If the final moments of Monday night's women's four hundred metres in Rio had been in a sports movie, they would have been shot in momentous slow motion. In one lane was Shaunae Miller, of the Bahamas, two steps from the finish, clinging to a lead. A few lanes over and a step behind was the favorite, Allyson Felix, of the United States, charging hard. At the crucial moment, Miller lunged awkwardly, and fell headfirst toward the line, while Felix leaned classically forward, her head slightly up, an image of athletic grace. Who had won? The question stretched for several cinematic seconds, before Miller's name flashed on the board, the winner by seven hundredths of a second. "We have barely ever seen a more dramatic end to a race than that," NBC's analyst declared, and in movie land, at this point, the musical score would have swelled to match the roar of the crowd as the camera captured Miller’s exhausted face in closeup, the victorious underdog.
NBC's coverage of the Olympics is forever promising this kind of drama, but in this case, when it was delivered, many audience members reacted as if they had just witnessed something unseemly. On Twitter, people accused Miller of cheating, and called her unorthodox finish "cheap" and "pathetic." Running fans, those reliable pedants, were quick to point out that what Miller had done was perfectly legal; the rules state that a runner has finished a race when any part of her torso—not her head or fingers or arms—has hit the line. Finish-line tumbles aren’t even all that rare. Just last month, at the U.S. Olympic trials, in Oregon, Felix finished in fourth place in the two hundred metres. The runner who beat her for the third and final American spot in the event, Jenna Prandini, fell across the line, too.
It is not even clear whether Miller’s sprawling finish on Monday helped or hurt her. In baseball, there is a long-standing and still mostly unresolved debate over whether it is faster to run through first base or slide headfirst. (Bill Nye has weighed in on the side of running, but others have argued that, with a perfectly timed slide, executed in ideal conditions, headfirst might be faster.) The variables are different in running, though, and, anyway, Miller's dive looked less like an impromptu innovation than a product of desperation. If you're already falling, the fastest way forward is just to keep on falling. Michael Johnson, the former American track superstar, who is in Rio calling races for the BBC, tweeted, "Diving across gets you there SLOWER than running across." Johnson also wrote, perhaps in an attempt to head off a thousand high-school track injuries, "Sprinters know the quickest way across the line is a well timed lean. Trust me on that." In other words, don't try this at home.
Social media, as we know by now, can be counted on to produce arguments about any opinion, but imagine, for a moment, if the roles Monday night were reversed. Felix has been at the center of NBC's promotion of the Rio Games, and entered Monday’s race just one gold medal shy of an all-time record. If she had been the one to fling herself, like superwoman, across the line for gold, American fans would surely have hailed it as a brave and resourceful heave rather than a sneaky and unsporting face-plant.
Still, at the Olympics, we've come to expect elegance in victories, from Katie Ledecky's harmonious freestyle stroke to Simone Biles's perfectly executed vaults to Wayde van Niekerk's effortless-looking stride. Even the events in which falling is the whole point, like diving or the high jump or the pole vault, highlight the grace of the human form. But there are other winning looks, and Miller's gutsy, ungainly finish is a reminder of that. It's there in the purple faces of the weightlifters, the mangled ears of the wrestlers, and the curled lips of the archers and shooters. And it was there in Shaunae Miller's stumble or crash or dive or leap to gold.
