I sat in the press tribune at Hampden Park this weekend, nursing a lukewarm pie, watching Northern Ireland’s Kate O’Connor supposedly take the lead over England's Jade O’Dowda in the Commonwealth Games standings. The local media is calling it a heroic athletic effort. The broadcasters are practically weeping into their microphones. I, however, call it a damning indictment of this generation’s pathological refusal to commit to a bit.
After four events—the 100-meter hurdles, high jump, shot put, and 200-meter dash—O'Connor sits in first place. Let that sink in. Four distinct, entirely unrelated athletic events in a single day. And she plans to do three more tomorrow. It is an absolute disgrace, a triumph of the modern athlete's inability to simply pick a lane and stay in it until their cartilage finally gives out.
The headlines this morning are praising O'Connor for "bouncing back" after a supposedly weak showing in the high jump. Let me ask you this: how can you bounce back in a sport where you can just completely change the sport fifteen minutes later? Oh, you had a bad jump? Good news, you do not have to jump anymore, now you get to throw a heavy rock. That isn't bouncing back. That is fleeing the scene of a crime. If a pole vaulter has a bad jump, they don't get to go swim a few laps in the aquatics center to make up the difference. They have to sit on the bench and think about what they have done.
Back in my day, if an athlete tried to leave the shot put circle to go run a sprint, their coach would have physically tackled them into the astroturf. You picked your discipline when you were twelve years old, and you did it until your shoulder required surgical reconstruction. That was the quiet, working-class dignity of track and field. Now, we are handing out gold medals to athletes simply because they have the attention span of a golden retriever in a tennis ball factory and demand to do a little bit of everything.
I had lunch with a senior official from the league office in Monaco last spring—I won’t name names, but he pays for his sparkling water with a black card—and I warned him this was coming. I told him that if we keep indulging the multi-eventers, we are going to lose the casual fan. The average viewer sitting on their couch with a beer cannot process an athlete who throws a heavy metal ball at breakfast and then hurdles over plastic fences after lunch. It dilutes the brand. You don't see NFL linemen taking a break in the third quarter to return a punt just because they felt like trying it. They understand their role in the system.
Furthermore, the scoring system for the heptathlon is a bureaucratic nightmare designed specifically to reward mediocrity. You do not actually have to win a single event to win the gold medal. You just have to be perfectly, adequately fine at all of them, accumulating arbitrary math points based on a conversion table invented in a Swiss basement. It is the athletic equivalent of a participation trophy for generalists. Where are the intangibles in being "pretty good" at the high jump? Where is the specialized, obsessive neurosis that builds a true champion?
We are witnessing a catastrophic breakdown in positional discipline, where athletes feel entitled to just wander over to the long jump pit whenever they get bored of running in circles.
And let’s talk about the sheer physical recklessness of it all. Participating in seven different taxing track events over two days is the exact opposite of load management. It is a dereliction of duty to your own ligaments. A true competitor preserves their body for the one, highly specific biomechanical movement they were contracted to perform. O'Connor is out here risking a catastrophic hamstring tear in the 200-meter dash that could completely ruin her javelin throw tomorrow. It shows a complete lack of foresight. How can you trust an athlete in the clutch when they are actively volunteering to exhaust themselves in six other entirely unrelated sports before the final gun goes off?
Look at Jade O'Dowda, currently sitting in second place. She is complicit in this too. The two of them are locked in a battle to see who can be the most successfully indecisive person in Glasgow. If either of them had a shred of competitive instinct, they would have looked at the schedule for day two, identified their single strongest remaining event, and flatly refused to participate in the others.
O'Connor still has three events left to "win" this so-called gold medal: the long jump, the javelin, and the 800-meter run. That is three distinct opportunities for her to look deep inside herself, walk off the track, and announce to the world that she is exclusively a javelin specialist now. If she truly respects the game, she will throw her running spikes in the trash, hire a throwing coach, and stop being so greedy with the stadium's equipment. Until then, I will be at the hammer throw, watching athletes who still understand the sacred value of just spinning in a circle until they vomit.