Below is an excerpt from the Lap Count newsletter, posted with permission. Kyle Merber’s Lap Count newsletter both entertains and enlightens fans about athletes and happenings in our sport.
From the Lap Count Newsletter
The Olympic schedule has been released and this should be plenty of time for all you Type-A planners out there to book your flights and start putting together your travel spreadsheets.
The good news is that they cut a day out of the schedule, at least on the track. In Tokyo and Eugene, it was ten straight days in the stadium and now it’s down to nine-ish (just like Budapest). The race walk is referred to as Day 0, which I think is offensive, but it honestly might just be a first-floor-in-Europe-is-floor-zero, type thing. The worst draw is for the women’s marathon, which is on Day 10. Those poor marathoners will be walking out of the hotel lobby for the race of their lives while all the other athletes are walking back in from a final night of Olympic-caliber revelry.
Having attended the entirety of a championship for the first time this past year, while incredibly fun, it sort of feels like you’re Bill Murray in Groundhog’s Day after about 72 hours. Paris ought to be an improvement, but I dream of a schedule that is six or seven days. That would make it possible for fans to realistically take a week off of work and spend all of their money to actually see everything.
There has to be a balance though, because athletes need to rest and there needs to be enough time in the schedule for the stars to possibly double. In the case of Sydney McLaughlin, she could conceivably run just about every day and come away with four (gold?) medals. But all the major and obvious ones are feasible like the 100/200; 800/1500; 1500/5000; 5000/10,000; and LJ/TJ.
Taking a look at this schedule has me excited, but it is also a painful reminder that we are apparently going forward with repechage heats. For those who don’t have a dictionary handy, they are the loser rounds – a second chance for those knocked out in the preliminaries to get into the semi-finals. As if any individual who didn’t make it out of the easiest round will really be a factor in the more difficult one, after having to run an extra race.
Hopefully, the Olympic schedule is not set in stone so that once the repechage experiment flops in Budapest they can reconfigure it in Paris. I am sure the television networks reading this newsletter are open to suggestions!
