If you’ve never seen a race walk, it’s like watching a lot of discomforted people hurrying, with determined and stressful purpose, to get to the nearest bathroom.
That, you’ve seen. And experienced.
If you’ve successfully navigated such a familiar situation but you’ve never seen it as a competition but are eager to, you are in for the same feeling of relief and afterglow today. Because FINALLY — it’s here!
I kid you not.
Today — Wednesday, August 7 — the marathon race walk mixed relay competition will be decided, over the hills and through the woods in the 2024 Paris Summer Olympics.
For more than 42 kilometers, a male and female competitor will alternate every 10 kilometers or so until they’ve crossed the finish line, which in American miles is 26 and a smidge. Male-female-male-female. No baton to pass at each relay point, just a low five. Like tag team wrestling.
Will take between 4-and-a-half to 5 hours, give or take: no one knows for sure since this is an Olympic first.
This is no slap at walking. This bureau is pro-walk. Like to walk. LOVE to walk. Try to walk two or three miles a day, 10,000-steps-plus and all that.
But casually. Not competitively. The only things I try to beat while walking are the sun and my age.
Those of a certain age will remember race walking in black-and-white on television, either at the Olympics in the 1960s or on “Wide, Wide World of (Sometimes Walking) Sports, and Jim McKay trying to come up with something to say while, with Jim, we watched a pack of people walking as if they really, REALLY wanted to start running.
Want a professional challenge? Try step-by-step play-by-play.
Best wishes.
Let’s face it: race walking is goofy. It requires a gait that demands you swallow your pride, and maybe a corn cob, at the door. It is not for either the faint of heart or the faint of colon.
It’s a tough sport.
Race walking became an Olympic sport back in 1908 at the London Summer Olympics, and I can only imagine how:
“Hey, Uncle Jules, since you’re the head of the Olympic Committee this go-’round, think you can make a sport for me? I would like to compete and get a medal but methinks jumping and especially the running, by golly, that appears tiresome.”
Boom! Race walk.
Those who can, run, do; those who can’t, walk.
Alas, this seems to be a part of Olympic fever. When you watch (or more likely just hear, like me) about some of these sports, doesn’t it sound like, “Well, I did all that 50 years ago —at church camp.”
Ping pong and trampoline. Skateboarding and bicycle jumping. And the most daring, pride-swallowing stretch of all, 3-on-3 basketball. Now we are taking real sports and dividing them up? Next is 2-on-2 basketball and then 3-on-3 soccer and on it goes.
If we ARE going to have 3-on-3 Olympic basketball, it should be “call your own fouls.” How is it true 3-on-3 otherwise?
Come on guys …
This is not an edict or proposal to do away with any of the Olympic “sports.” It’s like college football bowl games: if someone wants to play them and watch them and pay for them to be played, great. If it’s college football bowl games, I’m watching. Some of these Olympic things, neg.
To each his own.
I’m just saying this: don’t sell this stuff to me as Real Olympics. We know that while the Alamo Bowl is a college bowl game, it’s not one of the Big Six bowl games. And while breakdancing is called an Olympic sport now, it’s not the 100m or the 4×400. To paraphrase, don’t walk on me and tell me you’re running.
For the record, Americans aren’t walkers of the Olympic variety. We scored a silver back in Antwerp in ’20 (NINETEEN 20) and a couple of bronze deals 50 years ago. In the individual 20-kilometer competitions last week, the winners were from Ecuador and China. Took between 80 to 85 minutes to walk the 12-and-a-half American miles.
That’s booking it for a walk, between 8 and 9 miles per hour.
The Americans? We didn’t walk. And we ain’t medley walking today, either. We’ll be running and jumping.
Anyway, that’s it. Gotta run…
Contact Teddy at teddy@latech.edu