Track and Field, TV Has a Problem With You

On Saturday, I watched Thursday's men's 110-meter hurdles final and Friday's women's 200-meter final and Wednesday's men's high jump final and Monday's women's 100-meter final--did you hear: Marion Jones lost! --and a men's 100-meter final held six days earlier.

On Sunday, I watched the U.S. team win Saturday's women's 400-meter relay final and American Savante Stringfellow place second in Saturday's men's long jump final and UCLA alum John Godina win the gold medal in a men's shot put final held Aug. 4.

This was great, I thought.

I was getting very misty-eyed, getting into a very Sydney 2000 state of mind. I was getting ready to fire up a meat pie and crack open a Victoria Bitter and break out the Vegemite so I could grease my car.

Tie me kangaroo down, sport.

This is how Americans consume their track and field, you know. We have been trained. Whether it's the Olympics on NBC or the World Track and Field Championships on ABC, if you live in this country and you want to watch the best athletes on the planet run, jump and throw, you will have to go to the videotape.

A whole generation of American TV viewers is growing up knowing this and this only about the sport of track: Runners fast, television slow. To them, Maurice Greene is the guy they read about on the Internet winning his third 100-meter world championship before e-mailing the story to a half-dozen friends and doing a Google search to pull up his bio and downloading his photo to use as a screensaver before sitting in front of the TV to watch him win his third 100-meter world championship.

And you want to know why track and field is dying in this country?

Kids today can watch Kobe Bryant go end-to-end and Randy Moss run a down-and-out and Ichiro Suzuki go from first to third and they will see it start to finish, in real time, the outcome happening before their eyes. But the men's 400 relay finals at the world championships? On your mark, get set . . . we'll show it to you in four hours on another network.

That is precisely the neat little stunt ABC pulled on viewers after teasing them all weekend to hang in there, that men's 400 relay is really something, you're really not going to want to miss this.