As it should be!
I’ll be watching the whole meet. I couldn’t see it live. Yay for ESPN+ replay!
We don’t talk about track and field enough as a fan base. SO PROUD of our programs.
This is a minor quibble, but our women’s 4x400 did not set a world record. Under IAAF rules, a world record in a relay can only be set if all four runners are from the same country. Amber Anning is British, thus we didn’t qualify for a WR. (The surprise is that the non-American wasn’t a Jamaican.) Does qualify as a world best though.
The IAAF website had a report on the NCAA, prominently mentioning Britton Wilson and the 4x400.
They also noted that never before had two athletes broken 6400 points in the same heptathlon, until Kyle Garland and our own Ayden Owens-Delerme did it yesterday. Garland darn near set the world record, and Ayden is only the third man to top 6500 points. Lots of video links to our events too.
I guess they go by World Athletics now but I still think of them as IAAF.
The recesses of my memory tell me USC had a similar situation more than 50 years ago. Their 440-yard relay, which included O.J. Simpson, ran the fastest time ever, but the Broomheads had a Jamaican, so no WR. I think I remember this because it included O.J., pre-NFL and pre-glove.
The simplist thing to do is erase that stupid rule. A world record is a world record no matter who runs it.
I think swimming has a similar rule. A relay record must be swimmers from the same nation. But it is pretty dumb.
That is, literally, the dumbest rule I have ever heard. No world record unless everyone is from the same country. Hey, IAAF…I thought a WORLD RECORD was the best something had ever been done. Period.
Good grief.
If the four fastest runners on the planet got together and ran the relay, that would be the fastest its ever been run. Thus, world record.
So they are differentiating between “world best” and “world record.”
OK
This promotion of country of origin has the sound of the cold war.
I can kind of see the point (and there weren’t any Russian athletes available on this side of the Iron Curtain, certainly not 50+ years ago when the USC relay was affected). They didn’t want a school, or now a shoe manufacturer like Nike or Adidas, cherry picking the four best runners in the world and putting up an unbeatable mark. And of course the Olympics, and the World Championships as well, are built around national teams.