World Athletics and the Queen of Sprint

Given the paucity of news, the site of World Athletics is publishing a series on "10 of the greatest athletic moments". The first such series had to do with "triumph over adversity". As expected it was a motley collection of stories, but some, like A. Quirot's comeback after her accident, where she suffered extensive third-degree burns, winning a world title over 800 m, were indeed a triumph over adversity. 

Recently WA published a series of "10 of the greatest athletics examples of perseverance". 

Again the choice of examples is highly debatable. W. Rudolph's case (she became the "black gazelle" of world sprint after having suffered in her childhood from polio, scarlet fever and pneumonia) should belong to the article of triumph over adversity. E. Moses coming back to win a second olympic medal in 1984 after a first one in 1976, having missed the 1980 Olympics due to the US boycott of the Moscow games, is absolutely not an example of perseverance. Moses did what any professional athlete would have done: pursue his career, all the more so since he was unbeatable in his speciality. To my eyes the example of perseverance is F. Sanchez (since we are talking about 400 m hurdles). He dominated his discipline from 2001 to 2004. And then just after winning the 2004 Olympics he injured himself and while managing a silver medal in the 2007 World's he was considered by everybody as a "has been". Then in 2012 he won his second olympic gold, at 34 years of age, the oldest winner in that event. 

Merlene Ottey in the 80s

But what was most surprising was the item on "Merlene Ottey's long road to gold". The story is a well-known one. In 1993, Ottey, who was 33 years old, had a collection of bronze and silver medals, starting with her olympic bronze in 1980 in Moscow, over her favourite distance, the 200 m. But she had never won a major title. Well, this is not quite true. She was already indoor world champion in 1989 and 1991 over 200 m. (At that time the 200 m was still run indoor). She had won gold medals in the Commonwealth Games in 1982 and 1990 (a double 100-200 m, on the second occasion). She had even an outdoor world title with the jamaican 4x100 m relay obtained in 1991 (where she ran a phenomenal anchor coming from 3rd  place to win the race by a huge margin). But an individual world title was eluding her. She had just lost the 100 m title for just one (!) millisecond (and she would loose an olympic one in 1996 in exactly the same way). And then came the 200 m final. 

Merlene Ottey in the 90s

And while she was leading the race up to 190 m, she managed to stumble and she could have missed the best occasion in her life. Finally, she won by just a slight margin. For once Ottey has been lucky. It turned out that this was not the only time. Two years later she lost the 200 m world title to G. Torrence, but the latter was disqualified for a lane violation. So, Ottey managed to keep her title, beating Privalova by mere milliseconds. 

I am a great fan of M. Ottey. For me she is the best female sprinter ever. I was planning, since quite some time, to write about her in a blog post and the WA article was an occasion.  (That and the fact that, since we are under mandatory lockdown, I have more time to devote to the blog). M. Ottey is not an easy-going personality. In 2000 she found herself in the middle of a controversy. Having finished 4th in the jamaican trials she was qualified only for the 4x100 m relay, following which she asked that she be substituted for another team member. Thus she got to participate in the 100 m where she won bronze, but many members of the jamaican team took offence and protested. Due to this controversy, Ottey decided that after Sydney she was not going to run any more for Jamaica. 

Merlene Ottey running for Slovenia

She pursued her career, running for Slovenia, her last participation being in the 2012 Europeans as a member of the 4x100 m slovenian relay. She was 52 years old at the time. She holds the master's world records for 100 and 200 m for the age groups of 35, 40, 45 and 50. M. Ottey is an Ambassador at Large of the Jamaican government since 1993. A high school in the Pondside District has been renamed "Merlene Ottey High School" in her honour. Despite the fact that she decided not to run for Jamaica after 2000, the government had honoured her in 2005 by erecting her statue. In the unveiling ceremony the Prime Minister said to Ottey: 

“Your life is one of legendary endurance. From Moscow to Sydney, you showed the world that Jamaica is a force to be reckoned with in athletics. We know we can’t take the Jamaican out of you. No matter where you roam this will always be your home".

The statue of Merlene Ottey

And the Minister of Sports added: 

“Age is just a number. Merlene redefines what a person over 40 can do in sports today. She is one of the greatest Jamaican athletes of all time and undoubtedly the greatest Jamaican female athlete of all time”.

Why was I surprised seeing an article praising M. Ottey on the WA site? The story goes back to 1999. Following a meeting in Switzerland a urine sample of Ottey turned out to be positive. Ottey fought back asserting that she was innocent of knowingly taking steroids. She missed the 1999 World's but in 2000 she was cleared of all charges and the IAAF (that was what WA was called at that time) lifted their ban after the CAS dismissed the case. The IAAF instances did not like the fact that Ottey took them to court and ostentatiously ignored her whenever they invited past champions to medal award ceremonies. Does this article mean that the WA attitude has changed? I do not think so. Most probably, given the bizarre conditions we are currently living in, nobody in the higher-up echelons of WA saw the article before publication and, once published, they knew that any censorship would have provoked a Streisand effect.

M. Ottey and H. ElGuerrouj inducted into

the Van Damme Hall of Fame in 2018

There is no other track and field athlete with a career more impressive that the one of M. Ottey. She has won nine Olympic medals. (A. Felix has also nine Olympic among which one gold medal, won in 2012 over 200 m). Ottey has participated in seven Olympiads from 1980 to 2004. She has 14 World Championship medals, of which 10 are in individual events. (Felix has done better overall with 16 medals, but 10 of them are with the US relay team).

For me, Merlene Ottey is really the Queen of Sprint.

PS P.-J. Vazel also believes that Merlene Ottey is the Sprint Queen. 
She just turned 60. 

 

Foverer young, as Vazel says.

Exercise in the time of the Covid-19

While we are in lockdown, due to this pesky epidemic, a common advice is to do exercise. I agree 100 % with this and I decided to devote a post to this matter.

What can you do when you are confined at home? Well, you can do static running or cycling provided you have already the necessary equipment. (If you don't you better forget it, given the delivery delays). One other thing you can do at home are muscle-toning exercises. There are zillions of videos out there and in fact the World Athletics site publishes regularly videos by some famous champion showing her preferred set of exercises. If you look for something less `amateurish' I recommend the "Fitness Studio exercise videos" form the NHS (that's the National Health Service of the UK), and, in particular, the ones for strength and resistance. Mind you, these are not exercises for couch potatoes so tread with caution. 

On the other hand if you prefer to profit from the possibility to exercise outdoors, offered to all during the lockdown, you are welcome to do it. With this in mind the rest of this post will deal with running and walking. The benefits of exercise being unquestionable, one can wonder which of the two types of exercise  is preferable. Before proceeding, let us give some basic data. We know from physiology studies that an individual sitting quietly expends 1 kilocalorie per hour and per kg of body mass. This is usually called the "metabolic equivalent of task" (MET). Exercises can be classified according to their energetic requirements: '"light" up to 3 MET, moderate between 3 and 6 MET and vigorous, above 6 MET. The graphic below gives an idea the metabolic costs of various activities. 

One thing physicians do agree on is that runners tend to live longer that sedentary. It is even put forward that one hour of running adds 7 hours to one's life expectation (but please take this number with a grain of salt). OK, but how about walkers? Not to worry! Walking offers the same benefits as running, provided the energy expenditure is the same. In other words one should do longer walking treks, while running is more 'compact'. From the graphic below we can see that a 5-minute run generates the same benefits as a 15-minute walk. However you should keep in mind that one should not overdo it. 

There exists a 'sweet spot' beyond which one does not reap additional benefits from the exercise. Both curves reach a maximum at some point. It seems that past 4.5 hours per week there are no additional health benefits from running and the situation may even reverse. Be that as it may, the risks from any amount of running are always lower than from doing no running at all. And keep in mind that even 15 minutes of fast walking per day do bring substantial health benefits. So, use the lockdown period in order to change your habits, go out and run or walk. (As for myself, I am doing cycling and walking and I am longing for the day I can go back to the swimming pool).

In case you were doubting, the title of this post does indeed plagiarise the title of the Gabriel García Márquez novel, "El amor en los tiempos del cólera".

A bleak year for athletics

The year had started fantastically well. Two great world records by M. Duplantis in the pole vault and a U20 world record my Y. Machuchikh in high jump. J. Rojas established a new indoor world record in triple jump. G. Stark and S. Zhoya set world junior records in the 60 m hurdles. K. Klosterhalfen registered an excellent European record over 5000 m and H.-F. Zango an African one in the triple jump. M. Volkov set a new world U16 pole vault record. And J. Cheptegei added the 5km record to his 10km and 15 km collection. Yes, the year had started incredibly well. And then the epidemic struck and all went south from there. 

After some tergiversation the IOC and the japanese organisers decided to postpone the Olympics by a full year. What is funny is that I could not find the dates for the athletics competitions, neither at the WA site, nor at the IOC one. Fortunately Wikipedia, always the best information source, was there. The 2020 Olympic athletics will be held from July 31 to August 8, 2021.

The Marakana stadium with its dependencies 

transformed into a makeshift hospital

The change in the olympic program had as a consequence a cascade of modifications.  The qualification period for the Games to be held in 2021, had been suspended till December. The next World Championships to be held in Eugene in 2021, will finally take place one year later, from July 15 to July 24, 2022. This means that in the summer of 2022 we will have in succession the World Championships, the Commonwealth Games and finally the European Championships (August 15-21). An uncertainty remains concerning this year's Europeans. They are scheduled for Paris, from August 25 to August 30. However their feasibility is currently under scrutiny and a final decision will be taken at the beginning of May.

What does all this mean for the blog? Last year I published 40 articles and about half of them were referring directly to athletics events or were inspired by them. This year most of these occasions will be missing. Does this mean that the blog will go into radio silence? Let me reassure you. The blog is alive. While there will be fewer things to report, I will try to present more technical analyses of the kind that I love. And, who knows? Perhaps the epidemic will abate, come summer, and the activity will pick up again.

PS. And without waiting for May the decision to cancel the European Championships was announced today. In this case the championships are not postponed but really cancelled. We'll have to wait for 2022 for the next Europeans.

Imperative changes: horizontal jumps

I have always been unconformable with the way the long and triple jump are measured. What we are looking for is the longest possible jump. However instead of measuring the real length of the jump what we measure is the closest distance of the trace in the sand pit from the fixed foul line. The athlete may jump as far behind the foul line as he wishes: this is a pure loss for him since this length of the jump does not count. I find this quite unfair. Somehow it does pervert the notion of the longest jump.

The fact that jumps are measured from the foul line pushes the athletes to adjust their run-up so as to come as close as possible to the line on their last step. Hundreds of hours are spent in training in order to adjust the run-up. Hundreds of hours which could have been spent in a more productive way. Thousands of jumps are invalidated because the athletes, in their effort to come as close as possible, overstep the foul line. Does all this make sense? Some people argue that having the required precision is an integral part of the long (and the triple) jump. Pure bullshit. This is just an indication of the extreme conservatism that reigns in our sport, where we should continue doing something because we have always been doing it.

J. Owens, the first man over 8 m in long jump 

What should be done? The solution does already exist. In all major competitions there is a  video capture which allows to measure the distance from the tip of the athlete's foot to the foul line. Added to the length of the measured jump we can get the real length of the jump. However the take-off board is still too short from my point of view. What would be convenient is a board of a length of at least 60 cm, perhaps even 80 cm. Then the athlete would only have to adjust his run-up so as to arrive on the board on his last step. Not too difficult a task if the board has a length of 80 cm! The take-off point could be captured along any point of the board. If the athlete misses the board, then 80 cm are added to the length measured from the foul line. And if the athlete oversteps the foul line, well, then the judge will have the occasion to raise the dreaded red flag and indicate a foul.

As I pointed out the technology is there. In fact the concept has been tested. I have written about this in my article on "Long jump experimentation". In a competition in Malmö, held in 2015, I. Spanovic won the long jump with an "official" 6.83 m and a real jump length of 6.99 m. The difference is quite appreciable, 16 cm in this case. Closer to us, I remember that in the women's long jump final, the winner, M. Mihambo, had a first jump measured at 6.52 m taking off a good 40 cm from the foul line. Given that she fouled her second one, she was in a precarious position, since her measured performance did not suffice in order to give her access to the final three jumps. Fortunately for her, she jumped a huge 7.30 m on her third try, clinching the gold medal. 

V. Bardauskiene, the first woman over 7 m in long jump

Some persons could object to my proposal, saying that it necessitates sophisticated technology which can only be available for major competitions. Although I could argue that video tech is nowadays dirt cheap, I prefer to point out that low-tech solutions do exist. While writing my article on the Paralympics I had to gather material about all the disciplines. Thus I came to watch videos on how horizontal jumps are organised for visually impaired athletes. For them the take-off board has a length of 1 m and it is covered with chalk dust which allows to materialise the imprint of the take-off step. This is a solution that could be easily implemented, provided that take-off boards of 80 (or 60) cm are installed everywhere. Sprinkling chalk dust and swiping off the foot-print does not require anything special, and the total jump length can be easily measured with a tape.

Long jump for visually impaired athletes

Were these changes to be implemented, that would liberate the athletes from the constraint of the accuracy of the take-off. They would concentrate totally on attaining their optimal speed. That and the fact that the official length of the jump would be the real length, would boost the performances. A world record for men's long jump over 9 m would cease to be a dream, while women's triple jump could flirt with a 16 m record.