Assessing Team USA’s Performance
As no doubt you already know, the U.S. Olympic track and field team took home 29 medals. This was only one medal short of the audacious goal set by former USA Track and Field CEO Doug Logan as part of “Project 30″, a major overhaul of the organization.
When that target was set, it was routinely ridiculed by longtime observers of the sport as impossible. Various news articles amd press releases in the last few days all point to 1992 as the last time the US hit the 30-medal mark, but that doesn’t really do the number justice. It makes it sound like 30 medals was the norm before that, and it most certainly was not.
The US won 40 medals in 1984, when most of the Eastern Block nations boycotted. In track and field parlance, you would call that total “wind aided” and ignore it. The total of 30 medals in 1992 total came in the aftermath of the fall of the Berlin Wall and the implosion of various Communist regimes. So if that one isn’t “wind aided”, it had a borderline reading of 2.0 m/s.
Besides those two, when was the last time the USA won 30 or more track and field medals at an Olympics?
Would you believe 1956? Yeah, it’s been that long.
You and I both know much has changed since then, not the least of which is that there were only nine events contested for women back then, whereas there are 23 now. But those extra fourteen events we have now only gave Team USA five of the 29 medals they just won. When the difference in women’s events are taken into account, this is still the best Team USA performance since 1968.
Things that didn’t go well
What’s even more remarkable about this total is that not everything went well. In fact, a whole lot of things went wrong.
*The men won just three gold medals, the lowest total ever at an Olympics or Worlds.
*There was just one medal, a bronze, in the traditional strengths of the men’s 100, 200 and 400.
*Three of the world’s best men’s shot putters combined for just one medal.
*Reigning World high jump champions Jesse Williams (outdoor) and Chaunte Lowe (indoor) both bombed out early and did not win medals.
*The men’s 4×400 relay got beaten (as opposed to conceding a win by not running or a doping DQ) for only the third time ever in Olympic and World Championships competition.
*Last year’s #1-ranked women’s 1500 runner fell and was a DNF, and the defending world champion didn’t qualify to the final.
*The women’s marathoners, all three of whom were considered medal threats, ended up 10th, 11th, and a DNF.
*Two different women’s shot putters won medals at the most recent indoor and outdoor Worlds, but were not close in London.
Depth of performance
If all these things went wrong, how in the heck was this the best U.S. team performance in forty-four years? It was depth of performance.
Just one example: when those two World champion high jumpers had bad days and were out of the medals, a pair of senior-to-be collegians came through and picked up the slack for two completely unexpected medals.
Despite their seeming omnipresence, distance runners won only two medals. Team USA has exceeded that six different times at the Olympics and Worlds, even after you ignore 1984. In terms of depth of performance, though, this was the best meet ever for US men’s distance runners. They had the most top-eight finishes in post-WWII games (ten, breaking the record of eight in 1964). As noted on the TFN message boards: the 2012 U.S. men’s team became the first U.S. Olympic men’s team since 1964 to place somebody in the top eight in all the middle distance and distance events, 800 through marathon.
Overall, Team USA had 56 top-eight finishes, an increase of 22% over the next-best result of recent years. Those top-eight finishes came in 31 out of the 47 events.
Where did the medals come from?
So Team USA bombed in the men’s long sprints, didn’t make up the total in the distances, and continued to struggle in the throwing events with just one medal. Where in the heck did the medals come from?
The field events were the biggest area. Two years ago, after Benita Fitzgerald Mosley was named USATF’s High Performance Director, she was quoted by TFN as calling “London field-event medals ‘low-hanging fruit, ready to be picked.” Here Team USA won ten medals (if you include the field-event heavy decathlon and heptathon), compared to four in Beijing.
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