i win

prediction contest over.

winner: me
loser: everyone else

i get full points for the men's 4x100 and men's 400. i was really close at the steeple and both the 10,000's, but kara goucher's bronze was a shock

allyson felix was the star of the meet, blowing away the field in the 200 and finishing with a second leg on the 4x400 that made the rest of the runners look more like retarded geriatric sea slugs than world class athletes

tyson gay also won three golds, and jeremy wariner proved himself to be practically invincible. he also has cool shades


ryan was right about the japanese men in the 4x100. they ran 38.03 despite an average individual season best on their team of about 10.2. Unfortunately for them it was the deepest 4x100 ever.

i watched the women's marathon, and learned a lot about that race distance by seeing the whole thing through. it was a war of attrition in the top pack, which really began dwindling around 30K, but ndereba played it perfectly, hanging back early and making only one move in the whole race - the last one. reiko tosa's final 5k was incredible. after leading the pack for most of the race, she looked like she was dropped, but somehow overcame a 20-m gap from the lead pack late in the race even while visibly falling to shambles physically. she amazingly chased down zhu and jepkosgei for the bronze. a very strange marathon, in that it was very hot, but the favorites still won

the men's 5000 was possibly the dumbest race i had ever seen athletes of that caliber run. not to take anything from lagat, but when the entire field waits until the last 700m of the race to make a move, they shouldn't be surprised that the man with the best raw speed cleans up. the lack of strength runners like sihine and bekele, and lack of people who don't have a chance but just feel like running some 64's at the front of the pack early, like the japanese in the heats, meant not a single person wanted to take the pace. consequently almost the entire pack went into the bell together.

right after that the 800 was even more dumbfounding. i have never heard of an elite field going through in 55 on the first lap. that's what they do in SCIAC, not World Championships. Even after such a slow lap the second lap was not very impressive. Borzakovskiy was lucky to get anything - his race plan relies on the runners in front of him dying off in the last 200, which they won't do off that sort of a pace.

4x400. US. lights out.