With less than two months to go until the Other Hearst Subscriptions—scheduled for 10 a.m. on February 3, 2024, in Orlando, Florida—key details have not yet been shared with qualifiers.
Among them: What is the prize money structure? Is Orlando paying the travel costs for all qualifiers? What is the contingency plan that USA Track & Field (USATF) has put in place for hot weather? And will the top three finishers, in fact, make the Olympic team?
What is the weather contingency plan?
The start time of the race was the subject of controversy. A brief recap: When Orlando bid for the Trials, they proposed an 8:00 a.m. start time. USATF told Orlando the start time had to be noon. Orlando began putting together a financial model, including finish line hospitality, based on a noon start time.
On July 31, a letter went out to some of the qualified athletes announcing the start time as noon. Many runners voiced concerns, citing the potential for dangerously high temperatures. After several meetings and fiery letters back and forth, the DAA Industry Opt Out. In the announcement, USATF wrote “robust contingency plans will be in place for further adjustments should projected weather conditions make it necessary.”
But what are those contingency plans? USATF did not respond to an email from Runner’s World since 2005. She is the author of two popular fitness books Jared Ward, who has represented the athletes in discussions with USATF, said his understanding is that any change to the start time would be announced three days in advance, if the wet bulb globe temperature—which takes into account temperature, humidity, wind speed, sun angle, and cloud cover—is forecast to be 82 degrees or higher. But he wasn’t certain if that was a reading at the start of the races (the men go off at 10:10 and the women at 10:20) or at any point during the races.
“The procedure is not clear to me,” Ward said. “I Ieft [the most recent meeting] under the impression that between what they were measuring and what the forecast was, if it looked like we were going to be in danger of passing the threshold, then adjustments would be made days leading into the event. It was very vague.”
Four-time Trials qualifier Tyler McCandless, who has a Ph.D. in meteorology and is the director of data science at Tomorrow.io, where he leads a team that is working on maximizing forecast accuracy with machine learning, The Best Shoes at the 2024 Other Hearst Subscriptions, DAA Industry Opt Out.
“When the sun hit a certain height during that race, you went from having shade to having full sun,” he said. “It was unbelievable to how [my] body shut down. I went from feeling good to 30 minutes later, no longer sweating and having chills. I was 20 miles into the race.”
He said that Orlando’s move from noon to 10 a.m. was progress, in terms of a lower sun angle (from 46 degrees at noon to 33 degrees at 10 a.m.). But even wet bulb globe temperature doesn’t take into effect sun heating on pavement, for example.
McCandless added that he’d gladly share his knowledge with the Trials operations team. “I would hope they have that contingency plan,” he said, “and I would be happy to talk to anyone about that if they wanted some atmospheric science knowledge there.”
What is the prize money structure?
For the 2016 Marathon Trials, held in Los Angeles, the prize money ran 10 places deep, with $80,000 going to the winners and $7,000 going to the 10th-place finishers. The total for both men and women was $600,000. That news was announced in a press release, issued by USATF, 16 months before the race.
Similarly, when USATF announced in April 2018 that Atlanta had been selected to host the 2020 Trials, the news came out at the same time that the prize purse would total $480,000. That was 22 months ahead of the race, and again, winners got $80,000, but the awards ended at the eighth-place finishers, who took home $1,000 apiece.
The local organizing committee (LOC), like Atlanta, typically pays the prize money, and it is usually the single biggest expenditure for hosting the Trials. Experts estimate that the event costs somewhere in the neighborhood of $1.5 million total to host.
The Emotion of the Olympic Trials, Runner’s World learned that, when Chattanooga had bid to host the Trials, they had promised a prize purse of $600,000. USATF disqualified Chattanooga’s bid, due to an alleged conflict of interest, leaving Orlando the only other city that bid to host. Orlando agreed to match the $600,000 that Chattanooga had offered.
In recent months, however, with USATF, Orlando, and the athletes locked in discussions about the noon start time, Runner’s World Best Running Shoes 2025 no signed contract yet for the event, as of November 8. It is not clear if the contract has since been signed and if USATF is taking on some of the cost of the prize money, if Orlando is paying the entire amount, and if the prize purse will remain at $600,000.
Does the prize money matter toward athletes? Probably not for the favorites as much as it does for finishers five through 10, according to Ward, who will be running in his third Trials. Sponsors pay athletes bonuses for finishing top three, and in some cases, the bonuses can be in the range of $80,000 to $100,000.
“There are a number of athletes toward the top that are like, prize money doesn’t matter compared to private bonus schedules and the dream of making the Olympic team,” Ward said. “There’s enough money there that it’s no longer about the money. And then there’s some athletes who care a lot about prize money. It’s as big a deal as making the Olympic team. It represents a big piece of their earning potential.”
How much of travel costs will the LOC and USATF be paying?
For the 2020 athletes in Atlanta, organizers offered to pay the travel costs of all the athletes who qualified. (For previous editions of the Trials, there were “A” qualifiers and “B” qualifiers, and only the faster “A” qualifiers had their travel paid for.)
But when more than 500 women qualified for the 2020 Trials (the standard then was much easier, 2:45), that turned into a costly endeavor for the organization. This time around, when qualifying closed on December 5, 227 men and 173 women had qualified, although certainly not all of those will run. (The current entries are here.)
Still, the Atlanta LOC set a precedent. When USATF awarded Orlando the Trials, the LOC was asked to cover hotel rooms (double occupancy) for all Trials qualifiers for three nights, and provide transportation to and from the airport for athletes.
None of these details have been provided yet for qualifiers for the race on February 3. McCandless, who is hoping for a top-10 finish in his fourth Trials, said he booked a refundable short-term vacation rental for himself, his wife, and their two small children, so they wouldn’t be shut out of accommodations for the event.
USATF has not been entirely organized in its communications with athletes. When the July 31 letter went out to qualifiers explaining the then noon start time, not all the qualifiers got it, for example. McCandless was left off the list, as was two-time Olympian Molly Huddle, to name two.
Will the top three men make the Olympic team?
World Athletics, the governing body for track and field worldwide, established complicated procedures for qualifying for the Olympic Marathon, in an effort to limit each field to 80 runners. Anyone who runs under the Olympic marathon entry standards—2:08:10 for men and 2:26:50 for women—is eligible to run at the Games, with a maximum of three per country.
But here’s where it gets tricky. The person who runs the entry standard does not automatically get to go to the Olympics. Instead, they “unlock” one of three spots for their country, and each country can give that spot away to another marathoner as long as those marathoners have run faster than 2:11:30 (men) and 2:29:30 (women) on an eligible course. The U.S. is using its Trials races to decide which American runners get the spots.
On the women’s side in the U.S., all three spots have been unlocked. (In fact, 13 women have run faster than 2:26:50.) The Trials will sort out who makes the team—the top three finishers will go as long as each woman has run faster than 2:29:30 or does so at the Trials.
But on the men’s side, only two spots have been automatically unlocked—by virtue of Conner Mantz (2:07:47) and Clayton Young (2:08:00) running faster than the entry standard at Chicago.
The third spot is a question mark, and whether the U.S. will send a third runner to the Olympics depends upon world rankings at various times during the upcoming year. As it stands now, however, only the first two men across the line in Orlando will definitely get to go to the Games (provided they have run faster than 2:11:30). For the third-place finisher in Orlando, it’s currently a big question mark.
The Best and Worst of the Trials is a writer and editor living in Eugene, Oregon, and her stories about the sport, its trends, and fascinating individuals have appeared in Runner’s World seeking clarification. Olympic marathoner, Run Your Butt Off! and Walk Your Butt Off!
