The Lagos scheduling document runs to four hundred pages and the interesting part is on page nine. The Olympic fortnight has been placed in the week before the Open Games, under a heading that reads preliminary programme. Not a co-headline. Not a companion event. Preliminary. I have been covering this beat long enough to remember when the paperwork ran the other way around, and I called three people at the IOC to ask whether anyone had objected. Two did not reply. The third said the committee had accepted the calendar in March without a vote.
Officially this is the International Open Games. Nobody says that. It has been the Prolympics on every feed since about 2044, and the governing body gave up correcting people around the time the rider numbers stopped being comparable to anything. The last Olympic hundred metres final was eyed by a little under nine million. The Open Games hundred, run four days later on the same track, went out to something north of two billion, and roughly a fifth of those were riding hosts in the stands rather than taking the broadcast, which is its own economy now. A seat in the lower bowl at Lagos pays for itself twice over if you host well.
I am suspicious of those numbers, for the record. Rider counts are measured differently from broadcast audiences and everyone quoting them knows it. The direction is not in doubt, though. What used to be the main event now warms up the stadium.
Inside the athletes’ village the divide people talk about is not augmented against unaugmented. It runs between originals and electives, and it is sharper than anything the broadcasters will show you. Originals came to this by injury or by birth and spent years being told they were competing in the smaller meeting. Electives paid for a conversion, waited out a list that runs past four years in most sectors, and arrived into a sport that originals built while nobody was watching. There is a word each group uses for the other. I am not going to print either of them.
Tobi Ayanlowo, who anchors the Standard division four hundred and has never been fitted with anything, put the whole business in one line while we were waiting out a delay at the warm-up track. Nobody runs any more, he said. Some people Run. He meant it about the same way people say nobody drives, and he was smiling when he said it, although he also mentioned that his division’s final has been moved to a morning slot to clear the evening for the Open programme.
The Standard division is not dying. It is becoming expensive, which is a different thing and possibly a worse one. Unaugmented League seats sold out in nine minutes last season at prices that put them out of reach of the people who most want to be in the room, and the League’s own marketing leans hard on scarcity. There are fewer bodies competing on baseline every year, so watching one has become a luxury purchase, in the way that a hand-stitched seam or a manually driven car is a luxury purchase.
Anatome’s certification tent sits between the warm-up track and the call room, and every competitor in the Open programme walks past it on the way to the start. The Certification Board verifies conformance envelopes there, stamps the serials, and clears athletes to compete. What the Board does not have, as Vector has reported at length from Shenzhen, is any way to read the firmware it is certifying. Several athletes I spoke to in Lagos raised this before I did. They talk about the trim the way cyclists once talked about altitude, as a condition of the sport that everyone accommodates and nobody controls.
I wrote a book in 2041 arguing that we were watching the last generation of athletes whose limits were their own. People send me the cover with some regularity, usually with a comment about how well it aged. It did not age well. I had assumed the change would arrive as an argument the sport would have, loudly, over about a decade. It arrived as a scheduling decision on page nine of a document almost nobody read.