USATF Masters balk at WAVA hurdles rules

Note: This originally was written for Athletics Weekly

By Ken Stone

America and Europe are now separated by three inches. The gap may seem narrow, but the chasm is wide in the wake of a defiant decision by the US Masters at the annual meeting of USA Track & Field in Los Angeles. For the first time in WAVA’s 22-year history, leaders of American veterans have balked at a rule change.

Meeting in Gateshead on August 5, 1999, the General Assembly of the World Association of Veteran Athletes overwhelmingly approved motions by Britain and Australia to lower the heights of hurdles from 30 inches to 27 inches in all races for men 70 and over and for women 60 and over.

The changes, which took effect in October, came too late for 87-year-old Vittorio Colo’ of Italy, 80-year-old Lewis Hilton of Guyana and 62-year-old Christa Eschenbach of Germany -- all victims of nasty spills at Gateshead. They were among a scattering of DNFs at the WAVA meet attributable to hurdle heights.

But the US Masters Committee has decided not to comply -- thus ignoring its own rulebook, which says: “Every championship event . . . will use WAVA implement weights, hurdle heights and spacing and race lengths.”

The reason , of course, is money. Unlike Europe, Oceania and many other areas where 27-inch hurdles are available for schoolboy contests, the United States offers no races where such barriers are used. “It will be a tremendous burden to buy 80 new hurdles that will go to 27 inches,” said US Masters Chairman Ken Weinbel, who estimated a cost of $10,000 for a set. “Manufacturers are doing a quick count on making (lower) hurdles, and they say no."

Officially, the vote of USA Masters (with only two cast in support of WAVA) is to make an “exception” to WAVA hurdle heights. Weinbel, an M70 hammer thrower from Seattle, Washington, insists that the vote was legal and can be reversed, saying: “I am sure we will revisit the hurdle issue in Albuquerque (New Mexico)” at the next annual meeting of USATF in December 2000.

And racewalker Bob Fine of Florida, one of the WAVA’s founders and a former New York lawyer who wrote the original WAVA Constitution, says the US had no choice but to reject the hurdles rule.

“It is just a situation where the physical equipment is not available,” he wrote me. “To obtain 27-inch hurdles would cost thousands of dollars. In effect, USA athletes are putting themselves at a disadvantage in that the only available hurdle height is higher than what has been required. Certainly, it is not a matter of the USA 'thumbing our nose' at WAVA.”

But other noses are out of joint -- and the USA decision may create a rift within US ranks as well.

“What we have done is to shoot ourselves in the foot with little gained,” writes Rex Harvey of Ohio, a member of WAVA’s powerful Stadia Committee. “And we will still have to deal with the situation at some future time, and maybe over and over again. I can't defend all that WAVA does even though I am part of the process, but once a decision is made, in most cases, it should be honored until duly changed or deleted.

“The WAVA requirement for 27-inch hurdles has been a long time coming and will not go away and all we have done is reinforce the view that a lot of the rest of the world has of the US that, at best, we whine a lot for one of the richest countries in the world and, at worst, are openly rebellious with the established authority. I worry about that a lot.”

“I don't think that our legitimate objections to 27 inches, because of nonavailability in US, are enough to reverse the decision. This is mainly because this very good reason was not enough to prevent the decision itself. It was made in spite of repeated appeals to the WAVA technical committee by myself and several others over the years. I don't think that anyone objects to the height itself for those age groups, just that hurdles do not exist and are not readily available in the US."

Harvey, in a scathing e-mail note to American and world veterans leaders and in a later column for National Masters News, suggests that America missed a golden opportunity to bring in hurdles that would benefit youngsters as well as masters. He added: “As I . . . tried to point out at the convention, we are not serving our US masters athletes well at all when we legislate that they always have to run different (more difficult) hurdles in the major US meets than the rest of the world does.”

Harvey also points out that American masters have been put in the position “where they cannot set American records by running the hurdles specified by the recognized worldwide sports authority. Americans can now set world records that would not be American records. That looks, and probably is, ridiculous to the rest of the world and reinforces a negative image of US Track and Field.”

As it happens, the US Masters meeting at the Westin Century Plaza Hotel in early December 1999 almost said no as well to the new javelin weights mandated by the WAVA General Assembly (in which older athletes were told to buy lighter 500- and 700-gram spears for which manufacturers specifications have yet to be set). In the end, the new javelins were accepted.