U.S. Seeks Better Footing in Track

At the Wall Street Journal, "U.S. Seeks to Lift Athletes After Management Missteps":

LONDON — America's track and field team enters the London Games in a funk.

For decades, its men's 4 x 100-meter relay team was one of the most successful in Olympic sports, winning gold in 15 of 20 Games through 2000. Then came the losing streak.

Great Britain won the relay finals in Athens in 2004. Four years later in Beijing, the U.S. team failed to finish in an embarrassing preliminary round. A distraught sprinter, Darvis "Doc" Patton, called his wife in Dallas after: "We dropped the baton," he said, breaking into tears. "We dropped the baton."

The 123-member U.S. track and field team arrives at the London Games with a new chief executive, a roster of top athletes and plenty to prove. The question it will answer in coming days is whether it can reverse the team's long, slow decline.

Once the dominant arm of the U.S. Olympic team, track and field has looked more like a faded dynasty. Years of falling medal counts have since 1988 yielded to swimming the title of America's highest-achieving Olympic sport.

Well, U.S. swimming sure topped the Olympics this year. We'll see about track and field, but watching some of the women's 100m heats last night, it looks like there's some really tough competition out there, especially from Jamaica.

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