Fans flock to track & field for the thrill of witnessing a human body perform unthinkable feats – leaping over the equivalent of Big Bird, maintaining sub-5 miles for just over two hours, heaving a spear nearly the length of a football field – or to experience competition in its purest form… right?

Wrong! We love it because we cannot get enough of fine print, shifting qualification standards, and arcane selection criteria. It’s the same reason why NFL Head Coach, the 2006 spin-off of the popular Madden video game series where instead of controlling on-field action, players balanced budgets and traded draft picks, was such a big hit! The universal pull all sports fans feel toward bureaucratic tedium and away from the sport itself! Beautiful.

We kid, we kid. For the past week or so, fans of American men’s distance running haven’t been able to properly get excited about the Olympic marathon. Instead, we’ve been looking at our divining rods and attempting to read the tea leaves in order to figure out what happened to Lenny Korrir’s spot on the starting line, which was as recently as May 7th considered safe.

Here’s what we know:

• Korir finished third at the U.S. Olympic Marathon Trials, behind Conner Mantz and Clayton Young.
• Young and Mantz both had previously run the Olympic standard, 2:08:10, and had thus “unlocked” two spots for United States marathon men in Paris. They took the two spots with their Trials finish.
• It was assumed that Korir would be fine and get in via either his own World Athletics ranking, or that of a third American man. WA had stated previously that it intended to fill the goal field size of 80 with roughly half from runners who’d hit the standard and the remainder from rankings.
• After the last weekend of qualifying for the marathon, American C.J. Albertson sat at #73 on the rankings, meaning (confusingly, but less confusingly than what’s about to happen) that Lenny, in fact, would get his countryman’s top-80 spot.
• Last week, World Athletics announced that 11 men would be added to the Olympic marathon field via universality spots, which are a “spirit of the Games” sort of arrangement wherein countries that wouldn’t otherwise send many – or any – athletes to the Olympics are given the opportunity to do so in a handful of events, regardless of ranking or time qualification. In this particular Olympic cycle, eligible events are the 100m, 800m, and marathon.
• As it currently stands, based on the Road to Paris website, that infusion of additional marathoners, we are looking at a field of 70 eligible men who qualified via entry standard, 11 universality athletes, and zero off the rankings.
• So Korir is on the outside looking in, it seems.

But here’s how things get even more complicated, and why there may still be an extremely faint glimmer of hope for Lenny’s 2024 Olympic dreams:

• The rules say that the universality places must be each of the country’s “best ranked” athletes. Of the 11, four are not their country’s best-ranked athletes.
• The qualification window for other events runs through June 30th, 2024 so there’s still a chance for a country without any currently-qualified athletes or relays to hit a mark.
• The rules say that each country must submit “proof of the technical level and international participation of the nominated athlete,” but one has never competed in a marathon and five have personal bests slower than 2:12.

We’re in a holding pattern right now as we await word from USATF and World Athletics on whether Korir can run in Paris. Stay tuned for updates. We’ll be closely monitoring the situation to see if WA opens up some additional spots or holds firm at 81 accepted athletes, trotting out a Drew Carey impersonator to deadpan to the camera that the points are made up and the rankings don’t matter.