Rio Reflections: Cedenio's record, Ashton dominates, Final medal table

Twenty year-old Machel Cedenio of Trinidad and Tobago finished 4^th in the men’s 400m finals in a national record time of  44.01 seconds to erase the 24 year old record  of 44.21 seconds set by Ian Morris back in Barcelona in 1992. Cedenio, the 2014 IAAF world junior champion in the 400m, is one of the rising stars in this event. He has shown consistent improvements in the 400m from 48.12 seconds in 2010 to his current lifetime best time of 44.01 seconds in 2016. Based on his Rio performance, Cedenio seems poised to join the sub-44 seconds club.

Ashton Eaton

While Usain Bolt is undoubtedly the fastest man on the planet, the title of most versatile male athlete goes to decathlon winner American Ashton Eaton. Ashton successfully defended his Olympic title by scoring 8893 points over two days of grueling events to take the title ahead of France’s Kevin Mayer (8834 points) with Canada’s Damian Warner (8666 points).  Over the past several years, the 28 year-old American has been simply dominant in the men’s decathlon.  Since taken the sliver in the 2011 Daegu world championship, Ashton has stood atop the podium in the 2013 and 2015 world championships and the 2012 London Olympics. Ashton is indeed the iron man of athletics.

NBC’s Lack of Appreciation for Athletics

NBC did a less than stellar job broadcasting the track and field segment of the Olympics on live television. With ill-timed commercial breaks and over-the-top human-interest stories along with the inability of the commentators to provide detail analysis and insights into the events made the NBC coverage unbearable and hard to watch. In addition, there were instances where NBC just outright refused to show live semi-final races and skipped directly to the finals. The coverage of the field events was horrible with longtime track and field analyst Dwight Stones voiced his dissatisfaction with NBC’s coverage of the field events.

While, we are fully aware of the importance of featuring the sponsors and their products while providing quality programming to the audience.  NBC ignored its audience and true track and field fans were left hanging. NBC has the technology to be able to satisfy both its sponsorship obligation and its audience, but choose to ignore the latter.  Why not broadcast the events live while putting sponsors logo and products to the top right of the screen without it impacting the live feed? What was most frustrating was NBC airing commercials while a final event was in process. If fans stayed with NBC, they would have missed the live events.  NBC is set to host the 2020 Tokyo Games and has the opportunity to do a better job than Rio.

FINAL MEDAL TABLE (ATHLETICS ONLY)

Edited by Raymond Byfield

Machel Cedenio  (2015 adidad GP NY) picture above taken by O'Neil A Reid