This Week In Track & Field: LA28’s Tough Standards Have Been Revealed, Beijing 2027 Schedule Thoughts + Agnes Ngetich’s In / Yomif Kejelcha Out For Valencia Marathon

Chris Chavez (0:02)

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All right. It is Friday, November 13th. I'm Chris Chavez.

Preet Majithia (1:56)

I'm Preet Majithia.

Chris Chavez (1:57)

And this week in Track and Field, this episode is coming to you a little bit later. I was out of the office enjoying a nice baby moon.

Just, you know, we're a couple months away, I guess, before I become a dad, which is kind of crazy to think about. But a lot happened while I was gone. And so, especially, I think, one of the mornings, waking up to my phone buzzing at 7 a.m., local time where I was. And all of a sudden, I realized, oh, no, the 2028 Olympic standards have just been released. And it was text from you. It was text from, you know, my buddy Tim Rossi. Our group chat was going off. So, not ideal timing. But I did, you know, glance at my phone, read the release, looked at the standards, thought about them a lot while sitting poolside.

And so, I had a couple days now to gather some thoughts. But apologies, I guess, to the listeners who maybe expected us to jump on and do an emergency podcast immediately after that would have happened. Had it been just a regular day where I was at home, Preet, I think we would have been ready.

Preet Majithia (3:10)

We would have been straight on there. I mean, no, this is, we've been waiting for this one. We've been looking forward to it.

And yeah, I couldn't be more excited. I mean, we've got two nerdy things to talk about in one podcast, Chris. I mean, could it get better than that?

Chris Chavez (3:27)

There's, yeah, so we have the 2028 LA Standards. And then we also got the release of the 2027 World Championships in Beijing. The full timetable is out. I have to admit, I haven't dove fully into the timetable as much as I did the standards. So I'll be curious on your thoughts, but I did start doing a lot of time conversions and that sort of thing. So we'll talk about those later on in the show.

Let's hit a couple brief news stories, I guess, to start. So good news, bad news from the upcoming Valencia Marathon. What do you want to tackle first? Should we go bad news?

Preet Majithia (4:12)

Yeah, let's go bad news first, I think.

Chris Chavez (4:14)

All right. Well, so the bad news is that Yomif Kejelcha has withdrawn from the Valencia Marathon on December, which is taking place on December 6th due to injury. It was announced this morning, woke up to that news. And so now that means that the second fastest marathoner in history is out of what potentially was like the last fast marathon that everyone's looking at on the calendar. So pretty, it was a bummer, especially because we'll get to a little bit more on the women's side, there's been a lot of money added into the race in Valencia with what is a million-dollar world record bonus that has been ponied up for the event. And so everyone kind of presumed that this would be Yomif Kejelcha versus John Carrier, the Boston Marathon champion, two guys who have, John Carrier has run 201, Yomif ran 159 back in April. And so that was kind of the clash of the Titans. And now it's basically going to be John Carrier's race to lose. Although there are still some strong contenders in the race who could try and push him.