Where track and field is sexy and knows it

DONETSK, Ukraine — In his time, it was enough that Roger Bannister broke the four-minute mile. People cared, and a lot. Back then, track and field mattered.

In their day, the likes of Edwin Moses, Carl Lewis, Florence Griffth-Joyner and Jackie Joyner-Kersee could just run fast and jump far. A great many people found track and field itself relevant and interesting.

Now, track and field lives on the margins of professional sport, especially in the United States, except for one week every four years at the Summer Olympics, when it commands Super Bowl-like attention. As ratings and attendance figures at other times have demonstrated conclusively, it’s not enough anymore to just to run and jump — or even throw.

So when Kylie Hutson, a rising American pole vaulter, took her runs Saturday night here at the 23rd annual running of the “Pole Vault Stars” to the strains of LMFAO’s  “Sexy and I Know It,” playing to the crowd because she’s sexy and she knows it — hey, it was showtime.

Brad Walker, the 2007 world champion, ran the runway to perhaps the one G-rated sentence in the song “Move Bitch” from Ludacris. The noise shook the roof. The crowd roared.

Traditionalists may cringe. But this is the direction track and field inevitably has to move, a combination of sport and entertainment, if it wants to engage the paying public.