is anybody else appalled by the last-chance meets?

[gh]

... Given that the 200 Banked tracks violate the basic fairness and an absolute necessary condition of track and field, I do not want to hear about OTs being BAD and 200 Banked being the gold standard [the 200Banked are downhill, especially for the outer most lanes-- to such a degree that I think that the 200 wold not be legal for a road race course!]

They satisfy the rules as written for indoor track. And given that every World Championships ever contested, every NCAA since the mid-'80s, and every USATF since (can't dredge that out of the memory cells at the moment) have been contested on a 200 banked track, of course it's the gold standard.

Yes, they are flawed in that outer lanes have nasty advantage in the long sprints (but then, so do they outdoors), and the IAAF/USATF have recognized the foolishness of trying to have a fair competition on them, so they axed the event from the Championships, as should the NCAA.

Sorry, but I'm unapologetic in standing up for following the rules and not using facilities that by rule are illegal, plain and simple.

[26mi235]

I still think that, by the fundamental rules of track and field, OT tracks are fine (they are smaller than standard tracks) but that the when races are run on banked tracks that are downhill they are illegal in more than the sense that some committee decided what the rules should be. In this sense, the OT tracks are not eligible for record consideration (not really illegal) but downhill races really are illegal.

An interesting but impractical idea is to have the banked track have differential slopes, so that the outer lanes slope less than the inner lanes. This would help equalize what is a double disadvantage of the inside lanes: the have tighter turns and they face opponents that run downhill more than they do. Another impractical ideas is to have the outer lanes run further: say a 1 meter drop is worth 0.2 seconds so they start two meters back... Probably the most practical partial equalization is the one mentioned where the outer lanes have to run uphill at first.