Dispatch from the Track: Sunday, June 29

2:30pm Another hot and sultry day at Hayward. Makes me wanna walk around without a shirt, maybe an iced Hamm's in my back pocket. I cruise the Festival grounds and scope out the scene. People are huddled inside the various corporate tents, fanning themselves like Zimbabwean refugees, as if to say, "Save us! Save us from the heat, Windermere Real Estate!" Seriously, here are some of the vendors at the Festival:

• Sacred Heart RiverBend Hospital (Coming soon!!! As if a place where you go when you're deathly ill or injured is a place to get excited about...)

• Niketown (basically a fully operational store unit)

• Safeway's Tracktown Powerstation (where they dupe people into cycling on stationary bikes that are allegedly providing power to Eugene 08, when in fact these cyclists will drink four times as much bottled water and need to consume twice as many McChicken Sandwiches … so really we're just breaking even…)

• Northwest Airlines (presumably in case you haven't bought tix to Beijing yet)

• Nissan (wanna buy a car?)

• Oregonlive.com (hey, free newspapers never hurt nobody)

• Oregon State Parks in partnership with the Oregon Lottery (this one is sort of shameful, but what else can we expect if we continue to defund our public services but still want to re-create a semi-primitive experience in the woods ... with hot showers and flush toilets).

I did see one woman with a light blue "Please China" ribbon around her arm. [A symbol of solidarity with Darfur and Tibet.] She was drinking beer on the plaza with a pair of Nike sandals on her feet. Her strategy is to please China.

3:34pm There's an airplane flying overhead promoting Bigger, Faster, Stronger playing at the Bijou Cinemas this week. Funny. I wonder if the Bijou was in on this. Though the next time the plane flies by, the banner is gone.

3:44pm Men's pole vault final. The big news is that Tim Mack is out. He won gold at Athens four years ago, but today he no-heights and has to pack up his gear. As he does this, he shakes his head, asking himself, "What happened? What happened?"

4pm There are four jumpers left. Oh, scratch that. There are three jumpers left because one of the vaulters has decided that he's injured. So the three remaining (Walker, Jeff Hartwig and Derek Miles) can scratch on all three attempts and still make it to Beijing. BO-ring. When Hartwig jumps, and he realizes he's not going to make it, the look on his face is a classic "Aw heck!" I recommend that you watch for it during the women's pole vault. Maybe bring some binoculars.

• It turns out that only Derek Miles can clear 19 feet, 1/4 inches today, so he wins the event while Hartwig and Walker share 2nd place. Later, in the press tent, Hartwig clues us in to how, at age 40, he can still make it to the Olympics. "I just never quit," he says, saying that at age 36 he couldn't imagine competing in the Olympics at 40, but that he just kept training like he was never going to retire and managed to keep himself physically fit. "I treat every injury like a major injury," he says. Good advice, especially to young athletes. Hartwig said that many athletes just shrug off a little sprain here and there, but Hartwig takes these seriously, getting the medical attention and therapy each requires. He said he felt lucky he hasn't been plagued with injuries during his career, and chalks it up to this simple strategy of pre-emptive care.
• All the athletes were complaining about the constantly shifting winds at Hayward Field. Miles said that first it was a headwind, then a tailwind, the a fierce sidewind. "It was tricky," Miles said. "I got lucky." Miles is 35 years old. So he is pleased he can finally make an Olympic team before he gets too old and brittle.
• Hartwig talked of the camaraderie between the vaulters that only made their performances better. Indeed, after all three athletes were assured of making the 2008 Team, they hugged and probably said things like "Let's go get 'em in China." Walker even fist-pumped Miles right before Miles' attempt at 19 feet, 4 1/2 inches.


Pole vaulter Jeff Hartwig discusses how to raise boa constrictors and pythons in Arkansas. No, seriously. He did!

For those of you interested in process, here's how it works after the athletes leave the field:

1) First they are ushered through a gauntlet of fencing, much like a cattle drive. At one point the athletes have to cross a section where the spectators cross. So they stop foot traffic while the cattle are driven along, like freight on a midnight express. Some give hand-slaps. Most athletes just bow their heads and keep moving. They are about as delirious as cattle.

2) Their first stop brings them to the Media Tent Mixed Zone. Basically there's this waist-high gate that separates the athletes from the media goons. They first stop at NBC's camera station (NBC gets first dips on everything), where one sweaty guy throws out a bunch of questions while three to four camcorders film their sweat-gleaming brows.

3) The next section of gating is marked off for "Print Media." So, papers like the Seattle Post-Intelligencer (who, I learned, is sending a stringer to China) or the Register-Guard or, oh, I don't know, the New York Times. Most of the reporters in this area have been doing this for a very long time. They know these athletes because they've seen them many times before. A few of them will even hug the athletes, such is the camaraderie developed between athlete and sports reporter. Some athletes are more quotable than others. Oftentimes I see a reporter glance up from his laptop, see an athlete walk by, shoot a question, get a pat response, and then type up the response for the article he's writing. It's a bunch of horseshit, really.

4) The fourth and final section is marked "Internet." In this bottomfeeder system, the Internet press are the lowest of the low. They upload their content almost immediately and work with way less overhead costs (and usually don't need corporate sponsorship). The Internet media are the guppies of the sports reporting racket. Most top-tier athletes won't stop for a third interview, much less with the icky Internet goons, so these reporters must stick their voice recorders over the shoulders of the "Print Media" and hope a few key quotes get picked up on their microphones.

You see, it's all about "quotes." Eugene 08 Media, whose sole responsibility is printing up glossy little press releases for the following day's crowd, has people working simply as "quote getters." They collect quotes and then dump them into a Word doc. The writers pick out the choice quotes and the managing editor makes the final cuts. There are many guppies, as well as a few sharks, in these waters. Pretty much any athlete could be eaten alive, but the questions the reporters ask are always civil. BO-ring.

4pm Women's 400m hurdles final. A yellow flag is tossed out on the backstretch. A runner is disqualified. Later, in the press tent, it is learned that the runner initially DQ'ed was misidentified, and really it was a different runner (Latosha Wallace) who will be DQ'ed. Even Olympic-caliber judges make errors, apparently. Thankfully we have instant replay.
The Beijing Team is comprised of:
1. Tiffany Ross-Williams
2. Queen Williams
3. Tosta

Ross-Williams was running for Reebok, so naturally she had to take off her shoes on the awards stand.

4:23pm Men's 400m hurdles final.
The winners are:
1. Bershawn Jackson
2. Kerron Clement
3. Angelo Taylor

No big surprises there, except for Taylor, who has to run in a 400m qualifying heat in 30 minutes. Holy shit! He's gotta drop out, right?

4:40pm Men's 400m qualifying.
Nope. Angelo Taylor decides to be a crazy mofo and run the 400 a mere half hour after qualifying for the Olympics in the 400 hurdles. Well, he does OK. Except for he sort of stops on the final curve and limps over to the steeplechase water pit. Apparently he's reeeaaallllly thirsty and needs a big gulp. Or he's just dead tired. He even misses the 400m hurdles awards ceremony because he's busy limping the remaining 100m of the track. The kid shows a lot of guts, but not a lot of brains.

4:50pm Men's 100m final.
I run quickly around Hayward. I want to be near the finish line for the 100m. I want to see Tyson Gay either A) get creamed, or B) better his American record. It turns out I'm about to witness C) shatter the effing WORLD RECORD.

But first I need a view. Nope, can't get up to these stands … even the media are banned from blocking spectators' views. Damn! So I climb the two flights of stairs to the non-reserved seating near the press box. Nope! All full … with mostly officials and athlete families, apparently. Dammit! And I can't lean up against the railing this far from the track, those damn volunteers are keeping everyone back, back, get back! So basically I stand on tip-toes and get to see (with my naked eyeballs) about the final 20 meters of the race. Gay doesn't appear to cross the line that far in front of the others. But then I see this tall, black dude go apeshit on his cell phone. Then the rest of the crowd follows suit, all going apeshit in unison. The race was "wind allowable," meaning the time is allowed to qualify for records. And the time that flashes on the scoreboards is unthinkable: 9.68 seconds. Huh? Isn't that, like, even faster than Gay's 9.77 of the day previous? And isn't that, like, way, way faster? (UPDATE: Yes, it's a PR for Gay, but not the World Record. Apparently the wind was blowing a little too hard at his back and so it was a wind-assisted world record.)

Before the shitstorm rains down, I make my hasty exit down the special staircase erected special for the media, a staircase that takes me directly to the press tent, where the atmosphere is electric, but subdued in a way. You see, all these people just watched a world record on the TV screen, just like pretty much everyone else around the world who was tuning in to NBC's live coverage. They are caught up in the moment, but focusing too much on the fact of the matter. There's a media frenzy going on outside on the track, and they're busily typing away on their laptops, updating the Wikipedia entry for 100 meters and getting news of the new world record as fast as they can back to their news outlets. But NBC beat them all. And they, themselves, were just as current as whoever had an antenna and a boob tube. In one minute's time, I witnessed all that was dinosaur about the print media. Even the guy sitting across from me in the Media Tent (who looked to be about 85) was listening to a tape cassette recorder of an interview he conducted perhaps an hour prior, typing away at a snail's pace to get copy back to his bureau, completely oblivious to the here, the now, the present state of current events.

But that's OK. The old man will have the better story. The one with more hook and less entrails. The one worth reading during those idle hours of the morning with coffee and toast, or on a smoke break between the hours of 10 and 10:15 am. After noon the next day, his story will grow stale. Tyson Gay running 9.68 will be on YouTube for, like, forever.

6:20pm I'm in the Media Tent, watching the parade of "bulls wearing Nikes" storm through the mixed zone, en route to the press conference tent. This Circus grows bizarre by the day. But what really chaps my hide is this young woman "quote getter," who, amidst all this frenzy, has the gall to say this:
Woman reporter: "You know what I don't like about Prefontaine?"
Male reporter: "What?"
Woman reporter: "He was a drunkard."
Male reporter: "Yeah, but c'mon…"
Woman reporter: "I'm serious, all everyone ever says is 'Prefontaine was sooo great.' But they forget that he was an alcoholic."
Male reporter: "What I like about Pre was that he could back up his talk on the track."

And that pretty much shuts the young woman's mouth for the rest of the evening. I used to give people that same line about Pre, that he was a drunkard who died while drunk driving. But then I came to the realization of, what the fuck did I know? I wasn't even born when Pre died. All I have to go on are two Hollywood flicks. I should keep my mouth shut on the matter and acknowledge the facts: Pre helds many, many distance running records and he was from a small coastal community. He's just like me, except I never held any records.

10:21pm And now it's late, and I'm piecing this blog post together and growing sleepy. But, ladies and gentlemen, there's a deer in my front yard, silhouetted against the bustle of Willamette Street. It's summer. It's finally, finally, finally summer. Amen.

Special infield photographers do such silly dances.