Not surprisingly, the second-guessers have become unglued because the Chicago Marathon sponsors didn’t do—what?—enough about the blazing heat that laid many runners low. But, to compare what happened here over the weekend to the deadly disaster in New Orleans, isn’t that a bit much?

That’s what host Carol Marin did when she mentioned to her panel on WTTW’s Chicago Tonight that “some people” are calling the marathon, “the Katrina of Marathons.” The ridiculous analogy probably should have been expected considering how “some people” figure that someone (else) must be prepared on a moment’s notice to take care of every damn problem in sight.

You can bet if the marathon happened to have been run on a record-breaking cold day in a sleet storm, “someone” would have been blamed for not foreseeing the need to have an army of volunteers at the ready to chip the ice off the streets.

The Chicago Marathon is not a unique example of such starry-eyed expectations , but it sure is a shinning example of the prevalent Somebody-Do-Something mentality.

“Some people” at the Chicago Sun-Times had the simpering down pat. Marathon organizers, an editorial intoned, should have been “more aggressive” in preparing for the blistering temperatures. “Chicagoans are thirsty for an apology,” the paper said, dragging out the ultimate banality.

Sun-Times sports columnist Jay Mariotti was inspired to be “disgusted,” because “our sport organizers can’t even grasp when it’s too oppressively hot to stage a 26.2-mile road race for 35,000 runners. What went down at the Chicago Marathon was an ill-timed lapse in basic common sense that might cost this town its five-ringed dream [the 2016 Olympics].” Mariotti thus proves again that he is the town’s archetypal definition of a pundit: “The guy who watches the battle from the safety of the hilltop and comes down after the battle is done and shoots the wounded.”

For “some people,” the marathon shouldn’t have been cancelled at all; for others the organizers delayed too long to halt the runners. Ya can’t win.

Nothing in the marathon’s planning and execution has escaped the carpers’ microscope. There weren’t enough water stations. The stations’ “design” was faulty. “They” should move the marathon to a later date. “They” allowed an “absurd number of neophytes” into the race. “They” should make sure the runners are better prepared. “They” didn’t do enough to alert the runners about the dangers of running in the heat. The volunteers weren’t distributing the water quickly enough. Somebody failed, someone blew it. It’s somebody’s fault.

Here’s one example of how simpleminded the criticism can get: They should have moved the start up sooner, when the temperature was cooler. How? Call all the hundreds of volunteers the night before, tell them to show up earlier and forget how difficult or even impossible it would be? Reschedule the police and fire personnel on a moment’s notice to change their shifts?

In reality, the only decision the organizers could have made was: Cancel the race before it started, or let it continue based on the assumption that the runners were smart enough to know not to start in the first place (about 10,000 stayed away) or to stop when the run became too much. The latter turned out to be based on a false assumption; some runners were too stupid to know when to quit. As for the former? You think you’re hearing crabbing now? Imagine how the organizers would have been criticized for “letting down” runners who had been training for months, who had their “heart set on running what could be the Olympic marathon course.” Imagine the “civic black mark,” and how it would have diminished the city’s chances for snaring the Olympics.

The Olympics, again. How, pray tell, has the city’s chance at the Olympics become the sine quo non of everything that gets done around here? Why can’t matters be judged on their own merits, and not on what a panel of foreigners thinks. Of all the criticism of the marathon, the Olympic one might be the most absurd. If the Olympic committee can’t see the difference between organizing a race for 45,000 people and one for 100 of the world’s most superb runners, then nuts to them.

It takes no genius to know when something goes wrong. Sadly, “some people” are too ready to attribute failures to someone else’s stupidity or mendacity, discounting the possibility that complex events sometimes just go wrong or are overtaken by circumstances.

So, I wish that just for once before the next marathon, hurricane or whatever big thing to happen comes along that the media would run stories considering every possible contingency and itemize everything that has to be done to avoid every possible problem. It wouldn’t be tough because second-guessers are such geniuses.

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