Race walking endures at the Olympics, and it’s more hip than you think

PARIS - The Olympics are still going. So is the race walk, it feels like.

Walkers are soaked in sweat, hoofing it on a tight loop between the Trocadéro and a brasserie half a kilometer away, over the some 200-year-old Pont d’Iéna, with a dog leg at the Eiffel Tower and hairpin turns at either end.

“These men are getting very, very tired,” an announcer says, unhelpfully, at minute 51, as judges with clipboards scrutinize knees and feet for infractions. “They’re doing everything they can to walk within the rules. … They’ve walked for months, for years, for a chance at the Olympic podium, … but they have to keep themselves under control.”

Sixteen kilometers in, with four to go, the lead pack is getting away from Canadian Evan Dunfee, the 2020 Olympic bronze medalist who is currently back in 14th place. His body wants out, but by 17 kilometers he is clawing his way to 11th place, counting the athletes that separate him from a medal, and passing them one by one, into 10th place, then ninth, seventh, sixth, keeping strict form while loosing (and losing) energy.

Dunfee, 33, is within inches of spectators, repeatedly - a type of Olympic intimacy that is not really possible in any other event. The popular ones cost hundreds of euros for the privilege of sitting hundreds of feet away from competitors.

“We have other free events - triathlon, marathon, road cycling - but the spectacle is more in that you see these amazing athletes come by once, maybe a few times,” Dunfee says later, after finishing fifth. “Whereas with the race walk in the 1-kilometer loop, you can park yourself and watch an entire race unfold from start to finish, be spitting distance away, be so close you’re getting the athlete’s sweat on you. I think that’s a really powerful thing.”

Race walk is a sport that moves fast but can seem slow, that is mocked and misunderstood and yet is the only Olympic event that every ambulatory human is sort of training for every day, whether you know it or not. Late for work? You’re race walking - not to the technical specifications of the sport, sure, but the point remains:

“Walking is by far the most universal of physical activities,” says Elliott Denman, on the phone at 90 years old, who in the 1956 Olympics in Melbourne placed 11th in the 50-kilometer race walk, in just over five hours. “And yet we’ve always been far down the pecking order, in terms of interest.”

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The gold medalists in last week’s 20-kilometer individual race walk got nowhere near the hype or heed as American sprinter Noah Lyles, who on Sunday ran 0.5 percent of that race-walk distance in 9.784 seconds, which is more aligned with the American attention span.

But also: There are no Americans in the race walk here, for the first time in Olympic history, according to sports journalist Alan Abrahamson. Not in last week’s individual 20-kilometer, and not in the brand-new race-walk event Wednesday: a mixed relay, with 25 teams of one man and one woman, each walking two legs of a marathon (42.195 kilometers). The Olympics got rid of the 50-kilometer race walk - the longest footrace in the Games - to the chagrin of purists who prize its grueling chess game of attrition, and to the suspicion of some who think that the new event is an experiment designed to fail, and further sideline the sport.

So, for these Paris Games, we have shorter walks, which mean faster walks, which mean the line between walking and running seems even blurrier - which matters in race walking because of those fedora-capped judges, who make sure walkers don’t become runners. Athletes must have one foot touching the ground at all times (as judged by the human eye), and the knee of the forward leg must not bend until the body passes over it - or else walkers accumulate red cards and flirt with penalties and disqualification.

Hence the sport’s unconventional look: the wiggly waddle of the athletes’ gait, a pendulous glide that melds hustle with form - which is also the reason for the casual hazing from people who don’t know or appreciate the sport.

Texted one friend, when I posted video of last week’s race walk to my Instagram: “It’s just inherently ridiculous, particularly against the background of Paris.”

Texted a family member: “Looks like they are badly in need of a toilet!”

Senior race walkers have not forgotten Bob Costas’s on-air jab from many Games ago: The race walk is like a competition to see who can whisper the loudest.

“Okay, race walking is weird - but it is fun weird,” says Abrahamson, who is covering his 13th Olympiad. “And one of the things about the Olympics that people have to embrace is fun weird. Dull weird is boring, and dull weird needs to get out of the Olympics.” (What’s an example of a dull-weird event? Says Abrahamson: “I am not going there on the record.”)

Here’s the thing about the Olympics: Many of these sports are weird, if you stop and think. Synchronized diving: Why? Why not! And the pole vault: What on Earth? More like what off Earth, right? (Do not email me; I respect all sports; I’m proving a point.) So the race walk is not weirder than any other Olympic sport.

But then you ask: “Why walk when you can run?”

Flawed question!

“Sometimes I liken it to swimming: You can go faster freestyle, but we have the breaststroke, the backstroke. It’s just a different way,” says Maryanne Daniel, a former member of the race-walking committee of track and field’s international governing body. “But if it’s not exposed to enough people, then it looks funny.”

So let’s expose ourselves to it.

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In the 1870s and ‘80s, competitive walking was the most popular spectator sport in the United States, according to Matthew Algeo’s book “Pedestrianism.” The Industrial Revolution democratized leisure time, and hordes of people packed large exhibition halls to watch walkers walk in a loop for hundreds of miles. Algeo’s book begins on March 12, 1879, three days into the Astley Belt race at Madison Square Garden, with a competitive walker named Dan O’Leary, an athlete who was as famous then as LeBron James is now.

“A human machine who knew no fatigue,” wrote the Associated Press upon his death in 1933, whose “heels were his fame while the rest of the world took to wheels.”

Race walking was first included in the Olympics in 1904 at the St. Louis Games, as part of the forerunner to the decathlon, and became a separate medal event at the 1908 Games in London. The 50-kilometer debuted at the 1932 Los Angeles Games, and the 20-kilometer in Melbourne in 1956. Larry Young, still the only American to medal in the Olympic race walk, took the 50-kilometer bronze in the 1968 and ‘72 Olympics, crossing the latter’s finish line in 4 hours 46 seconds.

While popular and respected in many other countries (China and Mexico, for example), the race walk in the United States has been lapped continuously by marquee track-and-field events - the sprints and relays that involve blasts of energy rather than hips of precision. Those are the disciplines that attract most of the money and talent and airtime and coaching, which then yield medal winners.

“And once you have the best athletes in the world, others from your country try to be just as good as the best,” emails American Sam Allen, 22, who’s taking a year off from race walking because regular high-level competition is taxing mentally, physically and financially. “That’s why you start seeing all these young athletes you never heard of competing neck and neck with a Noah Lyles or Simone Biles. Race walking has none of that in the USA. … No NCAA programs. No sponsored training groups. No super-star athlete for young athletes to aspire to. No large pool of potentially great talent being refined through the U.S. sports structure.”

And then, for the Paris Olympics, World Athletics - the international governing body of track and field - decided to reduce the quota of race walkers from 60 to 48, and no Americans made that slimmer cut.

Nick Christie, the fastest male U.S. race walker for six years now, missed this Olympics’ qualifying time by 4 minutes 46 seconds. He’s now aiming for the Los Angeles Olympics in 2028, and plans to join the Air Force to supplement his prize-money income. (He gets no funding or sponsorship for race walking.)

“You have a sprinter’s turnover with an endurance athlete’s aerobic capacity,” Christie, 32, says by email, describing why he loves the sport. “It’s an event that is often difficult to try for the first time, but if you put in the hours almost anyone can be successful. And I think that’s reflected heavily by the diversity in our podiums at major competitions, and the breadth of countries who have some of their only Olympic/world medals in the race walk. It is an event that is truly accessible to everyone.”

The men’s winner in last week’s individual race walk was Brian Pintado of Ecuador, the country’s first gold medal in track and field in 28 years. That’s “a pretty good indication of how universal” track and field is, World Athletics President Sebastian Coe said a couple hours after that medal ceremony, at a news conference in the Palais des Congrès. Coe added that the race walk has a “safe home” in his organization’s world championships, but declined to speculate about the sport’s future in the Olympics.

That might come down to how the new mixed relay is received.

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Jeff Salvage became a fan of the mixed relay after first seeing it four months ago at the World Athletics Race Walking Team Championships in Antalya, Turkey. “The Olympic committees want shorter, faster, more exciting events,” says Salvage, president of the USA Race Walking Foundation. “If we don’t change, we’re going to be dinosaurs and disappear.”

The relay “feels like it’s a gimmick,” says Erin Talcott, the first woman to compete in a men’s Olympic trials for a track and field event (the 50-kilometer race walk in 2012). “If people watch it and they love it, I will gladly eat my words, and be ecstatic about it.”

That tight 1-kilometer loop by the Eiffel Tower is both long and small enough for teams to slide and stagger in the standings, and lap each other multiple times, as men hand off to women and vice versa, and spectators flail their arms and flags inches away.

Will the relay capture new audiences, or will it yield more armchair color commentary like this: “They are just running, every single one of them,” said one TikTok user, whose slow-motion replay of last week’s individual race walk has been viewed more than 12.5 million times. “None of these people have both feet on the ground. So can we just get rid of this? Just replace it with a better event. It makes no sense.”

But, again: What Olympic event makes perfect sense? Do we need the discus and the hammer throw? Sure! Why hitch and stutter through the triple jump when you can just simply long jump? Why not. Let the race walkers walk their race, even if they sometimes race their walk. (The elite athletes can do it without the human eye catching it.)

“I love this sport,” says Talcott, who worries about its future even while investing in it, through coaching high school girls in central New York state. “I love this sport because there’s something for everyone. If you just want to do local road races and you can’t run the whole thing, race walk ‘em. If you want to do masters-level championships? Totally. It’s a tight-knit community, and we’ve got each other’s backs. It’s not an expensive sport. Archery - I can’t imagine how much those bows cost. Triathlon has that expensive gear. The race walk: You just need a pair of shoes and some clothes.”

Evan Dunfee, the Canadian who came in fifth in the individual race walk last week, was back on the loop Wednesday morning in Paris for the new relay. Dunfee motored to the lead position and held it for the first three kilometers - trying to string out the pack, entice his opponents into penalties, and give a buffer to his young teammate, whom he has also coaching: 21-year-old Olivia Lundman. He started race walking two years before she was born.

“I was a very competitive child, but I was the shortest kid in the class: I had these big Coke-bottle rim glasses and red curly hair - the quintessential picked-on kid,” says Dunfee, who lives in Vancouver. “And I wanted to be the best at something. Maybe ironically, choosing race walking - not the best way to rid yourself of criticism and bullies.”

But turns out: Walking was the way to get ahead.

“Not many kids race walked,” Dunfee says, “so I won my first race. That’s kind of it.”