No more race walking event planed by the summer Olympic committee

For the brave few aficionados hooked on the race, the 50-kilometer walk on Friday morning will be bittersweet.

It will be the final version of the race at the summer Olympics. It is walking into the sunset and will not return for the Paris Games in 2004.

It’s an event only the purest reveal in. It’s race walking, with all that arm swinging and hip swaying for more than three hours. And you thought the marathon was long at 26.2 miles in two-plus hours.

But the Olympic committee has decided the race does not fit with the organization’s stated mission of gender equality. It just happens to be the only event on the Olympic program that has no approximate equivalent for women. So rather than add a women’s race, the IOC will now introduce an unspecified mixed-team race walker event.

This gets my long-time friend Elliott Denman upset. A sportswriter who resides in New Jersey and was a race walker for the USA team in the Melbourne Games in 1956, replied in an email that he was no doubt angered by the removal of the “longest and toughest of all events.”

The 50-kilometer race walking world record-holder, Yohann Diniz of France, raced, er, walked the course of about 31 miles in three hours and 33 seconds in 2011. The more common 20K race walk is a sprint by comparison.

The race, which was introduced in 1932 at the Los Angeles Games and held at every summer Olympics since then except the Montreal Games in 1976, is apparently too slow and tedious for younger sports fans. On television, the walkers also look like they’re jogging, which doesn’t help the sport.

“Unless the situation takes a drastic U-turn somewhere along the road — and don’t get your hopes up about it — the Sapporo 50K champion will be the 20th and last in an amazing series,” wrote Denman.

Race walkers, he added, loved every step of their long journeys, and now for all that effort, they’re being told to go take a hike.

Whether or not I have an opinion on this, Denman has a right to express his own concern, and knowing how much a writer and fan he is of track and field, I have his back.

The race, like the men’s and women’s marathons, was moved from Tokyo to Sapporo, on the northern island of Hokkaido, because it’s cooler there. It will begin at 5:30 in the morning local time, just after sunrise, with one final medal ceremony to follow.