(from the IAAF web-site)
The IAAF Council agreed in principle with the Race Walking Committee’s proposal to change the competition programme for race walking in order to protect and promote the discipline in major international championships and its appeal and attractiveness to new audiences.
Council specifically agreed with the importance of:
1.- maintaining a 4-medal discipline and gender equity with two men’s and two women’s events at all major international competition
2.- continuing to prioritise investment in and development of the Race Walking Electronic Control System (i.e, the electronic chip insole technology)
3.- testing and validating the technology in competition during 2020
4.- roll out of two of the following events: 10km, 20km, 30km or 35km from 2022.
216th IAAF Council Meeting media briefing Doha: click here
We note the following changes compared to the original proposal proposed by the Walking Committee:
a) the distance of 30km or 35km: we imagine that the choice of the longest race is related to that of the shortest race; if the IAAF will choose the 10km very probably the longest race will be the 30km, if instead the choice should be to keep the 20km the longest race probably would have been 35km.
Marcia dal Mondo supports this last hypothesis for the following reasons:
- the 10km would have been a media success only if it was carried out on the track with semifinals and final, but we believe that this is impossible since even the same running race has abandoned the semifinals since many years.
- we think that even with the electronic control system that would control the lack of contact we would be faced with a too fast race that could create some visibility problems
- the 20km-35km pairing is the one that comes closest to the current situation, namely a fast race (20km) and one of resistance (35km) which should however offer hypothetically different victory scenarios.
Finally, we like the hypothesis of four individual competitions that fully reflect gender equality.
It seems a good compronise.
b) the entry into force of these decisions, initially scheduled for the year 2021, has been moved to 2022. Also in this case we imagine that the choice is consequent to the possibility to test with attention the electronic control system with microchip insoles that should however start in 2020.