I’ve been intending to write this for a very long time, but a crushing workload and chronic insomnia kept severely undermining my desired combination of a cogent argument and mellifluous prose. Never mind all of that. The case I want to make is a simple and straightforward one, and pretty tough to refute.
This is not meant to be a bitter negative screed. I’m not big on those. I can be so nauseatingly and unrelentingly positive that my ex-girlfriend disdainfully calls me "The Bluebird of Happiness." From me, seldom is heard a discouraging word, unless it’s about Leonard Chuene.
This is a love letter. I love and cherish the Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago, and New York City Marathons (to name them in calendar order). I agree with Chris Brasher, who way back in 1979 called the New York City Marathon “the greatest folk festival the world has ever seen,” and went home to create another of the greatest folk festivals, the London Marathon. Chicago, Berlin, and venerable Boston make it a quintet of such festivals.
Each of the five is flourishing and expanding. Each transforms the host city into an extraordinary celebratory exercise in urban cooperation for a day. They’re growing and growing; laudably, they’re expanding their charitable ventures by leaps and bounds. There’s everything to admire about all of them… and I’m one of the biggest admirers.
Individually, the races make their own news, exhaustively now on the Internet. This spring's Boston and London coverage from Runner’s World, our teammates Running Times, Letsrun, Universal Sports, Track & Field News and other websites was abundant and appreciative. The patience of Ryan Hall and Meb Keflezighi, cooperating with interview after interview after interview, needs to be saluted as much as their running achievements. These five events that are collectively called the World Marathon Majors are not suffering for attention, or respect, and at least three of them could find enough interested athletes to double their fields next time around if their systems and facilities (ie, roads and bridges) could handle the burden.
What stories stood out in this past ten days or so? Well, obviously Robert Kiprono Cheruiyot’s scorching course record 2:05:52 in Boston, and Teybe Erkesso’s barely holding on as a massive lead became miniscule on Boylston Street. And there was Tsegaye Kebede scaring the London course record and Chicago champ Liliya Shobhukova showing us she might be the #1 female marathoner on the planet right now; they were both so masterful that it didn’t really matter if the race’s “big names” didn’t even make it to the finish line. For the second year in a row, watching on cable TV, I was reminded that London doesn’t get the credit it deserves for such a breathtaking and, in surprisingly large measure, bucolic course it has.
What was on virtually no one’s mind – although I got a press release about it seemingly within minutes of London’s race being over – was the World Marathon Majors Series. In the media coverage, the WMM was virtually invisible. It’s a failure, and a complete one. Other than the people directly involved in it, no one cares about the WMM. No one. It has most definitely NOT captured the imagine of the running community or the general public. Members of the “running media” consider the World Marathon Majors to be ridiculous and pointless.
The WMM is a very bad idea poorly executed. I think we should all just be adults and face up to that and drop the entire enterprise right now. No shame attached. The point, again, is that each of the five races has a thriving identity. Trying to create some collective identity isn’t working and isn’t necessary anyway.
The World Marathon Majors is a consortium, of course. It’s a way for the heads of the five families … umm, five major marathons … to keep tabs on each other and keep other marathons at bay. For what it’s worth, the original criteria for “membership” in the WMM was to be a massive urban 26.2-mile race which combined an elite echelon with some extremely massive masses. Rotterdam and Paris, and one or two events in Japan, manage to do that now, too, of course.
But the professed goals of the World Marathon Majors included coming up with a prize ($500,000 each for the male and female series winners) that impresses with its enormity – though if that total of $1 million was divided and distributed to the five races’ first prizes, some of those awards would be pretty hefty, though still not as much as Paula Radcliffe’s combined winnings and appearance fees in London in her heyday.
The World Marathon Majors concept was also supposed to be roadrunning’s response to the Grand Slam in tennis or golf, and that is something it could NEVER be. You can’t DO all five of these marathons in one year. You’re expected to do one in the spring and one in the fall (fitting in the Olympics or World Championships in appropriate years). You’re not even supposed to do two in the same season in short succession. Race directors frown on that sort of thing, but Gete Wami did that in 2007, when a Berlin victory in late September and a New York City second place in early November gave her enough points to top Jelena Prokopcuka for the 2006-2007 series win and give her $500,000. Runnersup like Prokopcuka get nothing.
The World Marathon Majors scoring uses two-year cycles, but there’s a desire to name male and female winners and dole out money each year. As a result, the second year of one series (ie, 2008-2009) is also the first year of the next series (ie, 2009-2010). You can be rewarded for essentially the same achievements twice – which has already happened with Irina Mikitenko, the WMM winner in 2007-2008 and 2008-2009. Despite his DNF at last Sunday’s London Marathon, Sammy Wanjiru probably only needs a middling performance in the fall to be the WMM’s 2009-2010 winner, largely because of all the points he accumulated in 2009 and was already compensated for as the 2008-2009 champion.
There was a tie in the point standings between Wami and Mikitenko in 2007-2008, and the rules to break that tie weren’t in place. The five race directors made something up after the fact, giving the money to Mikintenko because she’d earned the same number of points in a smaller number of races. There’s SOME logic to that, I suppose, except that it actually means the World Marathon Majors honored someone who did fewer of their races than the other woman did.
New rules will prevent that embarrassing snafu from being repeated. But again … how many people really care anyway? No one that I have spoken to. The chief goal of the World Marathon Majors is to give marathoning a higher profile, but trying to explain who’s #1 in this contrivance to a stonefaced media and public is not something worth doing anymore. Boston, London, Berlin, Chicago, and New York City are their own attention-grabbing spectacles. Let the focus be on each and every one of those when its weekend comes up. That notion of a collective World Marathon Majors? It’s a lemon. It’s even counterproductive. Put an end to it now.
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