Nobody accelerates for sixty metres, and coaching should say so

Top speed arrives earlier than the commentary suggests, and what separates sprinters afterwards is how little time they spend on the ground.

The hundred metres is not a hundred metres of acceleration. It is a few seconds of getting up to speed, a brief plateau, and then a controlled argument with deceleration that everybody loses. The winner is usually the one who loses it slowest.

Look at a split table from any serious final. The fastest ten metre segment is almost never the last one, and often not close to it. By sixty the top end is there. What follows is maintenance, and maintenance is a different skill from acceleration, trained differently, and chronically underserved because acceleration is more fun to coach and photographs better.

The mechanism at top speed is narrow. You are not pushing yourself forward any more in any meaningful sense. You are landing, applying a large vertical force in a very short window, and getting off the ground before the leg has time to become a brake. Ground contact at maximum velocity runs somewhere near eighty or ninety thousandths of a second. There is no strategy inside a window that short. There is only what the tendon and the stiffness of the whole leg spring do automatically, which means the training that matters is training that changed those properties months ago.

This is why I am sceptical of a lot of sprint drills. Marching, skipping, the whole A and B family. They happen at speeds where contact times run two or three times longer than the ones they claim to improve. You cannot rehearse a ninety millisecond event in three hundred milliseconds and expect the nervous system to file it in the right place.

What appears to transfer is running fast. Sprinting at ninety five percent and above, in small doses, fully recovered, plus heavy strength work and plyometrics that respect the contact time. That is an unfashionably simple prescription and it does not sell many seminars.

The other consequence is about talent identification and it is uncomfortable. If maximum velocity is largely a property of tissue stiffness and fibre composition, and if the trainable range for both is real but modest, then a lot of sprint coaching is selection dressed up as development. The coach who keeps producing fast athletes may simply be the coach that fast athletes keep choosing.

I would still rather be the one telling a fourteen year old the truth about the last forty metres than the one selling him the first ten.