Last weekend at the University of Pennsylvania’s Ott Center, as part of an all-comers meet hosted by local club Philadelphia Runner TC, three athletes qualified for the World Indoor Championships.

You’d be excused if you thought qualification was determined the weekend before on Staten Island as part of the U.S. Indoor Championship, and you’d be right… mostly. In the 800m, Sean Dolan took second and in the 1500m, former Washington Huskies Nathan Green and Luke Houser went 1–2 to upset a field of global medalists. At the time of these stellar performances, however, none of those three gentlemen were in possession of the requisite qualifying time to compete at World Indoors.

And so Dolan—whose dad is the head track coach at UPenn—and the Washington fellas had to go standard-chasing: 1:45.90 being the time to hit in Dolan’s case, and 3:36.00 for Green and Houser. All three guys got under those marks with room to spare, one day before the qualifying window closed on March 8. Which makes sense: based simply on the quality of the athletes they beat to secure theoretical bids to Worlds, they were clearly fit. But watching Dolan, Houser, and Green pull it off was still plenty exciting.

In 2002, Marshall Mathers asked, “If you had one shot or one opportunity to seize everything you ever wanted, in one moment, would you capture it or just let it slip?” And these guys didn’t lose themselves in the moment; they executed.

Now time to be a bit of a Grinch: HOWEVER… This never should have happened. While standard-chasing can create brief moments of high drama and cool stories for underdog-type athletes, as a practice it’s pretty Bad for the Sport.

What good are national championships—particularly U.S. Championships, where in nearly every event there are no shortage of athletes who are truly competitive on the global stage—if those who finish in the top two have to compete again the following weekend to shore up their spot? It’s confusing for fans. It diminishes the impact of the podium moment for athletes. And it forces athletes stuck in qualification purgatory to unnecessarily compete again—risking injury and fatigue—on a tight turnaround before a global championship.

To be clear, this isn’t the fault of anybody named Sean Dolan, Luke Houser, or Nathan Green. They’re merely rational actors within an irrational framework. This is both a USATF and World Athletics issue, and each could make a policy change to address it.

In an ideal world, World Athletics would grant federations more leeway when selecting teams. In the case of the men’s 1500m in the United States, there are 11 athletes who ran under 3:36.00 indoors this season, even when you remove the three that did so at Penn this past weekend. Placing in the top two spots at that particular national championship should more than indicate preparedness to fight for a medal in Kujawy Pomorze, Poland, in a couple of weeks. Call it qualification via the transitive property and let Green and Houser into the field. A universal rule of “if your country has two qualifiers, you get two spots” would go a long way to clearing up the chaos.

But take a look around. We don’t live in an ideal world. And this isn’t a move we expect World Athletics to make anytime soon. You could make the case it plays favorites with larger federations, and it would for sure weaken the impact of the world rankings, which WA keeps trying to make happen.

The next-best of all the bad options would be to push for USATF to tighten things up and implement a strict “no standard-chasing” policy. Yes, unfortunately that would make it so that there are fewer athletes in each event with a chance at qualification, and even more unfortunately, in theory the qualifier(s) could come from finishers outside of the top two. But the positives outweigh those negatives.

Those cuspy types without the standard would have greater incentive to make races honest at U.S. Indoors, hoping to improve their world ranking as much as possible there. But more realistically you’d get anybody who feels they have a shot at making Team USA taking the indoor regular season more seriously. If you’re planning to run World Indoors, you can’t sneak into USAs—you’ve gotta put a real mark or two down first.

Indoor track has a hard enough time breaking through on the global stage. The very least we can do is make qualifying straightforward, incentivize regular-season racing, and have a clearly-defined trajectory for the season. Standard-chasing muddies the waters in all areas, and so it’s got to go.

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