needs to do to become a bigger spectator sport. You forwarded me an e-mail from a reader...
N: From _our reader. _The one guy who has commented on both of our chats.
M: I'm pretty sure my mother has read both as well. O.K. Not exactly read. She’s bad with the computer, so I’ve had to call her up and recite them to her out loud.
N: She’s Jamaican, though, right? She’d likely be following them regardless. But, in any event, I love that you read your stories to her.
M: Oh, she’s Jamaican all right. And if there were ever a sprinting world championships for eighty-five-year-olds, sign her up. There’s still some quickness there.
N: O.K., so how do we bring more fans to the sport? It sounds like the sort of thing that should do well: beautiful men and women in tight clothing from around the world relentlessly competing with each other at elemental acts of physical fitness.
M: Someone should tell Buzzfeed about the women’s high jump. Good lord.
N: Or the U.S. steeplechase team. “Which of these 23 looks of Evan Jager and Emma Coburn are you?” But, as you note, our reader (a shout-out here to Jake Tuber!) lambasted the TV coverage.
M: It was a disgrace. Midway through the men’s five thousand—just as the tension started to mount and everyone in the stadium was waiting on Farah’s big move—they cut away. Not even a split screen! But I think the sport deserves some blame, as well. I was thinking while watching these championships how ill suited many of the field events—especially the jumps—are to a big stadium. The scale of the arena leaches all of the drama out of the competition. What if the high jump, triple jump, shot put, pole vault, and a handful of the other more self-contained events were moved to something more contextually appropriate—like a tennis stadium? Can you imagine watching a competitive high jump in a loud, crazy, claustrophobic, intimate space?
N: Entirely agree. And what if the meets were scored: five points for first, three for second, one for third? Then there would actually be a real national competition. I loved watching the relays, if only because you got a real sense of the teams out there.
M: Think about how humiliating a real national competition would be for your country, Nick.
N: Kenya fifty-six, United States fifty-four, Jamaica forty-four, Great Britain twenty-five, Canada twenty-two. I grew up as a Red Sox fan in the eighties and nineties. I know athletic humiliation. Losing 56-54 to the greatest running nation in history is nothing like losing to the Mets.
M: Nick! Do I need to remind you that the United States has three hundred million people! Jamaica has 2.7 million. Jamaica is basically Brooklyn. If we adjust for population, this was the all-Jamaican world championships.
N: I hate proving your points, but as I furiously Googled to find some great track athletes born in Brooklyn, the only names I got were Justin Gatlin, with his two doping suspensions, and Natasha Hastings, who is of Jamaican descent. I think that the borough will have to stand by Sandy Koufax and Mike Tyson as its greatest athletes. On population, though, I should add that India won zero medals—though they’d crush us in cricket.
M: I am waiting for someone to explain to me the curious failure of India in track and field. Surely statistically, in a country of over a billion people, there ought to be at least a half dozen potential Ashton Eatons or Mo Farahs? (This, by the way, is my theory on when the two-hour barrier will finally be broken in the marathon: it will come when Indians take up running and we double the size of the available talent pool).
N: You don’t think Hobie Call is going to do it? But back to reality and the races, I do have to admit one great source of deep national shame: the men’s four-by-one-hundred-metre relay team. They have been disqualified from almost every single major international competition during the past decade. And it’s not like other countries are D.Q.’d with any frequency. Watching the United States in the relay is like watching Shaquille O’Neal take foul shots or watching Tim Tebow throw a football: a relatively easy athletic maneuver is turned into something almost unspeakable by someone who ought to have learned how to do it by now. In this meet, after they inevitably passed the baton outside of the zone, I had to explain to my children why—after cheering wildly for Ashton Eaton’s second-place-finish in the fifteen hundred metres a few minutes earlier, I was cursing what appeared to be another second-place finish.
M: I think the relay failure was a delayed side effect from Bolt’s victory in the two hundred metres. That was a beatdown. Bolt jogged in the last five meters and still ran his fifth fastest time ever. Can you imagine how humiliating that must have been to the American sprint team?
N: I asked Lananna about the meet and the relay. He wrote back, “Team U.S.A. doesn’t have to win a gold medal in Brazil for redemption, but it does have to get the baton around cleanly, and not get D.Q.’d, which will result in a medal. That will be a priority for us at the Olympics.” I’m all for that! The U.S. ran a time in the preliminary heats that would have gotten them silver.
M: Lananna is absolutely right. It is time to start from the beginning: take care of the baton. Although that sounds a little bit like what George Bush used to call the soft bigotry of low expectations.
N: Lananna also, generally, defended the entire U.S. team. Here’s what he wrote: “The U.S. distance runners had their best meet ever with finalists in the 1,500, steeple, and 5K for men and women. In addition, the 10K athletes are now competing for medals at each global championship. … Thanks to the coaches and their athletes, it’s ‘cool’ to be a distance runner in the U.S. again.” Do you buy that?
M: Surely you and I—who spend our summer evenings watching Internet streams of obscure European track meets—are the wrong people to ask about all coolness. Do I need to remind you that I’m the guy who has spent the day deliberating over whether to upgrade his Asbel Kiprop screen saver to Almaz Ayana?
N: I think, actually, I may have the planet’s worst how-cool-are-you-while-running-compared-to-how-cool-is-the-thing-going-on-near-you score. Quite frequently, this summer, I would run late at night in Prospect Park, which meant looping by the Bandshell while some pretty awesome free concerts were going on. The secondhand pot-smoke inhalation slowed me by about three seconds a lap.
M: That’s the Brooklyn version of running at altitude.
N: In any event, I want to return this to the concept you brought up in the first chat—the Kipsang number—and turn it to your Bolt number. What’s the shortest distance over which you think you could beat Bolt? Could you take him in a 5K?
M: No idea. Do sprinters run any kind of mileage at all? To beat me, Bolt would have to break eighteen minutes, and my best hope is that even if Bolt could run that race, he has no reason to. I suspect he’d run the first mile in 4:30 to prove his point and then jog it in. The variant on this that I’ve heard people talk about is: What is the right distance for Bolt and Farah to race each other? At which distance is that a fair race? I think it's just under eight hundred metres. What do you think?
N: I think it’s shorter. Farah ran a 1:48 at the end of a championship 5K. I doubt that Bolt has the endurance to run that pace fresh; though he did run a reasonably fast four hundred this spring. I’m saying it’s fifty-fifty in a six-hundred-metre race, and Farah takes everything longer than that. Of course, at the rate that the men sometimes run the 5K in the finals, I sometimes feel like it’s so slow that Bolt could probably hang with them and then just blast by in the inevitable two-hundred-metre sprint at the end. He’s one guy who could definitely out-kick Farah.
M: Can you tell me why the track-and-field powers that be have never staged a Bolt-Farah showdown? It would only be the most-watched running event ever.
N: Isn’t there some dispiriting history here? Wasn’t there a race, maybe between the former two-hundred-metre and hundred-metre gold medalists, Michael Johnson and Donovan Bailey?
M: Donovan Bailey: Jamaican-born Canadian!
N: They agreed to race at a hundred and fifty metres and then one of them pulled a quad? I think Farah-Bolt is going to end up as one of those lingering questions: “Would you rather fight a hundred duck-sized horses or a horse-sized duck?” It’s fun to debate, but relatively unlikely to happen.
M: It’s not a race for the purists. But there’s a critical transition that sports like basketball and football have made in the past few generations: they are now watched as avidly by people who have never played those sports as by those who did. Track’s fandom is still in the ex-track-athlete category. We need to do something to appeal to everyone else.
N: O.K.! So what else do we have to do to get more fans to care about track (hi Jake!)?
M: Maybe we just need to cheer a little louder. There was a moment during Ayana’s win last night, when she was surging ahead at that insane pace with three or four laps still to go—and her form was absolutely perfect and her resolve unbreakable—and I just thought everyone needs to see this.
N: I couldn’t agree more. The women’s distance races were just stunning displays of athleticism, resolve, strategy, and grace. The women’s marathon ended with three women kicking in a sprint through the stadium. Maybe, though, instead of worrying about public support for the next competition, you and I should just celebrate this one the way that Elijah Manangoi said he’s going to celebrate his silver medal? In any event, it’s been a pleasure chatting with you. And I look forward to the next round!
M: Next year in Rio!
This was the third installment of Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson’s discussion of the 2015 World Track and Field Championships. Read part one and part two.
