The Warmup
Debate over super spikes heats up
Despite limited competition opportunities due to the pandemic, the past year has seen a raft of new world and national records (including those by Joshua Cheptegei, Letesenbet Giday, Sifan Hassan and others), mostly by athletes wearing “super spikes” – new track spike designs that feature a thicker layer of foam cushioning and an embedded carbon-fibre plate similar to what’s used in many road marathon shoes. The combination of the thick foam and the plate is assumed to provide a significant performance advantage, sparking a debate reminiscent of the one inspired by the Nike Vaporf ly 4% and the upgrades that have followed it.
In fall 2020, World Athletics set rules for midsole height (25 mm) and embedded plates that were fairly generous to the spike brands (mainly Nike and New Balance), and earlier this year it softened the rule that the shoes had to be widely available and accessible to all athletes. On the one hand, we have fans who believe that today’s performances, despite being faster, can’t rival those of track legends like Kenenisa Bekele, Tirunesh Dibaba and Haile Gebrselassie, who ran fast in considerably less technical gear. And on the other, we have those who defend the tech improvements as being inevitable, or who downplay the gains, speculating that they’re more likely due to training schedules uninterrupted by racing, or possibly the relative absence of out-of-competition doping controls during the pandemic. The debate is likely to become even more heated during the Olympics. Athletics events are scheduled to begin on Friday, July 30 with the men’s 3,000m steeplechase.
Canada’s Taryn O'Neill finishes sixth at NCAA Cross-Country Championships
The ncaa Cross-Country Championships, originally scheduled for November 2020, took place in Stillwater, Okla., on March 15. Taryn O’Neill, originally from Canmore, Alta., (where her high-school coach was Canadian marathon record holder Malindi Elmore), placed sixth overall on the 6k course in her first ncaa championship, leading the Northern Arizona University ( nau) women to an 11th-place finish. The nau men’s team won their fourth national title in five years, and the Brigham Young University ( byu) women won their first championship since 2002. Mercy Chalangat of Alabama took the women’s title, and Conner Mantz of byu won the men’s race.
Records go down at winter indoor meets
The winter of 2021 was filled with new world and national records, as numerous indoor track events took place with strict covid- 19 protocols. At the World Athletics Indoor Tour meet in Liévin, France, in early February, Gudaf Tsegay of Ethiopia crushed the world record in the indoor 1,500m with her 3:53.09 finish. Her result was a seven-second personal best and bettered the previous record (set by Genzebe Dibaba in 2014) by two seconds. With a PB of 3:54.38 in the outdoor 1,500m, Tsegay is the reigning world bronze medallist, and at the time of publication she was the 13th fastest of all time. (Tsegay wore the Adidas Avanti, which is not considered a super spike.)
After brea king t he European record in the 1,500m at the same meet with his 3:31 . 80 clocking, Jakob Ingebrigtsen of Norway ran to victory in the same event at the European Indoor Championships in Torun´, Poland, on March 5. Initially, Ingebrigtsen was disqualif ied for stepping off the track. He appealed, claiming he was pushed, and after repeated analysis of the race video, officials reinstated him as victor. And on March 7, running a 7:48.20 for the win in the 3,000m, Ingebrigtsen became the first man to win both the 1,500m and the 3,000m at this meet.
Julie-Anne Staehli sets Canadian record in the indoor 2-mile
Canadian athletes def initely felt the love over the Valentine’s Day weekend at the New Balance Indoor Grand Prix in New York City as they strove to improve their times and rankings. Julie-Anne Staehli of London, Ont., ran to a third-place finish and her first national record in the twomile (3,200m) race, with a 9:22.66 – more than 14 seconds faster than the previous mark set by Jessica O’Connell. (Staehli went through 3,000m in a new PB of 8:47.73, just over a second off O’Connell’s record in that distance.) The race was won by Elle Purrier, who set a new American record of 9:10.28.
Athing Mu of Texas A&M continues to astonish fans
Eighteen-year-old Texas a&m freshman Athing Mu, who in 2019 won the 600m at the usatf indoor championships at age 16 (setting the American record at 1:23.57 in the process), went undefeated in three individual and three relay races this winter, setting records in each. The first was an 800m in mid-January, which she won in 2:01.07 – the second-fastest time in ncaa history and a U.S. U20 indoor record by more than half a second, and with the second-place finisher trailing her by more than eight seconds. The following week, Mu broke the ncaa 600m record in 1:25.80, beating the next closest runner by two and a half seconds. (Since Mu holds the U.S. record over this distance, it wasn’t even a PB.) The first weekend in February, she won a 400m race in 50.52, a record for Texas a&m and the second-fastest indoor 400m run by an American junior athlete.
Mu posted her first loss of the season (in the 400m) at the ncaa indoor championships in Arkansas in mid-March (which were won by the Oregon men and the Arkansas women), giving up the national title to a senior from the University of Southern California, Kaelin Roberts. But Mu came back to help a&m win the 4x400m relay, recording the fastest 400m split in athletics history (49.54).