The most stacked 5K in world history

Join the Florence DL Fantasy League here:
https://hpr.github.io/florence23

Immediately after the Florence DL entries came out, before fully parsing the entrants I ran my script to auto-generate the AI event previews. They all checked out — until I saw the men’s 5000m. No matter how many times I regenerated the output, TrackBot was saying the winning time would be sub-12:40 or close to it.

“Got to be a mistake,” I first thought. Maybe I needed to adjust the code. Then I actually looked at the entrants, and realized maybe the AI was on to something.

We’re in for a real treat in Florence this Friday at 3:06pm Eastern (TV window and entries deadline is at 2pm). A record seven men with sub-12:50 PBs will spar in the men’s 5K, including WR holder Joshua Cheptegei — for comparison, even the stacked diamond league final last year could only manage five runners of that caliber. This might just be the most stacked 5K in world history.

And that’s not the only exciting event — the women’s 1500 has nine sub-4 athletes, the men’s 100m sees most the Rabat field returning plus Olympic champ Marcel Jacobs, and Femke Bol will be running her first diamond league hurdles race of the year after breaking the world record in the short track 400 and 500.

We had a great competition in Rabat — congrats to the winner Ryan W and everyone else, for which you can see the leaderboard here. But Florence, the temporarily-relocated site of the Rome DL, could prove to be an even better meet. Remember to submit your picks by 2pm ET this Friday, and reply to this email if you have any questions or feedback!

Join the Florence DL Fantasy League here:
https://hpr.github.io/florence23