Running Debate
Don’t Bring Back the Mile
Pushing a mostly irrelevant distance in a sport struggling for relevance is not the answer.
There is a call, south of the border, to bring back the traditional mile (1,609.344m) race in place of its metric equivalent of 1,500m. The ncaa, which governs American college sports, plans on making the swap. Meanwhile, Bring Back the Mile ( bbtm), a grassroots movement, feels that the distance will save the sport and attract much needed media coverage.
But will changing the 1,500m to the 1,609.344m save running?
Track and field could use a positive shot in the arm. Doping scandals, a poor experience at many track meets and lack of understanding of what’s going on prevent people from caring about our sport the way they do about the “big four” team sports, or even as much as European sports fans care about track and field. This is all despite the fact that hundreds of thousands of Canadians run.
bbtm positions the mile as a distance that most Americans “think, speak and relate to.” This may be true, but track and field is a global sport. Canadians of a certain age may also think in miles, but in Europe, track and field’s popular locus, the mile is mostly a curiosity or an afterthought. bbtm claims that “put simply, the mile still matters,” but if it did, such a movement would not be necessary. The deep meaning and importance this movement ascribes to the mile is based on the round number of the four-minute mile (ironically, a barrier first broken in England and not America). It represents the breaking of supposedly impossible barriers, and in that way, can be seen as a metaphor for the barriers every runner breaks when he or she runs a new personal best.
But this relevance is caught up in a generational shift: yes, the mile may resonate with some, but what matters to most young people these days, if the mile matters at all, is probably their own mile time, not the mile of people named Centrowitz or Rowbury.
Just as most recreational runners are not impressed enough by Kenyan superstars to make the marathon a true spectator event, neither will the mile catch anyone’s attention unless they are participating in one themselves.
Another f law in the mystique argument is that whatever small boost the sub-4:00 mile may have on runners, it’s effectively eliminated for just over 50 per cent of the running population: there’s no corresponding round number for the women’s mile. The current world record is 4:11 and is tainted by doping suspicions.
Pushing a mostly irrelevant distance in a sport struggling for relevance is not the answer. There are subtler changes we could make to our sport to make it more interesting to potential viewers.
If we ask ourselves why viewership is low, the answer is not “the 1,500m is too short” but rather that our competitions are hard to follow. There is both too much downtime and too much happening at once. Someone stumbling upon a track meet on TV would not have much chance of picking up what’s going on. The events are all, for the most part, quite elemental: run, jump, throw – but the context that we’ve put them in creates barriers to entry for the new fan.
A football field has yardage written on the field in massive white numbers, but the metre markers on the track are small stencils known to a select few. Ask a runner where the 3,000m steeplechase starts and you’ll likely get a blank look. There’s very little in-stadium or on-air leadership that appeals to both seasoned viewers and new blood: announcers give fans few clues about the results or schedule. Privileging spectacle over procedure is anathema to our sport.
If we look to Europe for an example, we see events that are tightly scheduled, with much in-stadium communication and entertainment. We could do worse than follow this model, and some high-level meets are starting to come around to this with smaller, elite fields, expert announcers and accessible live streaming. But without structural changes like these, subtle though they may be, changing the 1,500m to the mile is not going to garner any more eyeballs.