Heats in athletics..can they be made more 'interesting'
Discussion
Had a thought about this, and have felt it is rather unfair that the winners and x fastest losers go through, instead of the top fastest ones. You could end up with a winner of a very slow heat qualifying,while the guy that finished way down the field in a fast heat losing out. This is more noticable in the longer distance races, where it is a 'tactical' one eg bloody slow rather thn the spectators seeing each runner busting a gut to progress.
silverfoxcc said:
Had a thought about this, and have felt it is rather unfair that the winners and x fastest losers go through, instead of the top fastest ones. You could end up with a winner of a very slow heat qualifying,while the guy that finished way down the field in a fast heat losing out. This is more noticable in the longer distance races, where it is a 'tactical' one eg bloody slow rather thn the spectators seeing each runner busting a gut to progress.
I don't think a swimming or cycling style 'fastest time' system would work, especially with the distance events (800m up).Running fast times in the distance events tends to take a bit of recovering from and it's also very difficult to run fast times from the front, especially once you get to the 1500m and above. It's not like swimming where the swimmers are in their individual lanes, and they can recover pretty fully from races in minutes.
sammyboy said:
I thought it would be intresting to introduce a few Time Trial events like the cycling where each runner just had to go flat out for the best time they could achieve for longer distances.
I think it was Anquetil used to time trial back and forth with his Zimmer frame in the living room in his latter years. 
It's an intriguing idea but it's so much of a contrast to how foot races normally go - I can't imagine it'd get much traction with viewers. Wouldn't be too bad to set people off on 100-400m runs every 30s or so but for the bigger stuff it'd be a pretty overwhelming prospect.
I used to be a pretty handy 800m/1500m runner and used to run in national level competitions where you'd have to get through heats and semi finals. Everyone knows the score with top X and x fastest losers, it's up to the athlete to take the race on if they are worried about not getting through. But at the same time you don't want to hurt yourself too badly and not be able to recover.
In theory the heats should be seeded to spread out the fast+slow guys and make the heats even.
There's a lot of tactics involved in middle distance running and you have to be assertive enough to make the race what you want it to be. If runners sit behind someone who is known to have a fast finish then it's their mistake to make, it's not just a case of running as fast as you can for however many laps.
At our club BBQ night at the end of the summer we used to do some fun races on the track, odd distances like 1 mile and 1000 metres. We also used to do a handicap 1500m which went on everyones PB times with a staggered start. In theory everyone should end up in a sprint in the last 100m or so, but often there would be some 11 year old lad who had just hit puberty and was getting loads stronger week by week that couldn't be caught!
In theory the heats should be seeded to spread out the fast+slow guys and make the heats even.
There's a lot of tactics involved in middle distance running and you have to be assertive enough to make the race what you want it to be. If runners sit behind someone who is known to have a fast finish then it's their mistake to make, it's not just a case of running as fast as you can for however many laps.
At our club BBQ night at the end of the summer we used to do some fun races on the track, odd distances like 1 mile and 1000 metres. We also used to do a handicap 1500m which went on everyones PB times with a staggered start. In theory everyone should end up in a sprint in the last 100m or so, but often there would be some 11 year old lad who had just hit puberty and was getting loads stronger week by week that couldn't be caught!
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