Wednesday at the Track Meet

Where Nobody's a Winner

Back in the now-glorious late 1980’s, I joined the middle school track team. It involved keeping my hair properly fluffed and sprayed while I jumped hurdles and ran the excruciating 400-meter run. On the way to track meets, the bus smelled like cocoa butter and Icy Hot. This was in Florida, and long before “performance fabric” was a thing. Life was good.

I hated the 400-meter “dash”, but I loved hurdles. Sailing across them, one by one, was a daring act of artistry and athleticism. Occasionally, one would tip a hurdle or even fall in a moment of hurdle humiliation; but all the pain was worth the chance of hearing your school’s name—or perhaps your own name—announced for first, second, or third place.

Last week, I revisited those halcyon days while attending my son’s track meet. More accurately, I tried to revisit; as it turned out, things on the track aren’t what they used to be.

Five or six schools were there competing. At the beginning of each race, the announcer let us know which school was represented in each lane. The usual buzz of activity on the field was present. So far, so good.

Once the races began, though, a pattern emerged. The announcer praised the slowest heats profusely, and especially the slowest runners—not by name, but in glowing references to their “amazing” speed and prowess. Certainly she intended to encourage them, but the speech began to go just a bit into hyperbole and maybe even outright untruth.

In the slow heat, as the slowest among them jogged over the finish line, the announcer began praising their “lightning pace” and “incredible times” and other stretches of the athletic imagination. Runners trying to survive the last length of the track were said to be “zooming by.”

Fair enough; encouraging strugglers is a good thing, is it not? I had to admire her endless variations of exaggerated praise, anyways. She managed to talk through an entire track meet, never flagging in her energy for this euphemistic task.

What struck me most, though, was the scant attention given to the actual winners of the races. Not one time did I hear a winner’s name, or even their school, announced as the winner after a race.

Is this a new trend? Spectators were reminded to check a web site if they wanted to see results, but why the digital middleman? Don’t most people want to know who won the prize as it occurs before their eyes? At the beginning of the race, schools were easily announced by lane; but at the end, both winner and runner-ups remained a mystery to most spectators.

I heard no names for most of the meet. The exception occurred during a special senior recognition time, when graduating runners were announced. Two seniors also were also recognized for their racial affinity group involvement, a touch that provided a potential clue in the mystery of the missing winners.

The school where the meet was held has enviable athletic facilities. It also has a formidable selection of student cars—Tesla, Mercedes, BMW’s and restored frat-boy Broncos aren’t unusual. Like many other expensive, woke campuses, it also just happens to be on the cutting edge of low achievement.

For example, they’re getting rid of the old-fangled system of assigning grades. Thanks to some ground-breaking research that found students don’t enjoy difficult tasks, students will receive a 60 for having a pulse, and homework will not be graded. Could this innovation be related to the nameless winners at the track meet? Maybe not, but it made me wonder.

Perhaps strangest of all is the school’s move away from being a “college preparatory” school. The school’s DEI director recently explained (on Zoom) that since college isn’t for everyone, it’s time to move past that ideal at elite schools, too. She’s right, so why pay $35,000 per year to attend her now non-preparatory school? I wondered about that, as well.

Given the school’s reputation for embracing progressive ideas, I was a bit surprised by its inclusion of a holdover from the olden days; races were divided neatly into two categories— boys and girls—as if one could be certain about that. The “boys” 1600-meter winner (nameless) won in less than five minutes. The “girls” winner rolled in at just under six minutes. How could such a discrepancy occur?

The meet dragged on for quite a while, giving me plenty of time for people-watching and pondering. The crowd wasn’t too unusual, a gathering of parents, grandparents, and siblings. However, a few runners looked to be ambigendered victims of our sad and searching age; their genders uncertain, like the winners of the races.

Track meets have always been fun to watch, a glimpse of the individual’s hard-fought trials and triumphs. This one, however, seemed removed from such old-fashioned glories. Perhaps there’s something benign in the shift from elevating winners—sometimes there’s not a devil behind every bush. Yet clues on campus suggest achievement’s sun is setting; so I’d say something, on the track or not, is afoot.