No Games for 2020

Just a week after the declaration of the japanese prime minister that the Olympic Games were going to take place as planned, the IOC, in concert with the japanese government, decided to postpone the 2020 Games to 2021. 

It is not just the question of the impossibility for the athletes to train for the Games. A major problem that the IOC was facing is the fact that less than half of the spots giving access to the Games were filled. Many pre-olympic tournaments were planned for the next months and their cancellation was making the organisation of the Games practically impossible. Combine this with the uncertainty on the evolution of the epidemic and the cancellation of the Games was the only sensible action.

What is `funny' is that Tokyo has already seen the Games, planned for their city, cancelled. The 1940 Olympics were scheduled for Tokyo but due to WWII they were scrubbed and Japan had to wait till 1964 in order to be given the task of organising the Games. At least, this time the Games are not cancelled but just postponed. And, moreover, they will still go down in history as the Tokyo 2020 Olympics.

World Athletics (see, I am not referring to them as IAAF any more) announced that, as soon as the conditions will allow it, they will organise a series of meetings, which will (start and) end later than usual, making it possible for the athletes to adjust their preparation.  The current Olympic qualification system may also be revised.

One remaining problem are the 2021 World Championships, planned for the second week of August 2021 in Eugene. They might be moved to 2022, which is not that bad, since the year at mid-point between two Olympics is usually underwhelming. But then, of course, comes the question of the Europeans, planned this year for the end of August, in Paris, while for 2022 they are scheduled for Munich, again in August. In the next months the international sports authorities have some serious juggling to do.

Decathletes of Europe, a great site

I recently discovered this site and I thought I would share it with you. It was launched in February 2019 and is curated by G. Pieraccini. I knew her name since she is regularly publishing articles on the site of World Athletics. In her short bio one can read that 

Gabby, since her brief athletics career, has been talking about decathlon to anyone who will listen, or anyone who has ears. She loves to tell the stories of decathlon: the highs, the lows, the joy and the tears. Every decathlon has a story.

I found the site while looking up Jordan Gray, the US female decathlon record holder. Gray made the US heptathlon team this year after having placed 7th in the NCAAs and she was selected for the Thorpe Cup, which was held in Germany. (Unfortunately for Gray, she was injured in the very first, 100 m hurdles, event and had to drop out after the third event). 

Jordan Gray with her Team USA kit

The article on J. Gray is very interesting, and I suggest that you hunt it down and read it. The interview develops into an insightful analysis of women's decathlon and the difficulties it faces. First, as Gray points out, there are a lot of heptathletes who don’t necessarily want to change to decathlon because it’s a completely different type of thing. And, there are a number of challenges facing those women who want to pursue a career in the decathlon. One argument against women's decathlon is that you can’t run two decathlons at the same time. However this is totally spurious, since in major competitions decathlon and heptathlon are held on separate days. And, by the way, the unnatural order with field events swapped between men's and women's decathlon should disappear. Would anybody, in their right mind, dare put high jump as 9th event in a men's decathlon? 

Jordan Gray concludes:

“I think there should be a period of time where they offer both. Or, say, in this many years it’s going to change to the decathlon. That way it’s not blindsiding a bunch of women who don’t pole vault or do the discus. They can decide if they want to continue and do the decathlon. But, again, it’s a different type of athlete. It’s not necessarily better or worse. It’s just a different game”.

After all, the ten disciplines of the decathlon have been contested as individual events by women for more than two decades. It's high time to forget about the less demanding heptathlon and let women tackle the difficulty of the full decathlon.

A very sad moment

The flying steeplechaser is no more.

Giorgos Papavasileiou the legendary steeple champion passed away on March 12th. He was 90 years old. I had the privilege to meet him, thanks to my friend Costas Tsagkarakis, when I was preparing the article of my blog devoted to this unique athlete.

He was not flying only over the hurdles but in cross country as well

I have been an admirer of Papavasileiou since I started interesting myself in athletics. Nobody before or after him had his technique over the river obstacle, which he managed to pass without getting his feet wet. When I was attending competitions in the Panathenaic Stadium I was always choosing my place so as to be close to the river obstacle just to be able to admire G. Papavasileiou. 

Greek athletics is poorer after his demise.

On the evolution of throw records as a function of age

I have already addressed the question of the decline of records with advancing age. In my post on age factors I analysed the way performances progress during the athletes young age, reach a maximum and then start declining. Two main conclusions were reached in that study. First, the rate of decline is roughly constant (of course, when one considers the entire master population and not just specific individuals). Moreover the same behaviour is observed for men and women. (In my "gerontology" post I present the findings of Tanaka and Seals who have observed a departure from the constant rate of decline for endurance events, but this need not concern us here). Second, an almost linear progression appears to be true also for junior athletes. And what is really interesting, when one compares juniors and masters, young athletes appear to speed up roughly five times faster than old athletes slow down. 

All these studies of mine were focusing on running and jumping events. The reason for the exclusion of throwing events is that different age groups use implements of different masses. Thus one is faced, at least on the surface of it, with an "apples to oranges" conundrum. How does one compare performances obtained with shots the masses of which range from 7.26 to 2 kg? It turns out that the answer to the quandary does exist and can be found already in one of the very first posts in this blog.

In a study published in New Studies in Athletics (New Stud. Athl. 29:1 (2014) 75) I addressed the question of how throwing with lighter implements does affect the performance. I ended up by proposing a simple expression which represents nicely the dependence of the length of the throw L on the implement's mass m:

L=a/(m+f)

In the expression above f is a parameter which represents the inertia of the thrower's arm. It is of the order of a few kilograms and depends on the throwing event. The presence of this term ensures the realistic character of the expression. When the mass of the implement goes to 0 the length of the throw increases only up to some limit value.

Just to give an idea of the variety of the masses of the different implements used it is interesting to have a look at the list of best recorded performances in men's shot put. For boys between 5 and 11 years old we have performances obtained with 2 kg shots. Between 6 and 14 the performances are obtained with a shot of 3 kg. Similarly we have 4 kg for ages between 7 and 14 and 5 kg between 11 and 18. In some case a 5.44 kg (i.e. 12 lb) shot was used. Performances for ages 14 to 18 were obtained with a 6 kg shot and finally there exist performances obtained with a 7.26 kg implement for ages 13 to 19. Moving now to the masters' where the weight used by each age group is fixed by the rules, we have a 7.26 kg shot for ages from 35 to 49, 6 kg from 50 to 59, 5 kg from 60 to 69, 4 kg from 70 to 79 and 3 kg from 80 onwards. 

Using the expression presented above to bring all performances to ones obtained with a 7.26 kg shot we find the diagram below. 

The same diagram for women shot putters shows the same behaviour.

And just to show that the results are not specific for the shot put, here is the same diagram for men's discus throw. 

All these diagrams confirm what was already observed for the track events as well as jumps. The progression of the junior and the regression of the masters performances are roughly rectilinear. Moreover the respective slopes have a ratio of five. 

Imperative changes: the height of women's hurdles

When a women's hurdle race was introduced there were no uniform rules fixing the distance and the hurdle heights. It was only in 1926 that IAAF decided to fix the race distance to 80 m, a hurdle height of 0.76 cm and a distance between the 8 hurdles of 8 m. We had to wait till 1968 for the discipline to reach some maturity with the introduction of the 100 m. On this occasion the hurdle height was raised (a little bit) to 84 cm and the spacing of the 10 hurdles increased to 8.5 m.

In a post of mine I had already discussed the question of the women's hurdle height.  Comparing the women's hurdle height to that of men's we find a ratio of 84/107=0.79. The ratio of mean statures of women and men is 0.92 and, what is perhaps more significant, the ratio of world high jump records is 0.85. Obviously the 84 cm hurdles are ridiculously low. In fact the ratio for the low, 400 m, hurdles is already 0.83. Had we applied the same ratio to the 100 m hurdles we would have ended up with a height of 89 cm. 

What are the consequences of using such low hurdles for women? According to S. Hannan (ex-coach of S. Pearson) the low height of the hurdles allows for non-optimal styles. "One sees the hurdler's style going haywire over the hurdles. Using higher ones would oblige the athletes to streamline their technique". 

Coach S. McGill points out that as the hurdles are low it does not take much effort to get over them, and as a consequence there is very little break in the sprinting stride.  
In his own words
"Because of the low height of the hurdles, female hurdlers can get away with too many technical flaws, and, to me, this factor lies at the heart of why the hurdles need to be raised. Too many top-flight women hurdlers can get away with locking out their lead leg knee; too many top-flight women hurdlers can maintain their sprinting posture throughout hurdle clearance without bucking from the lower back; too many top-flight women hurdlers can get away with dropping their trail leg knee without driving it up in front; too many top-flight women hurdlers can get away with swinging their arms across their bodies without causing a major loss of balance. 
In the male 110 m race, the best performers possess a combination of skills, of which speed is only one. In the men’s race, it is essential to be flexible, quick, strong, and technically efficient. In the women’s race, good speed is too often enough to get by on. To me, the fact that hurdlers can run fast times without hurdling efficiently verifies the belief that the event itself is flawed, and therefore needs to be amended".

Coach N. Stein concurs. He argues that the women's hurdles for specialists is considerably depreciated in skill demands when compared to the men's hurdles. It should not be possible in the women's hurdles that the winner be an athlete whose performance in the flat sprint is demonstrably excellent but whose technique of hurdling is only moderate and whose anthropometric characteristics are not optimal.

All of the cited specialists propose that the height of the 100 m hurdles be raised to 91 cm (which, by the way, is the height of men’s 400 m hurdles). This would probably necessitate a slight increase of the distance between the hurdles, perhaps from 8.5 to 8.8 m. The distance between the last hurdle and the finish line is already a mere 10.5 m and thus it is impossible to take out the 2.7 extra metres from the final part of the race. So, the only possibility would be to gain them in the initial 13 m separating the start from the first hurdle. Since most women hurdlers take 9 steps to the first hurdle, diminishing this distance could bring the number of their initial strides down to 7. Anyhow those are details which can be easily fixed once the major decision of raising the height is taken. 

Given the resistance of the current champions to change (see my article on women's decathlon) one can fear a major outcry if the IAAF decided to raise the hurdles' height. In his article P.J. Vazel points out that olympic and world champion S. Pearson, had pronounced herself in favour of higher hurdles. Whether  higher hurdles will someday be introduced by the IAAF/WA remains to be seen. However if we wish to have a technical parity between the men's and women's high hurdles this is something we should undertake without delay.

And just to finish on a technical point, what would be the expected world record if women started competing with 91 cm hurdles? Given that men's speed over the 110 m is roughly the same as that over 400 m hurdles we may expect women to follow the same pattern, due to the difficulty of the higher hurdles. Thus 13 s would be the barrier to break, but once real specialists of the high hurdles emerge I believe that the barrier will not resist for long.