Another reason to like track

I am on the record heartily supporting the sport of athletics. Today's USA Track and Field blog just adds to it. The COO of the sport in the U.S., Mike McNees, devotes a column to the horrors of plastic bottles. He makes an argument often regarded as wacko environmentalism sound like what it is--common sense.

Certainly our elite athletes must take great care to not drink from unsealed containers, given the potential consequences of a positive doping test resulting from a tainted bottle. A career could certainly be ruined. This does not mean, however, that every 12-year-old miler or collegiate official needs bottled water. I participated in more than a few track meets in the days when bottled water was something my mom poured into the steam iron, and when suggesting one pay $4 for a bottle of water from a concession stand might get you committed. There are alternatives, not the least of which is the best public water supply in the world. It is a public water system, by the way, in which we have collectively invested billions of dollars, only to turn up our nose at in favor of an environmentally toxic plastic bottle filled with water that is produced and bottled without a fraction of the regulatory quality control of our public water.
The ban-the-bottle movement is not new, and at least two states have banned the use of public money for bottled water. But in spite of growing awareness of things like the floating Pacific garbage patch, the effects of plastics in our environment, the energy costs to produce and distribute bottled water, and the cost to buy it, that movement is gaining traction very slowly.

What other leader of a major U.S. sport would even bother to identify a problem like this, let alone call for ban on bottled water at U.S. track meets, as he does at the conclusion of his column?
Read it all.