Lane Nine - The Olympic idea you never knew you wanted

What is Lane Nine? Simply put, lane nine is the idea that at major sporting events, someone is selected from the audience to participate alongside the athletes.

Photo by Adi Goldstein on Unsplash

I’m not sure people entirely consider just how incredible Olympic-standard athletes are. Here’s an example. On my last 5k run, I reached a peak of 9.2mph. I was quite pleased with the effort. Baltimore Ravens QB Lamar Jackson, wearing full pads, runs at more than twice that speed at 21mph, breaking the actual speed limit in parts of London. Now consider that at an Olympic level. 9.2mph converts to a 100m time of about 25 seconds — I’d finish just as Usain Bolt hits the showers, and I am entirely okay with that.

When I was looking up times for this, I searched for Sir Mo Farah’s 10,000m times. Farah ran a 1000m in 2:28 in 2017, and that was a sprint finish compared to the 9k he’d run before, running 10,000m in a total time of 26:49. That’s the equivalent of putting your treadmill at a speed of 24kmph and keeping up with it (don’t try this, you’ll become a meme).

"What is Lane Nine? It’s the idea that at major sporting events, someone is selected from the audience to participate alongside the athletes."

And that’s just the running events. Now consider someone getting to attempt the pole vault, or the parallel bars, or the 10m diving. If you put John Q. Randomer in for the javelin, not only have you got an entertaining talking point, but you’ve got that real-life benchmark so we can see just how amazing pro athletes are.

And then there’s the global talking point if the lane nine competitor beats even one athlete…

You see a few examples of this already at sports games with retired athletes. MLB’s Atlanta Braves have held Beat The Freeze events, where people get a chance to out sprint Nigel Talton, a US Olympic hopeful. Even with a head start, it’s unlikely, but it shows how amazing professional athletes are.

I watch quite a lot of sport, but there are a lot I don’t, except when they get put into the Olympics. Slalom canoeing looks scary, archery looks like an accident waiting to happen, BMX cycling looks like something out of a Saw film. Look at gymnastics, for example. While taking a run-up at a vault, spring off it and flip, landing perfectly, we don’t realise how many years of training that takes. In diving, seeing someone normal attempt a back, 3.5 somersaults with pike dive would really drive home how amazing people competing for medals are.

To make it clear, it’s not to laugh at people. This isn’t a D-list celeb throwing out a first pitch on a bored Tuesday night. This is to show that average is fine, but the top 0.01% of the world are just on a different level. And why not? They’ve trained for this for several years, sacrificed so much but I don’t think we really see how amazing they are. That’s why you get idiot men thinking they could win a point off Serena Williams. That’s 23-time grand slam winner Serena Williams, by the way. Even if she had a guitar as a racket, she wouldn’t need to get out of first gear to beat most people.

Come on Tokyo 2021, make it happen. Make lane nine a revolutionary idea that’s talked about for years to come. And yes, I can already hear your question — of course it can be carried over to the Winter Olympics. It’s already happened.