The steeplechase mile: one and done (part 2 of "where did innovation go?" mini series)

In a recent article, where I returned to the subject of (nonexistent) innovation in Athletics, I wrote that I had seen a steeplechase mile only once. My memory had played a trick on me. In fact, I had watched two of them. The first was part of the farcical comedy that was the Fribourg Track Lab, a competition I hurried to forget. The second, however, was memorable for a completely different reason. It took place at the 2025 Diamond League meeting in Brussels, where a women’s steeplechase mile was organised with the participation of Winfred Yavi, the World and Olympic champion. Yavi did not disappoint. She won in 4:40.13, establishing the inaugural world record for the distance. She does not hold the world records for either the “canonical” 3000 m or the shorter 2000 m steeplechase. Those belong to the great Beatrice Chepkoech, with 8:44.32 and 5:47.42, respectively. Yet Yavi’s 8:44.39 and 5:56.83 place her firmly among the discipline’s best, especially over 3000 m, where she is only 0.07 seconds away from the world record.

And what happened next? Exactly what usually happens with World Athletics’ attempts at innovation: nothing. The event was promptly forgotten. No other steeplechase mile has been organised since, and none appears to be planned in the near future. That is a pity, because it could have been an interesting event.

Actually, that is precisely why it got me thinking. What other distances could be used for steeplechase races? In my article, a follow-up to “Metric versus Imperial”, I examined several possible alternatives for track events. One of them was a 5000 m steeplechase. I remember presenting the idea to the late great Greek steeplechase champion G. Papavasileiou, who found it particularly attractive. He even suggested that, given the difficulty of a race involving more than 50 obstacle jumps, it might be more interesting than the standard 3000 m event.

But the steeplechase mile also raises the opposite question. Could the event be made shorter still? Before answering that, let us look at how the steeplechase is run today. The water jump cannot, for obvious reasons, be placed on the main track. It is normally located in the infield, producing “steeple laps” of roughly 390 to 395 m. It can also be placed outside the track, which produces laps of around 420 m. Each lap contains five jumps, including the water jump. As a result, the 3000 m race contains 35 obstacles, 28 ordinary barriers and seven water jumps. The 2000 m race contains 23, 18 barriers and five water jumps.

How short could the race become before it stopped making sense as a steeplechase? My guess is that 1000 m is the lower limit. To make the format work, the race would have to begin with a water jump. Unlike the 3000 m race, it would need a water jump at the beginning, and there would be three water jumps in total, producing 12 obstacles altogether. That does not sound unrealistic. It would attract a different type of athlete, and the battle for position at the first water jump could provide a particularly entertaining feature.

Now let us remove the water jump but keep the steeplechase obstacles. If we also fiddle with the distances, could an 800 m hurdles race make sense? The average distance between jumps in steeplechase races is roughly 80 m. Over two laps, that would give us ten jumps. There is, however, a complication. The rules require at least 70 m from the start to the first obstacle and at least 40 m from the final obstacle to the finish. Applying the same principle here, we must leave enough room at both ends of the race. So this is what I propose:

There would be six obstacles per lap, with an average separation of 66.67 m. The first obstacle, on the right-hand bend, would be removed on the opening lap, giving the athletes roughly 120 m before the first jump. They could begin in lanes and move to the inside after 100 m. The final obstacle, the second one on the finishing straight, would be removed on the second lap, leaving more than 80 m for the finishing sprint. The result would be an 800 m “hurdles” race with ten jumps in total. And once we accept that such a race is feasible, why not consider relays as well? But relays deserve an article of their own, so I will leave them for another post.

It is clear from the above considerations that there is room for real innovation. Not just new events, but new events that could create new specialists. Will World Athletics ever take such a road? Unfortunately, I do not think so.

The 2026 Women's Decathlon championships

The 2026 edition of World Women's Decathlon Championships were held in Oberlin (Ohio) on July 8&9. And it was a smashing success. You can find all the details on the Décapassion blog, curated by my friends Frédéric and Pierre Gousset. 

Just after the first day I exchanged some mail with them and we shared our optimism on a possible 8000+ final score. Unfortunately that was not to be. But still, overall, that was the best women's decathlon ever. N. Boon who had won the 2025 edition last year with 7451 points improved her score to 7714 but had to contend herself with bronze medal. R. Bidois added close to 500 points to her score and still lost on place in the final classification. And I should point out that C. Newton-Smith who won the event with 7900 is a 6200 points heptathlete. We can only dream what a 6600 heptathlete could do with a one season preparation. (But, to be fair, Newton-Smith has always been practicing the pole vault, so she had only to learn how to throw the discus).

There are some excellent photos on the Décapassion Facebook page. What I would like to share here are the results. There were in fact two competitions staged at the same time, one for the elite and a promotional one with a good 50 participants overall. 

What is really interesting is that almost all participants had a valid performance in pole vault. Slowly this discipline is becoming a women's event (as prophesied in an old article of mine). And what I find astonishing is the second place, in the promotional event, of a 13-year old competitor. Lila Neese is a budding pole vaulter but I cross my fingers that she pursue her decathlon adventure in the coming years. Clearly the next generation of female decathletes, the ones who will practice the event in WA-sanctioned competitions and championships, is here already. Let us hope that lord Sebastian sees the light.

Where did innovation go?

World Athletics loves the word innovation. Type it into the search box on the World Athletics website and you will find articles going back to 2019. (That is already an improvement: until recently, the search function was in shambles and finding anything on the site was an achievement in itself). Unfortunately, the early articles offer little more than polished journalistic blah-blah. Things become slightly more interesting with World Athletics’ article on its “four-year business strategy”. The article links to a substantial document entitled Pioneering Change (2024-2027), which sets out the organisation’s strategic priorities for the future of Athletics.

It is an interesting document, or rather, a profoundly uninteresting one if you actually care about Athletics. It reads less like a sporting strategy than a marketing brochure. Its central ideas are familiar:

Make events faster-paced and more exciting for millions of people watching in stadiums and at home.

Increase innovation throughout the sport and bring athletes and fans closer together.

Turn athletes into the stars they deserve to be through competitions and social media.

Create more inclusive and accessible ways to enter Athletics as an athlete, coach, referee, volunteer, or administrator.

The problem is that none of this is specific to Athletics. Replace “stadium”, “athlete”, and “coach” with the corresponding words from almost any other field and the same paragraph would still work. This is not a strategy for Athletics. It is a collection of general ambitions expressed in corporate language.

The concrete plan is to “reconfigure the summer season to conclude each season with a global championship” and to launch “a new global championship in non-World Championship years”. The latter is the Ultimate Championship, to be held in September with a truncated and strangely unbalanced programme whose logic escapes me. The most revealing passage appears under the fourth strategic axis:

Discipline reform to see if we can improve the entertainment and excitement value of the sport to help future-proof athletics, with a particular focus on field disciplines, race walks and combined events.

Race walking has already provided us with a useful demonstration of what World Athletics means by innovation. First came the 35 km event. It did not take a high-level coach to see the problem. The 20 km and 35 km distances were too close together. An athlete could prepare for both without having to specialise in either. The new event filled a place on the programme, but it did not create a genuinely distinct discipline. A few years later, the 35 km was abandoned and replaced by the marathon, while the 20 km was replaced by the half-marathon. Innovation, apparently, sometimes means undoing the previous innovation. The mixed relay was at least a worthwhile idea. I find its total distance and its distribution bizarre, with legs of 11.45 km for the first man, 10 km for the first woman, 10 km for the second man, and 10.745 km for the second woman. Yet I find the event interesting. As regular readers know, I am a fan of mixed relays.

The reference to combined events gave me the chills. It probably refers to the proposed introduction of the Gundersen method, in which the final 1500 m would be run as a pursuit race. The athletes would start at intervals determined by the points difference accumulated in the preceding events. This proposal is not innovative. It is simply a way of removing the combined event’s defining feature, namely the competition between different disciplines. The decathlon is not a preliminary contest followed by a final 1500 m race. It is a competition in ten events. Turning the last event into a pursuit race would distort the contest rather than improve it. I have explained in detail why this is a bad idea and have presented the technical arguments in a separate article. I strongly recommend it if the subject interests you.

Jasmine Sawyers winning the 2026 Commonwealth Games' long jump

The document then offers a catalogue of possible innovations.

The first is the mixed 4x100 m relay. I advocated this event in a 2017 article. I had to wait until 2025 to see the relay run in the obvious order: man, woman, man, woman. Before that, World Athletics preferred the woman, woman, man, man arrangement, apparently because its decision-makers could not accept the possibility that a woman and a man could match each other’s speed in successive legs.

Then there is the steeplechase mile. Have you seen one? I have. Once. That was the beginning and the end of my experience with the event. Nobody is talking about it now.

“Improved efficiency of measurements” is another fine example of strategic vagueness. Which measurements? If World Athletics means timing in sprint events, I have already discussed the issue in my Imperative Changes series. If it means wind measurement, that subject too has been discussed in detail. In either case, nothing seems to have emerged from the proposal.

There is also a proposal to use new technology to settle ties in the jumping events. If this means the spectacle staged at the Fribourg “Future of Athletics” competition, where the highest point reached by the vaulter over the bar was measured, then I am relieved that the idea has disappeared into thin air.

I will not spend much time on the proposal to review the weights of the women’s shot and javelin. It is hardly worth discussing. Women already throw the shot beyond 20 m, which is within the broad range of men’s performances. There is no convincing reason to change the weight of the implement. The javelin is a different matter. Reducing its weight to, say, 400 g might produce throws in the region of 80 m, but only if the lighter implement could be thrown with the same efficiency as the current 600 g javelin. That assumption is far from certain. A lighter javelin would also be more vulnerable to crosswinds, making the event less predictable rather than more exciting. If World Athletics really wants to reform the throwing events, it should begin by confronting the records established before effective doping control. We may have to wait a very long time before a woman throws 76 m in the discus again.

The Fribourg “Future of Athletics” Track Lab also featured a women’s 100 m hurdles race with no lower reaction-time limit. This was presented as innovation. It was not. If World Athletics genuinely wants to experiment, it could lower the threshold to 70 ms, a value below what is normally considered a possible human reaction time. At least that would eliminate the absurdity of disqualifying athletes for reacting in 99 ms, as has happened in recent years. And if the organisation really wants to improve the women’s hurdles, it could raise the hurdle height to 91 cm. Keeping it at 84 cm suggests that the people making decisions in Athletics are still influenced by the Victorian idea that women are the weaker sex.

I will not discuss the take-off zone for the horizontal jumps at length. I have written about it several times, and the argument seems obvious to me. In one high-level official competition, unlike the Fribourg slapstick experiment, the number of fouls reportedly fell to 13%, compared with a historical average of 32%. The majority of observers appear to support the change. The exception is the group that matters most to the existing system: athletes and coaches. This is the real obstacle to innovation in modern Athletics. People do not want to surrender an advantage they have worked hard to acquire. Long and triple jumpers have spent years learning to hit the board accurately. They understandably do not want that investment to become irrelevant overnight.

The same logic keeps the women’s decathlon out of the stadium. Heptathletes and their coaches do not want to risk moving from the elite of the discipline to the also-rans once the event includes the discus and pole vault. But this is not a reason to postpone the women’s decathlon. It is a reason to introduce it. Every new event changes the distribution of expertise, and athletes eventually adapt to the demands of the discipline. The current dominance of the heptathlon should not be allowed to determine the future of women’s combined events.

And now we come to the question in the title. Where did innovation go? Nowhere. It never existed as a coherent programme, and it was never intended to. What World Athletics calls innovation is mostly presentation, repackaging, and occasional experimentation. The sport’s fundamental problems remain untouched. The organisation produces strategies, slogans, workshops, laboratories, test events, and press releases. But a genuine innovation would require something more difficult: deciding what Athletics is for, identifying which parts of the sport need changing, and accepting that meaningful change will upset people who benefit from the status quo. That is the part missing from the programme.