Millrose Games will be at Armory

Just because Saturday night's Wanamaker Mile will be contested over eight laps, instead of the 11 it covered for almost a century, doesn't mean track and field's marquee race has been shortened. It just means that, for the 105th running of the Millrose Games, a lot of geography has changed.

After 97 consecutive years at Madison Square Garden -- far longer than either the Rangers and Knicks have appeared there -- the Millrose is moving to the Armory at 168th Street and Broadway, where the track is larger and the seating capacity dramatically smaller, just over 5,000.

The new location is yet another sign of the sport's declining visibility on the spectator sports calendar, after a decade of dwindling crowds at the Garden. Yet Norb Sander, executive director of the Armory Foundation and the major force in the move, is convinced that the "electric environment" of the new venue and the meet's impressive field of elite athletes provide the best hope of saving indoor track.

Enough world and Olympic champions have signed up for the new Millrose to please the stopwatch and tape-measure crowd. And, in fact, with the steady disappearance of indoor meets in basketball/hockey arenas and the move toward larger fieldhouses (with fewer seats), most top runners have almost no experience on the tight, old 11-lap tracks.

An exception is Bernard Lagat, eight times the Wanamaker champ who Saturday night has moved up to the 5,000 meters to take a shot at the American indoor record of 13:11.44.

"I think it's going to be great," Lagat said of the meet's relocation. "Change is always necessary. So far, so good. I feel excited we'll have a good race in the 5,000 meters, and all these athletes have come, an indication that the Millrose Games' move to the Armory is going to be a great one."

Besides Lagat, the 2009 world champion at both the 1,500 and 3,000 meters, Saturday night's fields include 2009 world 400-meter champ Sonya Richards Ross (who is hoping for "a great couple of weeks for the Rosses" after her husband, Aaron, helped the Giants to their Super Bowl victory); American hurdlers record-holder David Oliver, Olympic 400 gold medalist LaShawn Merritt; world high jump champion Jesse Williams and reigning U.S. mile champion Jenny Simpson.

Both the major-league prices from Millrose's Garden days -- top tickets went for $140 and $95 -- and the budget for stocking the field, $500,000 -- have stayed the same, even as Sander continues to seek a naming-rights sponsor.

Meanwhile, with the London Olympics on the horizon this summer, "This is the first peek the athletes and all of you get to see where our training is going," Simpson said. And fast.

105TH MILLROSE GAMES

When: Saturday, first event, 4 p.m.; first professional event, 6:06; final event (Wanamaker Mile), 9:50.

Where: The Armory, 168th Street & Broadway, Manhattan.

Who: Elite international athletes include Olympians Bernard Lagat (5,000 meters), Jennifer Simpson (1,500), Sanya Ricards Ross (400), David Oliver (hurdles), LaShawn Merritt (500), world championship bronze medalist Matt Centrowitz (mile), world's No. 1 pole vaulter Jenn Suhr.