SI:AM | The U.S. Is Crushing It at the World Track Championships
Good morning, I’m Dan Gartland. Let’s check in on an overlooked sporting event being held in the United States.
In today’s SI:AM:
🥇 U.S. hosts (and dominates) the World Athletic Championships
🚴♀️ The long-awaited women’s Tour de France
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Team USA is right at home in TrackTown USA
The United States is hosting the World Athletics Championships for the first time—and it’s cleaning up on the podium.
Hayward Field in Eugene, Ore., is the host of this year’s meet, which began last Friday and will end Sunday. The city, known as TrackTown USA due to its decades-long history as the central hub of American athletics, and the newly renovated stadium, on the campus of the University of Oregon, are the perfect place for such an important event, as Greg Bishop wrote earlier this week:
In order to host the world championships, Nike funded that $270 million renovation, which was completed in 2020, making the largest and most lavish track stadium in the country larger and more lavish, while attempting to retain the aura that organizers—perhaps in an exercise in palatable framing—describe as “intimate.” Anyone still alive when crews broke ground on Hayward Field construction (1919) wouldn’t recognize the current iteration. Same site. Same entrance. Same sport.
Everything else is different. This is a track-only stadium with a video board! The seating bowl is “tipped” so that fans feel like they’re on top of hurdlers crossing the finish line. There’s some sort of 180-foot-tall tower that’s topped by an observation deck with full-circle sight lines, a 40,000-square-foot recovery center underneath the track and a special roof that can open and close and is designed to protect fans from UV rays and rain showers. This is all very Eugene, high-tech and homie—not small-town USA but TrackTown, the temple to running that Phil Knight (and many others) built.
And the U.S. is showing off for the home fans. Team USA currently stands atop the medal table with 22 (seven gold, six silver and nine bronze), more than the second- and third-place teams combined. (Ethiopia has eight medals, Jamaica has six.)
The latest triumph was the men’s 200m last night, in which the U.S. swept all three medals. Noah Lyles, who won bronze in the same event at the Olympics last year, took gold with a time of 19.31 seconds. That’s the third fastest time ever and a new American record, just one one-hundredth of a second faster than Michael Johnson’s time at the 1996 Olympics in Atlanta. (Johnson’s time stood as the World Record until Usain Bolt broke it in 2009.) Kenny Bednarek (19.77) took silver and Erriyon Knighton (19.80) got the bronze. The .46 second margin between Lyles and Bednarek might not sound like much, but make no mistake—Lyles smoked the rest of the field. Watch the race and see for yourself how far ahead he was at the finish line.
The U.S.’s dominance in the 200m comes after the Americans swept the 100m on Saturday, led by Fred Kerley. Team USA also took all three medals in the men’s shot put.
On the women’s side, Jamaica has been nearly as unbeatable in the sprints. In the 100m, Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce took gold, Shericka Jackson silver and Elaine Thompson-Herah bronze. In the 200m, Jackson won gold and Fraser-Pryce claimed the silver. (Great Britain’s Dina Asher-Smith got bronze.)
If you’ve missed the competition thus far, there are still 20 medals to be handed out, including today in the men’s and women’s 400m and the women’s 400m hurdles. The big events tomorrow are the men’s and women’s 4x100m relays. The last medals handed out will be Sunday in the men’s and women’s 4x400m relays.
The best of Sports Illustrated
Today’s Daily Cover, by Maggie Mertens, is about the long fight to launch a women’s version of the Tour de France, which finally begins on Sunday:
After years of controversy and stalling about a women’s Tour from the Amaury Sport Organisation (ASO), which organizes the Tour de France, this year’s men’s race will pass a baton of sorts. The day the men’s peloton will ride to the finish line along the Champs-Élysées, the women’s peloton will begin their race on the same road. The women will ride 1,033.6 km total (about 642.2 miles) over the eight diverse stages, ending on the climb to La Planche des Belles Filles on July 31. The prize purse is the highest in all of women’s cycling (€250,000 or about $256,108), the race will be broadcast in 170 countries and Zwift, the cycling video game platform, is on board as a title sponsor.
The Cardinals had no choice but to extend Kyler Murray, who is now tied at the hip with Kliff Kingsbury and GM Steve Keim, Conor Orr writes. … Chris Herring explains why the Knicks made a terrible decision in refusing to allow local media to cover Jalen Brunson’s introduction. … Avi Creditor breaks down what the future looks like for Bayern Munich now that prolific goalscorer Robert Lewandowski has been sold to Barcelona.
Around the sports world
Bo Jackson helped pay for the funerals of the victims of the mass shooting in Uvalde. … Charles Barkley will play in the pro-am event at the next LIV Golf tournament and is expecting to be offered a job as a commentator. … The Yankees dropped a doubleheader to the Astros yesterday, losing the season series 5–2, but Aaron Boone isn’t worried about a potential October matchup. … Lyon striker Alexandre Lacazette will reportedly miss the team’s upcoming friendly because he was stung by wasps in a Dutch forest. … Vinepair has an in-depth look at MLB’s sketchy new “official vodka.”
The top five...
… things I saw yesterday:
5. Italian soccer club Venezia’s gold alternate jerseys.
4. Aaron Judge’s long, long home run against the Astros.
3. Mookie Betts’s diving catch for the final out of the Dodgers’ win over the Giants.
2. Trea Turner’s pop-up slide after making a catch in foul territory.
1. Juan Soto’s petty deleted tweet.
SIQ
On this day in 2018, Sue Bird became the first WNBA player to play in 500 career regular season games. Who is set to join her in that club tonight?
Yesterday’s SIQ: Which MLB team became the last to integrate when Pumpsie Green debuted on July 21, 1959?
Answer: the Red Sox. In the 12 years since Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier, the Sox, under owner Tom Yawkey, lagged behind in integration. Yawkey’s racist reputation (he donated to segregationist politicians in his adopted home state of South Carolina and allegedly yelled slurs at Jackie Robinson and other Black players during a tryout at Fenway Park) led the team to rename Yawkey Way in 2018. And while the Red Sox employed a few Black players in the farm system in the 1950s, it took until the middle of the ’59 season for Green to be called up.
When Green failed to make the team out of spring training, it sparked backlash from Massachusetts civil rights groups. It shouldn’t have been a surprise that Green was cut, though. After all, the manager was a man named Pinky Higgins who once said, “There’ll be no n------ on this ball club as long as I have anything to say about it.”
Higgins was fired two weeks before Green made his debut with the Red Sox, when he was inserted as a pinch runner in the seventh inning on the road against the White Sox. When Green made his Fenway Park debut on Aug. 4, the Red Sox flew his wife, Marie, out to be there.
Green played five seasons in the majors as a light-hitting second baseman and shortstop—four with Boston and one with the Mets. He died in 2019 at 85.
From the Vault: July 22, 1991
Barry Blackman
SI senior writer William Oscar Johnson was the perfect guy to write about what being a sports fan would look like in the 21st century. Johnson, who also wrote two science fiction novels set in the near future—The Zero Factor and Hammered Gold—tried to envision how technology would impact the sports world over the next decade. While the universe Johnson envisions is supposed to be the year 2001, and while some of the things he invents (like federally subsidized access to sports for low-income people) aren’t spot on, many aspects of his fictitious future aren’t all that different from our current reality. (Even aside from his climate change–inspired lead, which felt all too real when I read it in the throes of a severe New York–area heatwave.)
Johnson correctly predicted…
- A college football playoff (culminating in what he calls the “No. 1 Bowl”)
- A proliferation of corporate sponsorships so extreme that even the Rose Bowl has sold its naming rights (indeed, beginning in 1999, the Rose Bowl was “presented by AT&T”)
- College athletes being paid
- The widespread adoption of legalized sports betting, including the ability to bet from home
- Something akin to today’s Fan Controlled Football League
- A “Very Exciting Moments” feature on your television that sounds an awful lot like NFL RedZone
- A larger NFL schedule (although he overshot it a bit at 20 games)
The biggest change Johnson envisions, though, is the dissolution of television networks, necessitating a move to a pay-per-view model. Fans pay $1 to watch their favorite NFL team or $5 to watch every game that week. NFL playoff games start at $2.50 and the Super Bowl costs $6. While sports leagues today still rely heavily on revenue from network television, doesn’t the system Johnson describes sound a bit like having to subscribe to Amazon Prime to watch Thursday Night Football or Peacock to watch MLB’s late-morning telecasts?
The best parts of Johnson’s story are the ones that are purposefully outlandish, like this one about how fans can increase their enjoyment of a lousy World Series:
I didn’t much like either team and I used my revolutionary new Home Invective system pretty often. Home Invective is an inexpensive ($1 a game) state-of-the-art spectator involvement program, exclusive to baseball. Any advice, insults or obscenities fans yell at their TV screen are automatically and immediately piped into the crowd noise at the stadium. The volume of Home Invective can be adjusted from the lowest decibels, called Conscientious Objection, to the highest, called Leather Lung. Baseball's Home Invective makes a joke of the NFL's wimpy Dial-an-Encouraging-Word program, which charges $2 to tape an upbeat five-second message that will be piped into the Vikes' locker room before the game.
The article is long (5,300 words) but it’s one of my favorite things I’ve read while going through the Vault. It’s oddly prescient and, above all, a clever satire of the commercialization of sports.
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