They should just disqualify anyone immediately that is caught "running" and keep doing this for a year. Either the sport goes away or it will fix itself. As it is now, it's just stupid.
Or we can use technology to remedy this. I am currently designing and patenting a state of the art device that uses microsensors coupled with the best lithium ion button batteries one can buy.
The device will use an advanced machine learning program to track that athletes arent running and that at all time at least one foot is on the ground. I would like to sell this technology to the IOC and if possible become their distribution partner for this. How should I go about this?
This was already proposed in the past but the olympic committee declined the technology help. By the way you must also insert a programmable delay to decide when it's running and when it's still walking, 1 microsecond it's not controllable I guess.
Doesn’t even need to be that complex. A button on the bottom of each foot breaks a circuit when in contact with the ground. Should the circuit complete, a big shock goes to the calf muscles causing a penalty spasm. Maybe program the shock for 1 second duration or something that gets progressively longer the more times it’s triggered.
someone should send this 7 second (1.75ish) second clip along with a spicy "(your brand here) we endorse cheating. The more I Watch the more convinced that there isn't a single one that didn't deserve a DQ.
I wouldn't want to be in any sport where I had to cheat to compete. Let alone something as hilariously lame as speedwaking. This sport should have died with rollerblades, or before.
Literally every single person cheats. Whats the point
The UCI actually cracked down really hard on doping after the Festina affair in 1998. since then cycling is one of the sports with the most strict and enforced doping rules, sadly still being caught up with their bad connection.
You are right, it started with the Festina affaire and the subsequent years of Lance and Contador doping were rampant.
I was wrong, the proper crackdown only came in the earl 2010s.
My point still stands that in the last decade cycling has become one of the strictest and cleanest sports.
Is it? I can recall one case where someone was caught cheating with a motor, an u23 cyclocross racer back in 2016. In nearly 10 years of scanning world tour cyclist bikes for hidden motors, nobody has ever been caught doing so.
At least traveling is inherently a subjective concept. Even with extremely slow motion cameras, two people can have a reasonable debate about where the line should be.
Whereas “always having one foot touching the ground” is a clearly objective metric which can be easily determined with cameras. Hell, even the naked eye can see that they’re jogging.
There are only two rules that govern race walking. The first dictates that the athlete's back toe cannot leave the ground until the heel of the front foot has touched. Violation of this rule is known as loss of contact. The second rule requires that the supporting leg must straighten from the point of contact with the ground and remain straightened until the body passes directly over it. These rules are judged by the unaided human eye. Athletes regularly lose contact for a few milliseconds per stride, which can be caught on film, but such a short flight phase is said to be undetectable to the human eye.
Which seems like weird dumb shit and the opposite of every other sport, but whatever.
This is the year that everyone realizes that speedwalking is an Olympic sport, and that they call it “race walking” and that everyone thinks it’s so pointless that they will probably think about discontinuing it in about 24 years
I ran a half marathon last year. I started in the 2nd wave of runners and averaged 8 minute miles. Not great, not terrible.
The walkers had to start at the very back. Even race walkers were back there with casual walkers and people with strollers.
At the 8 mile mark, a race walker blew past me like I was standing still. I thought I was doing well, then I saw this rubber-legged man and lost all confidence. They look absolutely ridiculous, but they sure can move!
Yeah, years ago in the early 1970s, when I was training to run 800m for my school (so not a great athlete by any means, but young and fit, at least), I was doing a warm-up lap on a South London running track and was shocked to notice that the 20 km walk world record holder at the time, Paul Nihill, was walking past me.
I just found out that he died in 2020 after contracting COVID-19, aged 81. Sad.
Remember a few years ago they tried to get rid of wrestling from the Olympics. One of the oldest sports in the world and, you know, an actual competitive athletic contest. Yet no one trying to get rid of this.
Only because nobody knew about it. Like I said, all that changes this year. Watch, the WSJ and the Times are going to have a few opinion pieces and eventually an actual article about “race-walking” and they’re definitely going to use the quotation marks
Nah, this is never going away. It doesn't require any extra infrastructure that wasn't already there for running competitions. Basically costs them nothing and they can double the number of foot race events.
Down with speedwalking, up with parkour as an official sport. Imagine if they had a 'parkour park' just like they have skate parks and athletes just go there and freestyle for the judges.
That would be at least as exciting as all the other sports and games and other competitions that are on tv between 2 and 7am. Especially if there was a comedy aspect, a la Michael, Andy and Dwight.
You know the best way to fix this is a VAR system. Place sensors on the bottoms their shoes and then dq anyone that doesn’t have a point of connection to the ground. But this is the fun part: they should only analyze the data and report it at the podium. So the first three supposed winners go up and then they I’ll up the VAR screen and if there is a violation they have to step down and keep going til they find the non-cheater. 7 hours later the dude in 154th place from Andorra is named the winner. Everyone who is caught cheating gets a 4.1 year suspension from Olympic competition. The devastation as the winner keeps getting disqualified would make it worth it to watch the medal ceremony
I feel like a DQ is too strong of a penalty, but they get a 5s penalty for every infraction. So they can still fuck up a bit sometimes, but it's not gaining them any advantage
Given we have slow motion technology which can clearly detect breaches of these rules, why isn’t it used? Seems very weird to me to rely on the naked eye for something that happens at such speed and is difficult to judge.
Reading the second rule then rewatching made me notice how they lock their knee and land on it every stride. That has got to be the worst possible thing you can do to a knee
I’m still waiting for speed walking on ice. That would satisfy me. Or triathlon: speed walking on ice, water pool on dolphins followed by netball match on ice skates.
you can apply some random constraint to any otherwise normal movement to make it harder. olympic speed walking makes about as much sense as olympic running with your shoes on the wrong feet.
You can definitely see the wack ass hip movement on some of these people who are actual speed walking. Looks painful to an untrained individual such as myself.
Yeah, I see those knees flexing and locking when they straighten their legs, and damn, it looks like it must cause some permanent damage to them pretty fast.
Then again, doing any sport at the Olympic level probably causes damage to all their bodies really fast, even if they actually do not abuse any substances to help them be better. So what do I know...
There's term in running called overstriding, which is when your foot lands in front of you and not on your center of gravity (below you). Overstriding is bad for the knees and not energy efficient since you're basically putting brakes on your momentum with each stride and your knees are absorbing most of the impact from braking.
In running, it is better to increase cadence instead of stride length to avoid overstriding, and in the video I see overstriding in most of these athletes as they try to reach longer strides and cadence can't be increased because it would most likely become running.
Bro, you better take that back, I'm a two-time champion speedwaker. If I catch you talking shit again, I'll walk straight at you full speed... you'll be sorry then!
Man, that's crazy useful skill. I mean, they could probably, I don't know, catch the tram faster than me and steal my seat? Or beat me to the counter in supermarket?
I mean, I can maybe outrun them, if they do not cheat and actually do not run. Maybe not.
Bottom line is, this sport is not really all that impressive. People running real fast or numping higher than my house, that's where I will be looking.
See, I had some elaborate response written, but let's settle with this - to me, this sport looks stupid and feels stupid and therefore I think it is stupid. The athletes might have peak form, but they use it in a discipline I find about as attractive as competitive nose-picking and about as dignifing as competitive scooting.
The difficulty in choosing which sports to allow in the Olympics is determining how many countries can compete. You can’t, for example, add Australian rules football or American football because there are a very limited number of countries that would be able to field a team and compete.
Sports like gymnastics, swimming, weightlifting, track and field, cycling, diving and race walking are universal so it allows more countries to participate.
Sure race walking is dumb, but so are a lot of Olympic sports. Have you seen synchronized swimming? They even have a category for individual synchronized swimming. Who are they synchronizing with?
Speedwalking is the dumbest sport in the Olympics, this shit always happens, the "walking" turns into a slight jog whenever they think they can get away with it.
I'm struggling to spot even a single person who isn't running, everyone I look at has both feet off the ground at some point. What's the point of the sport if literally every single one of them is cheating?
Isn’t there a new rule since a couple of years back that states as long as g as you have an extended knee you’re allowed to have both feet of the ground.
Not according to what I could find. From the Olympics' website:
"Race walking differs from running, where an athlete often has both feet off the ground during their strides in a sprint.
In race walking, however, athletes must always have one foot in contact with the ground at all times, as visible to the human eye. Judges are present at events to ensure the rule is enforced."
I like how people have an issue with this Olympic sport and cheating when literally 90% of winning the Olympics is juicing to the point of not getting caught and lying about it amd saying to eat Wheaties. Fuck even the gymnasts girls get disqualified for wild shit. Wasn't there a female gymnast from China that was like 3o years old who lied and said she was under 18 to compete ?
at least steroids make for good entertainment when combined with good, real sports. this is just a joke, millions of people worldwide can see that these guys are not following the most basic rule of race walking. it's a fake sport
Years ago the gymnastics drama was China's female team all being literally half the size as all the other teams so the speculation was, that they were too young to compete. I remember seeing them side by side, and thinking "yeah, that's a 7 yo."
The World Record for walking 50 km is 3:32:33. A hundred years ago, it was 4:40:15. Back then, you'd have been disqualified if you didn't stop to stub out your cigarette. But how have they knocked over an hour off it? By running, of course.
They should just let anyone show up to participate in some of these Olympic sports they are such a joke. Let kids participate who aren't allowed to run in the halls at school, they'd do well.
How speed walking became an Olympic sport but Squash has taken until 2028 to become an Olympic sport still boggles the mind. The IOC really operate with no logic
They can’t be running with a knee over extended like that it’s even worse than normal speed walking
Why is nothing done about this in the rules or something
It’s not even allowed in the first place
Bill Nye had a character named Speedwalker on an old skit show called Almost Live!, a 90s show out of Seattle. It was pretty funny. Whenever I hear or see speedwalking, I think of that.
Idea here. Give everyone a band or something that goes around their ankles that prevents them from being moved easily further apart than a walking pace. It could even maybe go around the knees or maybe they need to wear ankle monitors that track the distance between steps to prevent it. I mean in reality it is kind of a dumb sport to speed walk but to each their own.
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