Worlds, August 19th

These posts from the last two days I was at Worlds are long overdue - the competition has officially ended as of tonight - but I think I needed some time to digest everything.
Day 2 for me was just as exciting as day one. I had the pleasure of watching a former Ivy runner in the 400 heats: Erison Hurtault, the former Columbia superstar who was representing the tiny Caribbean island nation Dominica. He has citizenship there because his parents hail from the island. I have mixed feelings about competing for a country in which you have citizenship but do not reside. On the one hand you have some people like the guy from New Jersey who plays for the Italian national soccer team. I assume that like JP, he got his Italian Passport by virtue of having a grandmother or something from Italy. Similarly, Felix Sanchez, a former Olympic champion in the 400 hurdles, runs for the Dominican Republic, even though he had never been there before donning their singlet (he was born and raised in Los Angeles) there really wasn't any reason for him to do that, since he was good enough to run for the US. Then you have cases like Hurtault, who would probably not qualify for Worlds coming out of the US, so it's cool for him that he gets to do that. I've been saying for a while that Dwayne should cash in on Grenadian citizenship; I'm fairly certain he would break the national records from 3,000m on up in his first try.
I didn't have as good a ticket as I did for the steeplechase but I found a loophole in the stadium's architecture that allowed me to get as good or better seats than I had the night before. It turns out that they were actually pretty strict about checking to see that your ticket is for the section you're trying to enter (as long as it's on the first floor, the upper deck they don't care about). However, there are several bathrooms on the ground level that are accessible from both outside and inside the stadium. The bathroom attendants don't give a shit if you have a ticket, so I was able to bypass the sentries completely. Once I came out the other side, I had my pick of empty seats. I happened to choose a seat right near Chelsea Johnson, the babe-a-licious silver medalist pole-vaulter from the good old U S of A. I got an autograph. She didn't seem to want to chat at all. This trick proved to be especially useful the next day for the 200m final, but I digress.
My new seat also happened to be right near the discus circle. Rewind: back in the nosebleeds, I had sat next to this German guy who was a decathelete. He belonged to the same athletic club as one of the German discus throwers, Robert Harting, knew him personally, etc., so was telling me a little bit about that. He mentioned that he would be pleased if Harting got top 5. Fastforward: near the end of the night, Harting is in no less than second place with 4 of six throws down. However, the leader broke his own national record that he had set earlier in the night on his penultimate throw. That left Harting with one throw to grab glory for all of Deutschland at the expense of their neighboring Poles. So on the second to last throw of the entire competition Harting unleashes and sends his discus past the 85 meter mark, where the crowd knows it is contention to overtake the leader's best throw. When the final measurement is flashed on the infield scoreboards the Germans erupt, just like the night before for their jav thrower, except there are more people in the stadium tonight, so it's like exponentially more nuts. I knew either way that the crowd reaction would be great so I set my camera on video mode for the Polish guy's final throw. He dutifully went back to the throwing circle to try to recapture the gold medal but fell well short, at which point absolute pandemonium struck. There were a bunch of Harting's buddies in the first couple rows so Harting runs over to them and Incredible Hulks his tunic off. I have video of before the last throw up until about this point, which I will post as soon as I can. He then grabs Berlino, the mascot, and dangles him upside down behind his back. Harting takes a shirtless victory lap, sending the German's into a frenzy in which ever section he passes. It was just absurd to see, but I guess I wished that this kind of thing could happen in the US. The next day, I saw a Berlin tabloid with a picture of Harting holding a handle of Smirnoff. Guess he didn' t have any relays to worry about.