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The Week in the Rear View: Racing News June 2 - June 8

Posted June 10th, 2008 at 12:00 PM by Jay Hicks

Section: News & Results, Track & Field, Columns, Olympics, Drugs In Sports, Week in Rear View

maria mutola prefontaine classic

The Week In the Rear View is a weekly column wrapping up the week’s events in running and track & field. I am normally found at PreraceJitters.com, writing about the fast life of track and field.

This was a week that saw records drop. The Prefontaine Classic is one of the hallowed places in the United States to host a track and field meet. The standing ovation for Maria Mutola was griping. The track great won her 16th and final Pre Classic 800. One track expert I spoke with on the phone after the meet summed it up best saying, “The fans at Pre really get it. They really get the sport.”

Jeremy Wariner did more than “bounce back” from the rare loss to LaShawn Merritt in Berlin last week. The Olympic and World Champion ran 43.98 in the IAAF Golden League Meet in Oslo on Friday. Some of the pundits may have forgotten that Michael Johnson lost to Frankie Fredricks in the 200 after the 1996 U.S. Olympic Trials and before going on to run 19.32 the Olympics Games.

Is it the long tights? That’s what many wanted to know after Brad Walker broke the American record jumping 19 feet, 9 ¾ inches in the pole vault in Eugene.

Who can forget the courageous world record by Kenya’s Tirunesh Dibaba 14:11.15 at 5000 meters? Fans in Oslo saw Dibaba tear down the previous world record by four seconds, and the crowd could not get enough of the action.

It must be something in the water because increasingly more athletes are running world class times at a younger age? To say Sudan’s 18-year-old Abubaker Kaki’s World Junior 800-meter run of 1:42.69 is good is akin to saying that Michael Angelo did a good job sculpting David. The run was historic. Memorable. People will talk of Kaki’s race twenty years from now, even if someone breaks his record in the mean time.

Bernard “Batman” Jackson is fighting off his demons, fears, and most importantly his competitors in the 400-hurdles. Batman is driven by his disappointment of not making the finals at the 07’ World team. On Friday Batman cruised to 48.15, his fastest time of the season and the second fastest time run in the world this year.

As we pointed out in this column last week, there may be more to the “non-injury” of China’s megastar Liu Xiang than revealed. He didn’t run again for a second straight meet after sitting out the Reebok Grand. This week in Eugene, Xiang didn’t run because he was disqualified due to false start, and he didn’t look the least bit upset upon hearing the news.

I keep talking about Bianca Knight because she keeps winning and because the traditional media hasn’t quite figured out who she is yet. Do you realize what she just accomplished? At the age of 18-years-old, Bianca flew across the pond and ran second (11.25) in the 100 and 22.56 to win the deuce. Some of the vets struggle to maintain consistency running on European track circuit.

In other news, how jaded do you have to feel to voluntarily return an Olympic gold medal? Obviously a great deal because Michael Johnson is returning the gold medal he won as a part of 4×400-meter relay at the Sydney Games in 2004. Johnson, never one to mince his words, saved some of his harshest assessments for his former teammate Antonio Pettigrew’s recent admission that Pettigrew used banned drugs. “I know that the medal was not fairly won, and that it is dirty,” Johnson wrote in the column. “I don’t want it. I feel cheated, betrayed and let down.” Umm…that pretty much sums up the matter for me.

This article was written by TheFinalSprint.com guest contributor Jay Hicks of the popular running blog PreraceJitters.com.