Carl Lewis: "Our sport is proving the definition of insanity"

Track on TV isnt that hard. No fluff stories, just track with a good commentator and some background on the athletes.

That goes against every fiber of our being and we will fight you to the death on that one.

hmmmf wrote:

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Carl Lewis is one of the greatest athletes ever. His opinions of the sport of track and field ,which he understands very well, should be paid attention to. .

but seb coe was a great athlete

He was no Carl Lewis.

Either way, it would help the sport if the drug cheats of the 80s would go away, and not be treated as heroes anymore.

mcvred wrote:

Jsjsjsjs wrote:

What has the world come to when a former sprinter (Lewis) advocates for inclusion of 5k and 10k, where a former middle distance runner (Coe) acts to eliminate them?

Exactly.

+2. Carl should be President of IAAF. Not that muppet, Coe.

Also, I think he’s right about too many professionals. There should be elite league tiers where athletes can get can get promoted and relegated based on performance. Would’ve easily solved the distance “problem”.

Jsjsjsjs wrote:

What has the world come to when a former sprinter (Lewis) advocates for inclusion of 5k and 10k, where a former middle distance runner (Coe) acts to eliminate them?

Definitely the only comment that makes sense in this whole thread. Thanks!

reality check right now wrote:

Nobody cares about watching track on TV. It is what it is. You can "do it right" or do it wrong. It doesn't matter, the viewership will be the same - LOW.

That's where you are wrong. People do like to watch track and field. The problem is that tv is too stupid to figure out how to show it with their bloated amount of ads they feel they have to show. That's why they can't show any race longer than a mile without interrupting it with ads.

They would rather show "competitions" like ninja warrior where they can run 3 minutes of ads every 4 to 5 minutes.

How does a sport expect to be professional when its only big event happens once every four years, and most of its meets are meaningless even in yearly competition? There is no reason anyone should care about someone chasing a trials or champs standard. The champs are the two-week season.

And the fault for that is not with the system, but the hardcore fans who keep insisting that tactical races and rounds are exciting, and that the tortuous process of selecting the entrants is interesting. It's YOUR all's fault track isn't popular.

The fix is simple: qualify for champs by seasonal form, which makes every sanctioned race matter and eliminates unqualified entrants. Top 8 on the charts go straight to the final, period. Every single meet is the heats and semifinals! It'll be great.

I think all of Carl Lewis' statements have merit. Certainly listen to him as much as

Sebastian Coe!

I would like to see team competition in the Diamond League. Perhaps you could have

Divisions and Conferences like they do in the NBA, NHL, MLB, and NFL.

Have an all-star team every year so you know the best players by name.

Perhaps everyone in the world could know the MVP.

STOP eliminating college track & field teams.

I watched Tim Tebow/Lebron James's show Million Dollar Mile today for the first time and I was entertained. Had me at the edge of my seat.

Made you root for the average guy...

That's good stuff there...it beats watching the DL any day.

Bad Wigins wrote:

How does a sport expect to be professional when its only big event happens once every four years, and most of its meets are meaningless even in yearly competition? There is no reason anyone should care about someone chasing a trials or champs standard. The champs are the two-week season.

And the fault for that is not with the system, but the hardcore fans who keep insisting that tactical races and rounds are exciting, and that the tortuous process of selecting the entrants is interesting. It's YOUR all's fault track isn't popular.

Nope, it's the fault of the athletes and their reptilian agents who can't come together to build a viable pro league or tour like any other respectable pro sport has. IAAF is no basis for a genuine pro sport, much like FIFA, FIBA, etc. aren't. There's simply no greater vision and will for anything that goes meaningfully beyond the status quo.

ESPN is dying and TV is fading away. Why would track and field want to invest in trying to get airtime back on some tired old technology? I watched the entire 2016 Olympics through the streaming, it's the one time I paid for cable TV in like 5-6 years just so I could access NBC's Olympic streams. You could watch entire races without interruption, every attempt of every field event competition, it was really awesome. It's interesting that many of the official videos from the 2016 Olympics on youtube have millions of views, some of them have 10s of millions of views, someone out there wants to watch track and field. They just don't want to watch it on some tired old format, stuffed full of commercials.

Many track and field events fit perfectly into the modern streaming age, a 10 second sprint, a 4 second jump or throw, even a 4 minute race. We should be embracing the modern age and marketing the sport heavily through the internet.

Again, what kind of league are they supposed to build when meaningful competition consists of two two-week festivals of mediocrity where the elites duke it out with the sub-elites two or three times before getting to the real event?

This is rooted in the scholastic history of athletics, as so many of its troubles are. The fans are the coaches, parents, and athletes themselves, and they prefer mass participation to serious competition. Posters here hype minor-league sideshows, e.g. US OT marathon, as much as they hype the world class, because the OT marathon is something some of them might be able to qualify for. They blather on ad-nauseam about the NCAA because many are NCAA athletes.

How are the pro athletes and agents supposed to market themselves to such a self-indulgent audience? Step one is change the competition format to one that makes sense for elites and doesn't invite sub-elite sideshows.

Well how exactly do you think pro golf and tennis tours and leagues were formed, from a lightning or meteor strike? JFC.

What's wrong with participation? The massive participation numbers for Track and Field is the only thing keeping the sport alive.

Track and Field is second only to Football for participation numbers at the high school and college level in the US. Worldwide it's second only to Soccer. Yet the sport has completely failed to capitalize on these numbers when it comes to turning them into a financially supportive fan base for the sport. Carl Lewis is right we are insane for continuing to think that our sport can ever follow the model of the NBA or NFL, very few people are ever going to pay money to sit and watch a track and field meet, they just aren't. We've been down this path, it failed. People have been talking about professional track leagues and TV deals for more than 40 years, what happened to that professional track league in the US that started up 2-3 years ago? Looks like you can still buy tickets for the next meet, on July 23rd, 2016 LOL:

. Attendance is dropping at Diamond League meets. The heyday of people paying to watch a track meet is long gone (and it was never very good to begin with). We need to find another way.

We have a successful model to look at within our own sport: the marathon. Would it be so bad if we used participation numbers to support our Track and Field pros? What if major track meets were festivals like the Penn Relays, with 10s of thousands of participants paying to compete to support appearance fees and prize money for professional competitions? Would that be such a bad thing? Increasing the number of people buying cloths, running shoes and track spikes is only going to bring more sponsorship opportunities for the pros as well. The fact is we've failed to keep people engaged with the sport after high school and college. There is no club system for adults in the US, there are virtually no competition opportunities outside of scholastic competitions and the national championships anymore. We've completely shut the sport off from the average person, and then we wonder on message boards why it's dying.

CO Coach wrote:

We have a successful model to look at within our own sport: the marathon. Would it be so bad if we used participation numbers to support our Track and Field pros? What if major track meets were festivals like the Penn Relays, with 10s of thousands of participants paying to compete to support appearance fees and prize money for professional competitions?

There are only two such mass-attendance track meets in the world, both of them school-focused. How much do they pay out now to pros who compete in them? What kind of ratings do they get on TV?

Tennis succeeds because it has many big events and is not a school-based sport. Same deal with golf. Pro competitions are not tangled up with amateur stuff. They have mass participation, but you don't get to just enter the U.S. open, you have to prove you're one of the world's best first. That's what a pro athlete is, and what the pro sports fan wants to see on tv. That's why elite marathoners aren't really pro athletes; the "job" of a pro is to provide a service to paying fans, but that's not where the marathon money is coming from. The race entrants who pay into it mostly don't follow the elites at all.

To succeed, pro track must divorce itself from schools and make the entire season count. Diamond League titles aren't taken seriously because they don't affect the world championship. Only busting up the trials-to-champs paradigm can create a real season.

When he's talking about the transgender issue, at least athletics is at the forefront of tackling the issue head on, under the courageous leadership of Seb Coe.

The insane sports are those like boxing and MMA, where it's only a matter of time before a 'transgender' kills one of his female opponents, yet they don't even admit to it as a problem for fear of upsetting the PC freaks.

Coevett wrote:

When he's talking about the transgender issue, at least athletics is at the forefront of tackling the issue head on, under the courageous leadership of Seb Coe.

The insane sports are those like boxing and MMA, where it's only a matter of time before a 'transgender' kills one of his female opponents, yet they don't even admit to it as a problem for fear of upsetting the PC freaks.

NASCAR is dying, too. Huge drop off, because watching a race is like watching a slow 10K, without the crashes...boring.

I like the idea of a meaningful pro season, I do. But it's not going to magically produce Track and Field fans. Look at this message board, the vast majority of posts on here are interested in their own training and their own races, and the vast majority of adults on here are training for road races, because it's the only competition opportunities they have. Few people on here engage in threads about professional track.

Tennis and Golf have millions of people that continue to participate in those sports well into adulthood. There are publicly accessible golf courses and tennis courts all over the world. Those are the people that stop channel surfing when one of those sports is on TV. I've got to believe the vast majority of the fans of those sports follow them because they can still relate to the sport. It also helps immensely that people that play both sports have money, because they are not cheap sports to participate in. There's a reason why the commercials during golf tournaments are for things like mutual funds and Buicks. The same is true of cycling, most of the cycling fans I know are also cyclists to some extent and many compete locally, they are buying bikes, helmets, shoes and silly cloths. The cycling fan base is pouring thousands of dollars each into the sport which turns into team sponsorships for the pros. No one is paying to watch a cycling race. If we want fans of Track and Field we need to keep them engaged in the sport at all levels.