With the Track and Field World Championship Meet coming up in London in August of this year (these championships are held every other year) it would be good to once again speak about the way track and field is covered in the U.S. Four years ago criticism of NBC for delaying London Olympic coverage till prime time was to be expected as was their delay. Criticism of the surfeit of commentary-as-chatter was also to be as expected as was the inanity of the chatter. And even in establishment and mainstream venues criticism of the exclusionist nationalism of the coverage–decades after it began–emerged, albeit in still much too tepid a form. Frank Bruni, a New York Times center-right columnist whose columns are necessarily always within the safe margin of center-right and center surprisingly ventured forth with a criticism of the “jingoism” of the coverage although far more incisive criticisms about this could be found amongst many of the comments upon his column where the common theme consisted of vehement and angry criticisms of the total concentration on American winners or favorites to the exclusion and neglect of the accomplishments of athletes from other countries. Nonetheless, rarely do criticisms of the jingoistic, nationalistic, and exclusionary coverage ever constitute themselves in the kind of specificity that can have a chance to escape being a merely generalized condemnation and lament of “neglect of foreign athletes”. And therefore…