One candidate is widely agreed to be competent and experienced, with one major drawback--his inexorable ties to special interests. The other is much more famous, but she has less administrative experience. Vin Lananna and Jackie Joyner-Kersee are running against each other for USATF president. They'll be replacing IAAF Council member Stephanie Hightower, who is term-limited after serving two four-year terms in the office.

Lananna is best known as a coach and administrator. His coaching career took an unusual path; after coaching the track and cross country teams at Dartmouth and Stanford, Lananna went to Division III Oberlin College to hone his administrative skills from 2003 to 2005 as its athletic director. From 2005-12, he coached the track and XC teams at Oregon, racking up more national titles. Since stepping down as the Oregon head coach in 2012, he's been an associate athletic director at Oregon, president of TrackTown USA, and general rainmaker in American track. His most notable post-coaching accomplishment was getting the IAAF to award the 2021 IAAF World Championships to Eugene, OR, without even having to bid for it.

Joyner-Kersee is, without hyperbole, one of the greatest athletes in the history of the world. She's the world record holder in the heptathlon and the American record holder in the long jump. From 1984 to 1996, she won six Olympic medals, including three gold. USATF's female athlete of the year award is named after her. She's sat on USATF's board since 2012 and has run her own personal charitable foundation in East St. Louis, Illinois, since 2000, though the foundation has occasionally hit choppy waters and once lost its tax-exempt status.

But that doesn't make Lananna a slam dunk to win. He's played a major role in clustering the Olympic Trials and NCAA outdoor meet in Eugene, and he has been operating in the heart of Nike for 12 years. He clearly is very close with a very specific set of interests.

Lananna and Kersee are titans of American track, and the idea of one of them not getting what they want is hard to imagine. But only one of them can be the USATF president. The election will be held at the USATF Annual Meeting in Orlando, Florida. It's unclear from this schedule exactly when the balloting is, but the annual meeting is December 1-4. Page 19 of USATF's governance manual lays out who gets to be a delegate (and therefore, I believe, who gets to vote) at the annual meeting, and pages 57-59 lay out the election procedure.

As far as I can tell, a roughly 500-person group made up of athletes, coaches, bureaucrats, and local USATF representatives from across the country votes for president, and then multiple rounds of voting are held until one candidate as a majority. Orlando in three weeks should be a pretty interesting time.