Clive - To be honest I can’t really remember what schedule said what. I know that when we concluded our RunnerSpace, technical check on Friday, late in the day, it was assumed that we were covering the Master’s Race - just as we had for 4-years in Kingston as the kick-off races for the day.
This idea of separating men’s and women’s races has been proposed before formally to AO but related to masters indoor “mini meet” track races and it went no where (there is a persuasive argument for this format at the mini meets assuming appropriate safety protocols). Having said that I’ve had conversations with a few women masters who feel like I do that while such a change at the AO/AC Masters xc Championships might have some growing pains that ultimately it would serve the masters women community well in the longer run. I’ll have to check but I’m pretty sure that’s how the USATF masters cross country championships work.
I’m going to draw on my professional background and state that business phrase “Tone comes from the top”. And so you have some idea of the ideas about women masters that are embedded at the top, it’s standard operating procedure at AO Masters (formerly OMA) Championships that if there aren’t sufficient women to form a women’s only section in the mid distance to distance races than the women (no matter their age or seed time you could be 40 with a 1500m 4:40 seed or 50 with a 5:15 seed) all women are placed in the oldest men’s race (i.e. the 70+ category). From personal experience, if you protest this and insist that you be placed in a more appropriately seeded men’s section in the Championship race it will require a persistent “discussion” that might even include the threat of boycotting the race. So the fact that it was apparently ok to entirely exclude any visible presence of masters women from the broadcast (including not airing the interview of the women’s overall winner) and that when I brought it forward in the CMA FB group the response from the AO masters chairperson was “it was windy and cold” as an acceptable excuse is entirely unsurprising.
Tone comes from the top.
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An additional point about the Master’s race besides lack of coverage of the women’s race is that there was virtually no coverage by AC that there were even age groups besides 70+ (6km race) and the rest (8km race). Their press releases featured Masters as simply these 2 races with only top overall placings. One has to dig inside Sportstats details to find the age placings of individuals. This is also the first year that I remember where they compressed the race length for the older age categories, probably in interests of time. Confirming the very short planning window, it should also be noted that it was at about 11pm the night before the race that the order of laps for the Masters races were changed. That last-minute change was fortunate and avoided huge numbers of athletes being overlapped. My feeling about separating Men/Woman in different races is mixed - already within Men/Woman there are huge age ranges. This would result to two separate but very spread out races. So this decision would have a large impact on the limited daylight and also should depend on sufficient numbers of entries. Comments on the age aspect not withstanding, it should be possible to cover the leading Master’s women properly.
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Agreed that there is no excuse for not properly covering the women masters whether it’s a combined race or two separate races. There are definitely two persuasive arguments re keeping the single race or splitting it but I’m also going to guess that because we don’t have enough depth that many of the women (including myself) have a couple of guys who we like to key off during races so it would likely be an animated debate.
If we think about equity in its broadest sense (i.e. not just in terms of gender) there is a lot more meat to be discussed here.
The 8k/6k split actually brings the AC race in line with the WMA regs. WMA rules have age related modifications to the WA rules for some events and cross country is one of them.
More importantly though is the concept of age grading in determining the outstanding performances across the different age groups. It’s quite likely that the most outstanding performance can be found further back in the pack not necessarily at the front which tends to be the younger masters. In terms of recognition within the masters community it’s a combo of age group results (for medals) and age grade for things like GAAT Trophy and Breslin Cup scoring (and just general bragging rights). That’s a difficult ask during a live broadcast (as you generally have to wait to get everyone across the line and the results electronically run through the age grade tables). But certainly in the pre race marketing and definitely in the post race written summary, these outstanding age graded performances for both women and men should be recognized along with indicating that it’s not just one masters race. But that would require that the appropriate staff at AC have a basic understanding of masters which doesn’t appear to exist given that the instructions necessary to actually provide the masters results by age grade, teams, and age group weren’t given to Sportstats. To date we don’t have the complete masters results. It’s looking like it may involve a lot of manual computations by volunteers within the community.
This lack of knowledge and care to detail doesn’t inspire confidence in AC’s ability (in absence of the CMA) to oversee the masters programming.
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Do you think it would make more sense to have a master’s or former master’s athlete announcing for these events? I feel like it is better to have someone more familiar with the athletes announcing.
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Yeah I think it’s a great idea (and not a knock in SF and ED - I gave them good marks on the feedback survey 
). Might make sense to have as an addition to the experienced team calling the broadcast.
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Yeah I don’t think it’s a knock on them either, but I feel like the master’s races are niche enough where having someone else who knows them would help much more than the other events. Tbh the u18 as well haha. The other divisions are easy enough to follow along and do some background research beforehand.
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Thank you. One of the top “rules” for Commentary in TV or any kind of broadcast situation, is to talk ONLY about what is on Camera. Coming over to Commentary from Live Race/Event Announcing a number of years ago, I was pulled aside at some of the first work I did in this area by a top Producer and had this explained to me. If you watch the BIG races/meets, Olympics etc . . you will see this is the case! Now this also raises with regards to the Master’s race the challenge of what do do, with all the races, within the race, most particularly the Women’s Master’s Race*. With limited cameras - there is not much we can do (Note this is decision-making well above what I do - but I do know there are limits with this - budgetary and practical). I have seen it suggested that the women Master’s should have a separate start. That’s a really simple and obvious move to make - something that I would be FULLY in support of.
The next issue becomes data and whether we get any - so that we CAN talk in a more educated manner about what is going on in the race - and maybe even break that “Rule” I mentioned previously, but we can ONLY do that if we are getting good data from the Timing company. I battle relentlessly and tirelessly, with the timing companies who are timing these races we cover, to somehow get us some data. They all say they will, but we are very often let down . . we get nothing or it’s wrong! Some of the data we were getting for the ACXC Master’s Race that we were getting was unfortunately wrong! I am sorry about that!
*BTW - you will always have a Champion on your behalf, with me. My wife is one of the top Master’s Women Cyclists in North America. She is a 2X Canadian Master’s Women’s Time Trial Champion. I was the Live Race Announcer at the Canadian Master’s Road Race Championships earlier in the Fall!
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