TRACK AND FIELD : Top Marathoners Are Out of This World

Don’t look for the world’s best marathoners to compete at the track and field World Championships in Tokyo. Especially don’t look for the best Americans.

The main problem is timing. The marathon is a spring and fall sport. Most world-class runners schedule two marathons a year. Asking them to run an extra one in August is a bit much. Asking them to run an extra one for no appearance money and no official prize money is way too much.

World-class marathoners have already planned their 1992 schedules, most scheduling around the Olympics. Most will run two marathons--some sort of qualifying race and the Olympic marathon.

The problem in the United States is that none of the best women showed up for the national championship race, the Long Beach Marathon on May 5. That was designated as the World Championship qualifier, with the top three finishers eligible, provided they ran the qualifying standard of 2 hours 35 minutes in the past year.

The top two finishers, Maria Trujillo and Gordon Bloch, had done that. But the third-place finisher had not met the standard. Officials decided that they would go to the top of the rankings and begin asking who wanted to go. They called Kim Jones, Joan Samuelson and Kathy O’Brien, the three runners, who may constitute the Olympic team for Barcelona. All had other plans.

U.S. officials are still looking for a third woman to send.

Among the men it is somewhat easier.

Steve Spence and John Tuttle, by virtue of their victories at Columbus and Twin Cities, respectively, have already made the team. The top American at New York was supposed to round out the squad but the first American finished 29th with a time 12 minutes slower than the qualifying standard.

The men, too, went to the top of the list, seeing there Mark Plaatjes, who won the L.A. Marathon and whose 2:10:29 is the fastest by an American in some years.

But is Plaatjes an American? The former South African is in the process of getting his citizenship and has been cleared to run internationally. He has not been cleared to represent the United States yet.

That may happen as early as this weekend, when U.S. track officials plead Plaatjes’ case at a meeting of the International Amateur Athletic Federation.

The best American women don’t want to go. The best American man would like to go, but may not be allowed to.

Multiply this situation by every federation in the world and it may tell you why the marathon at the World Championships may not be at a world-class level.

Daley Thompson, two-time Olympic champion in the decathlon, will try to qualify for the World Championships by competing in a decathlon in Spain June 1-2.

Thompson, 32, attempted to meet the qualifying standard earlier this month at Irvine but fell short of the 7,850 points he needed when he dropped out after nine of the 10 events.

Thompson competes for Great Britain but has trained in Orange County since 1984, when the irrepressible decathlete won the Olympic gold medal and the hearts of many fans with his antics. He set the world record, but that was Thompson’s last great effort. He tried but failed to win his third consecutive decathlon title in the 1988 Seoul Olympics.

Since then, Thompson has undergone knee surgery and battled inconsistency and the multi-event athlete’s greatest enemy--failure to finish. The competition in Spain may be Thompson’s last chance to qualify for the World Championships, beginning August 24.

For the absolutely final time, Ben Johnson and Carl Lewis have (this is for sure) agreed to run (really fast) the 100 meters (no kidding) against one another (no stand-ins) July 1 in France.

You might have heard that they were going to run together, for the first time since the Seoul Olympic final, in Seville, Spain, on May 30. Not correct. Johnson and Lewis will both be at the meet, true enough, and they will both be sprinting, but not against one another.

There were other stories, purely hype, understand, that Lewis and Johnson were going to race in Japan in some sort of match race designed for television. It was never seriously contemplated.

And, just to clear things up, the statement by the president of the international track and field federation that he wouldn’t allow such a race had no bearing on anything. Who needs his permission when you have the backing of television, anyway?

Speaking of money, Raymond Lorre, meet director at Villnueve d’Ascq, would neither confirm nor deny that Lewis and Johnson, who are not even the best in the world this season, would receive $300,000 each for 10 seconds of work. Good. Best to keep the money out of it. They are doing it for the love of the sport, after all.

However, Lorre did say one curious thing. When asked how he managed to land the two sprinters, he said, “When you have the money, you have the athletes.”

What did he mean by that?

Track and Field Notes

Mary Slaney ran her first competitive race in more than a year May 11. She was outkicked by Shelly Steely in the last 100 meters of the 1,500 at a meet in Eugene, Ore. Steely ran 4 minutes 7.92 seconds, Slaney 4:08.51. . . . South African runner Elana Meyer’s world-best half-marathon Sunday caps a two-month span in which she has set five national records. Meyer set South African records at 3,000, 5,000, 10,000 on the track and 10K on the roads before her record-setting half-marathon. Her time of 67 minutes 59 seconds bettered Ingrid Kristiansen’s world best of 68.31. However, since Meyer is a South African, her time will not be recognized as a record.

About 13 German athletes have been training at high altitude in Flagstaff, Ariz. Many of them will compete in the Bruce Jenner Bud Light Classic Saturday at San Jose. . . . The Jenner meet has one of its best fields ever, highlighted by the men’s 3,000. The race has Steve Cram of Great Britain, the world record-holder in the mile, and Steve Scott and Doug Padilla of the United States. Jackie Joyner-Kersee, the world record-holder in the heptathlon, will open her season at San Jose with a “mini-heptathlon”--100-meter hurdles, high jump and shotput.

Ben Johnson has at last found a coach, Clyde Duncan, former coach at Arizona State. Duncan has been working with Johnson in Phoenix. Duncan left ASU amid controversy, including NCAA probation for the program. . . . Michael Johnson ran 20.02 for 200 meters in Brazil on Sunday, adding that he hadn’t pushed himself. Scary. The soft-spoken Johnson said he believes he is capable of setting a world record at the distance. The record is the oldest running record on the books--19.72 by Pietro Mennea of Italy, set at altitude in Mexico City in 1979.