The Canadian sprinter Andre De Grasse and the Jamaican Usain Bolt compete in the men’s two-hundred-metre semifinal. Photograph by Ian Walton / Getty

D_uring the Rio Olympics, Malcolm Gladwell and Nicholas Thompson have been discussing the track-and-field events. Part 1, on_ Caster Semenya and Olympic economics, can be read here. Part 2, on Usain Bolt and Mo Farah,_ is here. Part 3 is below._

Nicholas Thompson**:** Malcolm, here we are again. I’ve been utterly captivated, and I couldn’t be more proud this time around of the U.S. team—the shotputters, the jumpers, the hurdlers, and even the distance runners. But here’s my question: Why is there no one in the stands?! It’s the Olympics, and world records are falling! More people attend meaningless college football games in the fall. I know that some of the seats are reserved for athletes and coaches who don’t show up. But there have to be ways to fix the theatre of the Games.

Malcolm Gladwell**:** Track and field is its own worst enemy. Last time we did one of these conversations, I think we discussed the idea of moving the field events to a smaller venue—like a tennis stadium. The jumps are thrilling events. But they are intimate events—and ninety per cent of the drama is lost in an eighty-thousand-person stadium.

N.T.****: Right. You can’t even see the high jump from most of the stadium. Watching the field events in a giant stadium is probably the worst spectator experience that exists, short of those people who spend three hours waiting for the Tour de France to come by and then get to see the top riders for about twelve seconds. Though they, at least, get to have wine-and-cheese picnics on a mountain.

M.G.****: Here’s my idea for the sprints. Forget the stands that run along the backstretch. Instead, put up bleachers or some other temporary stands along the infield of the homestretch, so that all sprints would run through a narrow corridor, flanked closely on both sides by fans. It means dramatically reducing the number of potential seats, because bleachers obviously seat a lot fewer people. But can you imagine the drama? Can you imagine Bolt or Elaine Thompson—my new favorite Jamaican—rounding the curve in the two hundred into the homestretch and into a roaring tunnel of screaming people? I mean, come on.

N.T.****: I totally agree. The logistics would be tricky. And maybe you have to just have the bleachers on one side of the homestretch. But WAIT ONE SECOND: DID YOU JUST SAY THAT USAIN BOLT IS NO LONGER YOUR FAVORITE SPRINTER? I mean, I’m an Elaine Thompson fan, and not just because of her name. She has an utterly captivating demeanor, which is less showy than Bolt’s but just as charismatic. She’s also demolished the field, and she doesn’t seem, like so many top female sprinters before, to be an obvious doper. But I feel like I’m chatting with a devout Catholic who has been praising Pope Francis for years, but who now wants to point out that there’s this other cardinal who’s actually cooler.

M.G.****: I have room in my heart for more than one Jamaican sprinter, Nick.

N.T.****: Let’s get back to how track can stop self-sabotaging. The biggest solvable problem, at least for me, is the mess that occurs when runners start getting lapped in the distance events. It becomes impossible, when the TV pans out to a distance, to tell who’s running where. And it must be awfully confusing in the stadium. The first obvious fix is to require that runners getting lapped the first time must move into lane two. If they’re getting lapped a second time, they then need to move into lane three. What about, however, forcing the ten-thousand-metre runners at least to do the first part of the race outside?

M.G.****: Yes! For goodness sake, both ten thousands were unwatchable! I think the ten thousand metre should be the first event of the track-and-field program. It should be on the roads outside the stadium, so the general public can get into the spirit of the Games, then head into the stadium for the final lap. It could be like a mini-marathon to get things going.

N.T.****: Yes. Agreed. Let’s bring that proposal to the I.O.C. Now let’s go to the men’s five thousand. The field looks weirdly weak, given that all the Kenyans bombed out in the semifinals. Perhaps this means that my man, Bernard Lagat, will medal. But what it really seems to mean is that Mo Farah is going to get yet another gold. As the author of a book about how Davids beat Goliaths, can you dispense any advice to the hapless runners going against one of the greatest five-thousand-metre racers of all time?

M.G.****: For the uninitiated, Bernard Lagat is forty-one years old, meaning that the field is so weak that a guy who was a world-class runner before others in the field were even born is a plausible medal threat. I personally think that the runner with the best chance of beating Farah isn’t even in the race. It’s America’s best miler, Matthew Centrowitz, who runs the fifteen hundred metres so effortlessly and smoothly and calmly, and once the race is over looks so unperturbed, that I can’t help thinking he needs to trade up to the longer distance. I’ve often wondered about this in track—and in swimming. We have very little knowledge of whether athletes are competing at their best possible distance. Would Usain Bolt actually be an even greater four-hundred-metre runner than he is a hundred- and two-hundred-metre runner? Maybe. As a teenager, he ran some staggeringly fast times in the four hundred. America’s best marathoner is Galen Rupp, who will be running—at age thirty—only his second marathon ever on Sunday. Rupp was a brilliant ten-thousand-metre runner, third in the London Games and fifth this year. But is his true race the marathon? Maybe. People spend a lot of time talking about performance (how good someone is) and not enough time, it strikes me, thinking about fit. I was chatting with an education researcher today, and she suggested that some large chunk of teacher performance may actually be a question of fit: that a “good” teacher may in large part simply be someone who is lucky enough to teach the kind of student that he or she is particularly suited to teaching. In a world properly concerned with fit, we would all switch jobs more!

N.T.****: I do remember you making the argument that people should change their jobs at least once every ten years. And there is a good parallel with Lagat. He started out as a fifteen-hundred-metre runner, and he won a bronze in 2000 and a silver in 2004. (Take a moment and watch the crazy ending to the fifteen hundred in the 2004 Games, where Lagat is going back and forth with Hicham El Guerrouj, who is still the world-record holder in the event.) And then he moved up to the longer distance.

Let’s move back to the sprints, though. One highlight of these Games was Shaunae Miller’s dive in the four-hundred-metre finals to pass Allyson Felix, which, apparently, according to my Twitter feed, was an appalling and scandalous act of perfidy. I don’t get the outrage at all! What she did was perfectly legal, and perhaps her best chance given how she was slowing at the end. I wanted Felix to win, but it’s the Olympic Games, and the rule is that you get a gold medal if you get your torso across the line first. I loved it.