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Olympics Blog

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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