I must say I feel somewhat vindicated after arguing for years that the World Youth Championships are not in the best interest of long term athlete development. Back in August, following the IAAF’s Council meeting, president Sebastian Coe announced that 2017 will be the last instalment of this championship, saying that “it’s not the best pathway for those athletes at that stage of their career.”
Administration
New age category cutoff date
From the 2018-19 athletics season (so you have a little time to get used to the idea) Little Athletics will adjust the age category cutoff date to 31 December.
Read more about what this means here. I suggest you read the full media release which contains a useful age group table and makes it easy to determine which age group you’ll be in for the next couple of seasons.
The table is also below:
A future for athletics
According to the recently released ASC/CSIRO report The future of Australian sport, people who want to participate in sport will increasingly do so on their own terms, when it suits them or in ad-hoc groups led by personal trainers/coaches and not necessarily for the purpose of competing but simply to stay fit, and they want to stay active for as long as they can well into old age.
German sports world rocked by study on elite sports
Recently the German sports world was rocked by a study on elite sports, which was published not long after in Australia a can of worms was opened by a report of the Australian Crime Commission, which alleges widespread doping and criminal behaviour within Australian sport.
Commissioned by Germany’s sports foundation “Deutsche Sporthilfe”, that country’s premier sports education institution, the “Deutsche Sporthochschule Köln”, conducted a survey on elite sports, and the resulting report, Dysfunctions within elite sports, published on 21 February, revealed some interesting but also some rather alarming results.
Hammer throwers – an endangered species?
The Weltklasse-Meeting in Zürich is a fantastic event. When I was a young lad Christmas was a far distant second favourite to my yearly trip to Zürich to watch the best athletes in the world. In fact, this meet is what got me hooked on athletics in the first place. The meet has always been a spectacular show. When I attended in 2009 I saw only one real difference, apart from a new stadium, and that was the extra-curricular show elements that make the meet even more of a spectacle now, without in the least detracting from the sport. The star athletes are presented to the crowd in the most extravagant ways, and the night ends with fireworks.
When I reflect back I notice that I never saw the hammer throw in the Letzigrund stadium, but when I recently read an article in the Swiss paper Basler Zeitung (BaZ, 6 July 2012) featuring the meet director, Patrick Magayar, I realised just what a neglected event the hammer throw has become, and why some of the more prominent throwers have to fight so hard for acceptance.
Below a few translated* extracts from this interview, which would have to be of concern to hammer throwers:
BaZ: Sports continue to develop. How about new events for athletics?
Magayar: I would say if anything we have too many events and would have to cut away old ones. Not invent new ones.
BaZ: Which ones would you leave out?
Magayar: We have to distinguish between what we want to maintain as core events within athletics, and what can be accommodated for in one-day meets.. Events such as our meet are primarily for the entertainment of spectators. And in a large stadium the heavy throws – shot, discus, hammer – are not really suitable. But here too the entertainment value depends on who is competing. If Gregory Ott puts 21 metres in three years, then we will once again be a united nation of shot putters.**
BaZ: So much for which events are suitable for one day events. But if there are too many events – which ones would you get rid of?
Magayar: I would really think hard about where I still have how many registered hammer throwers. In the hammer throw we are approaching a category [of sport] like the bobsled. These are sensational athletes, but that’s not the point. A long time ago I tried for fun to beat Sergei Litwinow in a 30 metre sprint. I didn’t even see him, that’s how fast he reached the finish line. But there are fewer and fewer of them, so one has to ask whether it makes sense that stadia are equipped for such an event.
No further comment required.
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* My own translation.
**Gregory Ott is a budding young Swiss shot putter, who is tipped to follow in the footsteps of the great Werner Günthör.
Why six throws are adequate
After the IAAF introduced the option for organisers to allow all competitors four trials rather than applying the usual 3+3 format, there has been an increasing tendency even by national and state organisers to limit the number of attempts for horizontal field events to four, presumably to make competitions shorter and sharper.