No "A" standard, no trip to Beijing - Los Angeles Times
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No “A†standard, no trip to Beijing

By Helene Elliott
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EUGENE, Ore. -- An odd footnote to the women’s 800-meter finals.

Hazel Clark won the race -- and her third Olympic berth -- with a time of 1 minute, 59.82 seconds. Alice Schmidt was second in 2 minutes, 46 hundredths of a second and also earned a trip to the Olympics. However, third-place finisher Kameisha Bennett, third in 2:01.20, doesn’t get to go.

The reason? She has not recorded a time equal to, or faster than, the Olympic ‘A’ standard of 2 minutes flat. Schmidt has previously done that. So has fourth-place finisher Nicole Teter, who ran a 2:01.30 on Monday. So Teter gets the third berth.

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-- Helene Elliott

Olympics Blog
Helene Elliott

Helene Elliott was with the Los Angeles Times’ Sports department from 1989 to 2024, first as a staff writer and then, starting in 2006, as a columnist. She became the first female journalist to be honored with a plaque in the Hall of Fame of a major professional sport as the 2005 winner of the Hockey Hall of Fame’s Elmer Ferguson Award, awarded to writers “who have brought honor to journalism and to hockey.†A native of Brooklyn, N.Y., and graduate of Northwestern University’s Medill School of Journalism, she has covered 18 Olympics.

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