Masters Track News and Muse

The National Senior Olympics is pioneering a new way of listing track meet entries. In a delightfully compact 67-page Adobe Acrobat file, athletes are alphabetized by first name. But get ready for a challenge akin to a double decathlon. And put on your Sherlock Holmes cap if you're trying to ferret out results of the track meet, which began May 28 and lasts through June 7.

Have we come to this? Masters athletes handed two-year doping bans because they sought to control hypertension or lose a little weight? That's the possibility that arises with the revelation of the banned substances within the systems of two Italian masters. Yesterday, World Masters Athletics posted a series of WMA Council reports in advance of the world championships in Puerto Rico. New details have finally come to light about recent "drug positives' in masters track.

Reluctantly and with agonizing slowness, the National Senior Olympics is posting women's track results -- even though the track meet started a week ago and is almost over. Actually, the NSGA isn't posting results at all. This function is being performed by an affiliated site (the one involved in marketing photos of the event). But what results! Three world age-group records by W75 Leonore McDaniels alone!

Next time you visit World Masters Athletics, you might notice a little change. The "Forum" is gone -- vanished. No longer in the upper-righthand corner. No longer letting masters athletes and others post comments and queries. Actually, it's still there in the background -- but links to the Forum have been erased from all pages. I don't know why they pulled the plug, but I suspect my raps of WMA honchos had something to do with it. And all this time I thought nobody was reading those cheeky critiques. Anyhooo, WMA can remove the Forum from the site but not from the Web. Thanks to archive.org, it'll live on forever.

Phil "The Legend" Raschker of Georgia tied her own W55 world record in the pole vault this week when she won the event at the National Senior Olympics at Virginia's Norfolk State University. Phil, 56, cleared 3.00 (9-10) to match the mark she set in August 2002. But two 90-somethings were the real stars at the event, setting a batch of world or American bests in prolific fashion.

Dutch master Troy Douglas, 40, put the masters record in the 100-meter dash into outer space Saturday at a meet in Leiden, Holland, clocking 10.29 with a just-legal wind of 1.9 mps. He crushed his own world M40 record of 10.42 set six days earlier in Hengelo. Until Troy's debut as a master, the world M40 record was 10.61 by Switzerland's Stefan Burkart in July 2000. The fastest before him was 10.6 (hand-time) by Eddie Hart in 1989.

Manuel de Jesus, a spokesman for next month's WMA world championships in Puerto Rico, passes along the great news that three Web sites will be posting meet results in expeditious fashion. The bad news -- results will cover only 2,600-plus athletes. This is the smallest turnout at a WAVA or WMA world championships since 1981, when the meet held in Christchurch, New Zealand, drew 2,400 athletes.

Larry Stuart, one of the greatest javelin throwers in masters history, says he's retiring from competition after being robbed of another potential world age-group record. For at least the second time this season, meet organizers failed to provide a steel tape to measure his best throw -- a necessity for records consideration. Larry posted a note on the Javelin Discussion Forum:

Picture this: the front page of MLB.com featuring a single group photo of commissioner Bud Selig and a bunch of balding club owners. Or this: the gateway page to IAAF.org boasting a lone shot of IAAF President Lamine Diack and his council cronies. Absurd? Ridiculous? But of course. No sensible sports site is illustrated with bureaucrats. Then there's WMA.

USATF Masters Track & Field Chairman George Mathews has a strongly worded column in the current June issue of National Masters News titled "Status of the Inaugural World Indoor Championships." Traditionally and rightly, the same column is posted within days on the USATF Web site. But not this month. I wrote to USATF webmaster Keith Lively to ask about the delay (since NMN has been out for two weeks).

Tony Young of Redmond, Washington, turned 41 in April but hasn't shown signs of slowing after his record-setting M40 debut in 2002. Saturday at the Seattle International Track & Field Classic, Tony lowered his own USA masters outdoor mile record to 4:07.25, breaking the 4:09.61 he ran at the same meet a year earlier. Tony described the race in an e-mail note to me the day after Father's Day (and later sent photo of finish sprint, taken by John Kaiser). Tony is in red.

The WMA Web site recently deep-sixed its public Forum. Could the WMA Constitution and Bylaws be next? A close reading of WMA rules reveals that at least four members of the WMA Council -- including two-term President Torsten Carlius of Sweden -- are guilty of violating conflict-of-interest provisions of the world governing body of masters track and field -- serious offenses that merit impeachment and removal from office.

I'm distressed by some reactions to my WMA conflict-of-interest rant. They boil down to: "Say what?" Or "Who cares?" The former call my screed "disjointed" and confusing. The latter wonder what the big deal is. OK, I'll try again. But first I should make clear that I'm not against Masters Games. Except when they are overpriced, I've been generally supportive of these multisport extravaganzas.

Officials of World Masters Athletics are not all ethics-challenged. Many quietly execute their duties with sensitivity to the sport and its athletes. One is world champion and world record holder Ralph Romain of Trinidad and Tobago, one of the greatest masters quarter-milers of all time. I alerted him to my WMA conflict post, and he kindly responded.

The German town of Sindelfingen hasn't officially been chosen to host the inaugural 2004 World Indoor Masters Championships. Indeed, WMA has not even officially scheduled a 2004 WC indoor meet. But WMA Emperor Torsten Carlius already is touting the event Web site. Carlius pretends to take pains to call the meet site a WMA Council recommendation. And the Web site appears to be unready to proclaim itself the host as well. It has nearly no content. So why even advertise its existence?

I'm a little worried about the Puerto Rico WMA organizers. They don't have Cuba on their list of entered countries, but news stories have said that at least three former Cuban stars have been specifically invited to compete -- including Olympic 800 great Ana Fidelia Quirot, who turned 40 in March. I've written a bunch of WMA honchos, but still no reply on the Cuban situation. Also see stories in Spanish and rough English.

Tony Young, 41, of Redmond, Wash. -- competing against runners his own age for once -- smashed the listed American M40 outdoor record for 3,000 meters Saturday at the Hayward Classic in Eugene, Oregon. And he wasn't the only great miler making the rounds. In the W65 mile, Canadian Diane Palmason, 65, clocked 6:21.54 to better the listed WMA world age-group record of 6:32.47 by Jeanne Daprano in 2002. However, a few weeks earlier she ran the mile in 6:19.04 at the Review Kajaks International Track Classic in Richmond, B.C.

Next week's 15th World Masters Athletics Championships will have dozens of dramatic dashes -- but none as momentous as the slowest. For the first time in WAVA/WMA meet history, two centenarians will line up beside each other in the same race. Waldo McBurney of Kansas and Everett Hosack of Ohio will face each other on Saturday, July 5, in the M100 100. With luck, they'll tangle again on Tuesday, July 8, in the 200-meter dash final.

Like many masters, I eat up any advice on how to get faster and stronger. Now I've finished a book that does something better than build biceps -- it tones your thinking about training. "Ultimate Fitness: The Quest for Truth About Exercise and Health" is a stunner. Written by W55 science reporter Gina Kolata of The New York Times, it potentially ranks with "Silent Spring" and "The Feminine Mystique" as a cultural milestone. All because she asks some simple questions about exercise and fitness. The answers are the shockers.