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Friday, September 12, 2008

Usain Bolt 9.55s? Yeah, right

Could Usain Bolt have run 9.55s without his celebration in Beijing? Not a chance...

Thank you for visiting The Science of Sport. If you've arrived here searching to find out what Usain Bolt is capable of after his amazing 9.58s, you've come to the right place!

Click here for our detailed analysis of Bolt's 9.58s time, including Bolt's splits, speeds and a comparison with his previous world record in Beijing.

And check in at our
homepage for more in the coming days!

Late edit to this post (NB):

If you've arrived here in the aftermath of Usain's amazing 9.58s WR in Berlin, I must emphasize a very important point: This post was written back in September 2008 to answer the question "Could Bolt have run 9.55s without celebrating in BEIJING?". It was NOT written to say that Bolt would NEVER run 9.55s. So if you are here to point out that he just ran 9.58s, yes, you are quite right. And yes, 9.55s is on the cards. But this post, I must stress again, looked at the very specific issue of Bolt's 100m in Beijing, and whether he might have been able to run 9.55s in BEIJING. The post was written in September 2008 - we are now a year on, so to use this to prove your point...well, you're in the wrong place.

If you would like to read the latest thoughts on the Bolt 9.58s WR, and if you're wondering what Bolt is really capable of, as well as the rest of our coverage of athletics, please click here.

Yesterday, the news wires were buzzing with the news that scientists in Oslo predicted that Usain Bolt, Jamaica's triple Olympic champ, would have run 9.55 seconds had he not celebrated prematurely in his 100m final in Beijing.

It was on the radios, internet, TV news, all over. A while back, just after that race, we speculated that a 9.61s time was about the limit, given the split times that were available.

So this 9.55 s is quite different from that. And far be it from me to criticize the physicist's assumptions, and calculations, but what we have here is a classic case of losing sight of the wood for the trees. Their method involved looking at the final 2 seconds of the race, where Bolt began his celebrations, and compared his acceleration to that of Richard Thompson, who finished second. They looked at two possible outcomes: One is that he maintained the same acceleration as Thompson (that is, slowed down, because all athletes slow down at the end of a 100m race), and the second is if he maintained an acceleration 0.5m/s2 greater than Thompson.

It was in the second of these scenarios that they worked out that he'd run 9.55 s. But the problem with this emerges when you consider the official 10m splits from the race, courtesy the IAAF analysis and a website in which they discuss the race.

So let's look at the analysis, and let me start by asking a simple question: Where in this race are you going to find 0.14 seconds to help Bolt run 9.55 seconds? The answer, as you'll see, is that you won't find it at the end of the race, in the celebrations. It's just not physiologically possible...

The splits:

These are the split times from Bolt's race, according to the IAAF analysis. The graph below it shows the times making some basic assumptions (apologies for the lack of integration and physics equations, but I wish to make a point using simplicity as the vehicle). Again, ask the question: Where are you going to help Bolt knock 0.14 seconds off his time?


The RED line represents the ACTUAL PERFORMANCE. It adds up to a time of 9.685 seconds, considering also that Bolt's reaction time was 0.165 seconds. You'll note that Bolt's fastest 10m interval was from 60 to 70m, taking 0.82 seconds. I must point out that no one has ever measured a human being running a 10m interval faster than this. In our analysis of the race, we got a lot of interesting discussion and data from people, and of all the recorded 10m split times, this is the fastest ever measured. To speed up for the remaining 30 m would represent not only the fastest splits ever run, but also the longest period for which they are ever run.

That's not to say, of course, that Bolt would not be able to run a 0.80s segment. But the key is the pacing strategy - nobody speeds up progressively all the way to the finish line. Nobody. There are mechanical and metabolic reasons for this, but the point is that even holding that speed would be unusual, and speeding up would be highly, highly unlikely. Note, for example, that Bolt has already started slowing down BEFORE he starts celebrating. According to the splits, Bolt slows from 70m to 80m. The celebrations started at 80m. So speeding up? I don't think so.

The BLUE line, to simplify, represents Bolt's projected splits if he continues to accelerate. This is effectively the assumption made by the physicists when the calculate his 9.55 second time. I must emphasize that if you want to find 0.14 seconds at the end of the race (and answer my simple question), then you HAVE TO project that Bolt continues to speed up.

According to this assumption, Bolt would run faster and faster - he has to, in order to do what was projected by the analysis. Again, I must stress that this has never been done - I believe it to be impossible to speed up this much after 70m, and even Bolt would have slowed, or at the very best, held his speed. The whole basis for the argument by the physicists is flawed because there is no reason to believe that Bolt would continue to run faster than Thompson, or accelerate.

The GREEN line represents what I would in fact consider a more likely scenario. In this case, Bolt maintains that top speed that he hits between 60 and 70m. He thus runs the final 30m at 0.82 seconds/10m speed. If he does this, then he run 9.605 seconds.

In reality, I suspect that Bolt would slow down at the end anyway, even without his celebrations. His most likely performance is thus somewhere between 9.61 seconds and 9.69 seconds.

Now, I know there's no fancy physics here, no integration. Just split times, and a very simple question: Where in this race are you going to find 0.14 seconds to help Bolt run 9.55 seconds?

Answer, you can't find that time at the end of the race. Unless you assume that Bolt is going to run a 0.79 second 10m interval somewhere in the race. But that, I'm afraid, is not possible, and therefore, you cannot conclude that he would have run 9.55 seconds without celebrating.

What is possible? There is still time to be made up, but it wasn't the celebration

Having said this, I make the suggestion that Bolt's CELEBRATIONS cost him only about 0.05 seconds. However, that's not to say he cannot still run under 9.60 seconds.

One area for improvement is the start - a reaction time of 0.165 seconds can easily be cut down. Asafa Powell, for example, had a reaction time of 0.134 seconds in Beijing. Therefore, we can estimate that Bolt might get a 0.140 second reaction time.

If that happens, then suddenly he's down to 9.66 seconds. Add to this the fact that there was no tail-wind in Beijing, and it has been estimated that a tailwind of 1m/s improves 100m times by 0.05 seconds. Therefore, on an ideal day, with a tailwind of 1m/s (it could be as much as 2m/s, recall), a super fast reaction time, Bolt could run 9.61 seconds, and still celebrate. Take away those celebrations (another 0.05 seconds, in my estimation), and we have a 9.56 seconds.

But there is no way the 9.55 second time would have come without those celebrations - the trees just got in the way.

Preview of forthcoming attractions. The Coyle-Armstrong debate:

A big debate has flared up in the last few days, ignited by Lance Armstrong's comeback. It turns out that Ed Coyle, he who published a paper that "proved" why Lance Armstrong was superior without doping, has admitted that he may have made "some mistakes" in that paper. He only did so under pressure from the University of Texas after fellow scientists lodged a formal complaint of scientific misconduct against him.

The paper, which you can find here, showed that Armstrong improved his muscular efficiency over the years, but it was fraught with problems. In fact, it became a running joke within sections of the scientific community. That didn't stop Coyle from using his data to testify at a legal hearing that Armstrong had a physiological reason to have dominated without using drugs. It was a shameful display of science meets money meets tacky indulgence, and loses all credibility.

In response to the latest "attacks", Coyle had this to say: “This is a minor waste on my time. However, I don’t understand how they can afford to spend so much time on this. Don’t they have real jobs?”

Well, yes, Ed Coyle, they do have jobs. They are credible scientists, who search for the truth. But then aren't we all?

So the announcement, and the challeges to the Coyle paper are more than welcome. We'll look at the issue early next week. So join us then!

Ross

35 Comments:

Anonymous said...

I'm sure that there are going to be plenty of juicy articles and debates that surround Lance's return, and I for one am licking my chops at the prospect of them.

One thing that I note from Ed Coyle's paper is that he states in his abstract:

"It is hypothesized that the improved muscular efficiency probably reflects changes in muscle myosin type stimulated from years of training intensely for 3-6 h on most days."

Is he referring to the conversion of type LLA-LLB fibers(or vice versa, I forget which is which)?

I also had a thought that if this research is such crap, perhaps this is where the term "to park a Coyle" comes from :-)

Anonymous said...

Hmm, interesting article giving us a different viewpoint. We should always view such articles as useful insights, and not "truths", as we will never know for sure how fast Usain Bolt would have run had he not slowed down.

To look at the 10m split times and then conclude "...Therefore, he'd break 0.8s for the 10m intervals. Again, I must stress that this has never been done - I believe it to be impossible..." is as flawed as the previous analyses the authors are criticizing. Why is it impossible? The whole point of a world record is that it has never been done before!

Why the obsession with measuring the time to cover 10m intervals anyway? These are arbitrary gaps as people dont run in 10m "segments".

I would also be interested in your analysis of Asafa Powell's split times when he ran the final leg of the 4x100m relays as I heard he covered that distance in less than 9 seconds (clearly these figures would have to be treated with caution as there is no slow reaction phase and the distance covered may be less than 100m)

Keep the analyses going, I find it very interesting!

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas said...

Hi Anonymous

Thanks for the comments, and questions. YOu're quite right, as I was writing the "impossible" sentence, the thought crossed my mind that 10 years ago, someone would have said a 9.69 is impossible and here we are.

However, I stand by my point and I've tried to clarify it in the post and wills say here, that the reason its impossible is because you cannot continue to speed up at the end of a 100m race. It just doesn't happen - there are mechanical and metabolic reasons for this. I knwo it's dangerous to say "never", but there is no way that Bolt was going to continue to speed up from 70m in the race. No way. Maybe some day, someone will run faster than this for a 10m segment, but its the pacing strategy that is impossible.

As for the 10m segments, you're right, but how else would you like to analyse it? Nobody is saying the guys run in 10m segements, just that we can time it to better understand how the race is run. And that shows me that you can't knock 0.14 seconds off Bolt's time at the end.

Finally, POwell's run will be interesting to look at. Let me give that some thought.

Thanks for the visit! KEep reading!

Ross

Anonymous said...

I enjoyed your analysis of Usain Bolt's run.

I am looking forward to your analysis of Coyle's paper. First, his data is his data and it is interesting simply because of who this data is about and the time period in which it is gathered. But, what is most appalling to me is how this data has been interpreted by Coyle and others. It is right in the title, "Improved muscular efficiency" when what he documented was simply improved cycling efficiency. He has had to hypothesize that it came from changing muscle type because he couldn't think of any other explanation I presume since he had no muscle biopsy data. Of course, there are other potential explanations. And, the scientific literature has essentially zero support for such changes in elite athletes, in fact the scientific literature discounts such changes are possible in elite athletes. see:http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/2932641?ordinalpos=551&itool=EntrezSystem2.PEntrez.Pubmed.Pubmed_ResultsPanel.Pubmed_DefaultReportPanel.Pubmed_RVDocSum

So, the question remains. How did Lance improve his cycling efficiency in this period of time which seemingly accounts for going from a "simple" World Champion to complete dominance of the sport? Dominance can be explained by this simple efficiency change and his weight loss coming from this level. There is no evidence that doping can cause such changes so that can be ruled out it would appear.

What did Lance do that others, who were seemingly training just as hard, failed to do that improved cycling efficiency. That is the question that should have been asked at the end of that paper rather than coming up with unsupported conclusions.

Anonymous said...

Just a heads up: Letsrun.com has posted a link to an interview with Carl Lewis, in which he says of Bolt: "I'm still working with the fact that he dropped from 10-flat to 9.6 in one year. I think there are some issues."

These seem to be much the same kind of "issues" around Armstrong; how do you account for a huge improvement in
a short amount of time?

The Carl Lewis interview is well worth a read - very outspoken. It's at
http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/
2008/writers/arash_markazi/09/11/
carl.lewis/

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas said...

HI Simon

Thanks for that. I actually read the Lewis interview - it was excellent. I considered doing a post on it today, but then flipped a coing and eventually the Bolt analysis won out. I'm still probably going to comment on it in a post at some stage, depending on what transpires in the next couple of days.

The interview was good. Lewis said what I think everyone "neutral" is thinking - the sport has such a bad history, so many cheats in its past that spectacular dominance by one person, and one island, is obviously grounds for suspicion.

That is the point I tried to make in my "Discovering Bolt" post, and you may have seen some of the very aggressive responses it got! I think many people, patriotically motivated, get angry at the hint of anything wrong. But Lewis said it best in this interview - you'd be a fool not to think it given the size of the improvement. There's always a counter-argument, however. Same with the dominance of the Jamaican women - Lewis touched on that very lightly in his interview...

And you can still stop short of accusations. Interesting times...and then Lance enters, stage right, and another debate will open!

Thanks for the comment!

Ross

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas said...

To anonymous

Well put! Thank you for that! I'll certainly make use of your points in the posts. There are many issues there - Coyle defends the paper by saying that he never suggests that the improved efficiency (debatable, as you've pointed out, but let's run with it for now) was responsible for Armstrong's dominance. He actually says in a letter in response to some criticism that he never implied that this was the reason Armstrong won the races. But then he went on to testify in court, and this finding was the basis for suggesting that Armstrong didn't need drugs.

The intention was pretty obvious to me, so his argument is odd from that perspective. There are some technical issues as well, like calibration and the use of a weight that is different to anything he actually measured - it's funny that when he calculated Armstrong's efficiency post cancer, he used the "reported" weight, which was much lower than anything he ever measured. That was not even really picked up on...

Anyway, we'll see what else comes up in the posts. I think it will probably be a series, first looking at the study results, and then at the criticisms and subsequent debate, culminating in the latest admission that he made a mistake!

Thanks for reading!
Ross

Anonymous said...

How fast did he run the first 100m of his 200m record? Could that shed any light on what he is capable of doing?

Anonymous said...

Er ... no. Bolt barely ran the 100m before this year.
It's safe to say that Carl Lewis is a less classy individual than Michael Johnson.

Anonymous said...

Folks, you may want to read this article on Bolt, and understand that not only was he a child prodigy, but he never really trained or raced hard. While I am deeply suspicious by nature, even believing Lance is a doper, I really happen to believe Bolt is legit.

http://www.timesonline.co.uk/tol/sport/more_sport/athletics/article4727520.ece

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas said...

Hi Bob

Thanks for that - I have actually read that article, it was very good.

I am in the same camp as you on this one - both with regards to Armstrong and Bolt.

I guess the thing about Bolt is that suspicion is inevitable - he is a victim of the history of the event he's now dominating. So I don't know what Carl Lewis' motives were, or whether he even had any, but I don't think it's necessarily unusual for him to ask the question. We did previously too. But I am with you - I believe he's clean.

If however, he turns out to be a perpetrator rather than a victim...well, let's just hope that doesn't happen!

Thanks for the link and for reading!

Ross

Anonymous said...

I would like to commend you on the well balanced and fact based analysis that you do here, Excellent. I am a proud Jamaican who follows athletics very closely. I have been watching usain bolt since he was 14 yrs old and whereas i am have no doubts that he is clean i do understand why neutral persons would have suspicions.

Usain as we all know was world junior champion at 15 yrs old and ran 19.93 at 17 which is still th junior wr! At 16 He ran 45.28 at our high sch boys champs easing up at the end and shaving off a second off the record which was over a decade old. When he was running those blistering times one could see that his running technique was terrible... his head was always leaning back and he swung it from side to side among other things. Also persons close to him spoke of his laziness and unwillingness to train. i thought to myself that if he corrected all these things then he would fly.

fast forward past the years of injury, partying five times a week, the girls etc to last year when he first ran the 100m. he ran 10.0's twice last yr, one in europe and the other here in ja. That race in Jamaica was also a horrible one where technique was concerned and my friends and i all thought that if he could get a start, get th drive phase and transition into cruise and be relaxed at the end asafa might have some company.


Now what i want to understand ross... is if i have a gift to run fast and i decide to try to run 100m and run 11.00 and someone then teaches me the technique and i practise and then run 10.3 ... is 1.00 my true potential or is it 10.3? I do not think his 10.03 was run by an elite 100 m runner... he wasn't as yet.... the 9.76 was his first race as a true 100m runner!

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas said...

Hi Anonymous

Thanks for the post. You're right, and much of what you say is echoed by many people who wrote in when we did a post on Bolt during the Olympics. That article was called "Discovering Usain", and it looked at his times as a junior, his incredible talent without much technical work. It was based on those comments (many from your countrymen) that I concluded that I felt that, until proven otherwise, I could believe that Bolt was not guilty of doping. I did in fact say this much earlier, because Bolt is so different when he runs that I can see a physiological reason for his dominance, other than doping.

So yes, all your points are valid.

Quite where that takes us is difficult to say. He has burst onto the scence and people are now getting carried away saying that 9.4-something is on the cards, but that is typical of people when a world record is broken. Last year, Gebrselassie broke the World record in the marathon by 29 seconds, and suddenly everyone was talking about a sub-2 hour time, which was ridiculous.

So to answer your question, I have no idea what true potential means? I'd guess that Bolt can improve his first 10m by maybe 0.05 seconds, plus another tiny amount in the middle, and then knock off 0.05s for the celebration and a 9.58 is possible.

Who knows? It will be enjoyable to watch it unfold. Hopefully he remains injury free, and continues to remain hungry - he sounds like the kind of guy who is prone to drifting, and having shot straight to the very top of the world, what is going to motivate him for 4 years? The hardest thing in sport is staying on top. Hopefully he gets that right...

Thanks!
Ross

Daveawalker said...

What were his spits in the 200?
What were the various splits in the 4 x 100? Did anyone brake the .8 seconds there?

Anonymous said...

Outstanding article guys. Well done, keep it up.
I've found another way to shed and few hundredths of a second to improve the 100m time: costume design. Aerodynamics, drag and all that excess air resistance is a contributing factor I'm sure. Humidity too needs to be considered.
Actually, I would appreciate the full mathematical formulae. Go for it - do it now!
Greetings, Indy

Anonymous said...

According to the Spikes article the IAAF only actually timed the first and last 10m splits, the others were just estimated, presumably based on previous athletes' acceleration profiles. So they are worth next to nothing in any attempt at a detailed analysis of the race.

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas said...

They're not worth next to nothing. I'll point out that a group of physicists in Oslo used the estimate method to publish a scientific paper on the race as well, and this post is a commentary on the conclusions drawn from that article, not by itself a detailed analysis of the race.

Unfortunately, you're making the mistake of disregarding EVERYTHING in favour of scientific stringency, which means you miss the possibility that the analysis is still worthy of something, even if that is just discussion. I appreciate your scientific stringency, but you can't adopt that kind of approach in elite sports - you'll get nowhere and never understand performance if your standard is exactness.

Matt said...

Ross,

Is it possible to cite the exact source from which you obtained Usain Bolt's true 10m splits? I'm using the data for a project of mine and I'd love to cite your blog, but that doesn't look as credible as somewhere from the IAAF website.

Thanks!
-Matt

Anonymous said...

make his reaction time .115. this shaves off .05. give him 2m/s the maximum allowable. this shaves off .1 s. give him the .82 per 10m if he doesn't slow down that shaves off another .08. this means hes running 9.46s if everything goes his way.

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas said...

Hi Anonymous

Yes, but the question was specifically around how much time Bolt lost thanks to his celebrations. So all those other assumptions are all good and well, but if one starts to play the assumption game, then we could do the same for someone like Tyson Gay and he might even end up winning.

So I take your point, but making too many assumptions makes the race a figment of our imagination! I'm sure that when Asafa Powell ran 9.74 he could have said "take off 0.03 from the blocks, maybe add a tailwind, maybe dip a little at the line, maybe hold my form for 10m longer, and hey presto, I just ran 9.51s".

Ross

Anonymous said...

if anything i feel bolt by relaxing in the closing stages(he knew he'd won)reduced his de-acelaration therefore making him faster

Israel said...

Really not a chance of getting 9.55 after today's 9.58 with 0,9 head wind?

Anonymous said...

bolt just ran 9.58 ...and it was a easy run .....he can definately go 9.55 .........

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas said...

Hi Israel

No, not really. You're making a very stupid mistake and comparing Bolt's Berlin race to the Beijing one. they are a year apart, I might add, so the comparison is worthless.

Read the post again - the question was "Could Bolt have run 9.55s if he had NOT slowed down in the last 20m?"

The answer is no. What you are talking about now is a completely different question, a different race. And of course it's possible. But i never said it wasn't - you're making up an argument where there is not one.

Read the post properly.

Jon said...
This comment has been removed by the author.
Jon said...

He just got pretty close! Usain just ran 100m in 9.58 seconds in Berlin.

Anonymous said...

And your assumption is based on the fact that no one has done a split time faster than 0.82 per 10 meters. At the same time, no one ran below 9.69 until Bolt came along. So unless you have the split times from that last 9.58 run and can show us he isn't capable of accelerating *beyond* those 0.82 split times either, it's nothing more than an assumption either. I wouldn't be surprised if he is capable of faster split times. Which would have made him capable of doing a sub 9.6 in Bejing without celebration. That ofcourse is my assumption, but just as valid as yours.

Anonymous said...

wow......the comment on 14 of September 2008 was so on target...Bolt can run 9.58

Anonymous said...

And there we have it. The IAAF published the 20m split times from his record run and it turns out that between 60m and 80m, Bolt did a 1.61 split, resulting in 0.805 *average* for the 10 meter splits over those 20 meters. Which completely debunks de assumption that 0.82 would have been the limit. You could assume that he has improved his topspeed or that circumstances were simply better yesterday, but you could easily counter that by stating he simply never gave it 100% (maybe not even yesterday). Afterall breaking those world records earns a good extra income too.

If you argue that we shouldn't project these fast splits on the old race in Bejing, then you should apply the same argument to your assumption that "anything-beyond-0.82-shouldn't-be-expected" theory.

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas said...

Hi to the last anonymous poster

I have to say - you are fabricating the argument you're having, it's a classic straw man.

In this post, I never once said that 0.82 seconds was the limit for performance. What I said was that Bolt would NOT have continued to speed up beyond 80m, and therefore to project a 9.55s time based on Beijing's splits is incorrect.

I did not say it was not possible. I even went back and posted text in red to try to get you to read the post properly, yet you've continued to make up your own argument.

You're right - it is possible to go faster than 0.82 seconds per 10m interval. I agree. But Bolt would not have done it in Beijing.

Since you have the split times, you will be able to see for yourself that BOlt slowed down in the last 20m of the Berlin race. This is normal, this is why I am saying 9.55s was not possible in Berlin.

Please, read the post and appreciate its context, because you're arguing when there is no argument.

Ross

Anonymous said...

Exactly, your assumption is that 0.82 was the limit and that he wouldn't have accelerated beyond that and he wouldn't have maintained topspeed until the finish line because no one ever has. Yet if you have a look at his best 200m and 150m splits, you know he might even be able to maintain that topspeed until the 100m finish. And who's to say he couldn't accelerate to 0.805s per 10 meters and maintain that.
Fact is, he was a full tenth of a second faster (than in Bejing) in his 9.58 race, during the last *40 meters*. Fact is, he did 0.85's average during the second 50 meters of his record *150m* run this year and even the last 50 meters of that run he managed to stay *under* 0.90.

No classic strawman argument there, simple facts and reasoning.

You state a certain 0.79 is impossible, I state he has shown the impossible to be possible. With his topspeed, you could come to 9.56 in the Bejing race if he maintained that topspeed to the end without celebrations.
And to adress your red text, all we have is history to base these assumptions on, that goes for mine *and* yours. So ofcourse we can refer to the Bejing race if your reference is: what has been shown possible until today/yesterday.

Tomorrow can easily prove both of us wrong. Especially when talking about someone like Bolt.

Ross Tucker and Jonathan Dugas said...

Hi Anonymous

I think you're still missing a vital piece of the puzzle, and the point.

In Beijing, BOLT WAS ALREADY SLOWING DOWN BEFORE HE STARTED CELEBRATING. yet your whole argument is that he'd speed up and continue to accelerate?

It's just a false starting position.

The latest German analysis shows that everyone, even Bolt, slowed down from 80m to 100m. No exceptions.

The difference in Berlin was that Bolt hit a higher top speed (by some margin), and that's why he recorded those splits.

So again, look at the data from Beijing, and you will see that Bolt was already slowing down, not accelerating, and so therefore, to project a final 20m at 0.805s/10m is completely incorrect.

It's not simple logic and reasoning, it's false.

In Berlin, he slowed down. In Beijing, he'd have slowed anyway. However, and again, please read the post, even if he held his speed, he'd still be well outside 9.60 seconds.

And yes, 0.79s is possible. But not in that race. Then again, why let the facts get in the way of being a fan...

Berlin was brilliant, he ran faster than ever. But to compare Berlin to Beijing, and say "see, he can run 0.805 for 10m", that's just a flawed argument.

Ross

Unknown said...

According to the 10m splits released today for the 9.58 WR these are the 50m - 100m times.

0.83
0.82
0.81
0.82
0.83
0.83

That is maintaining astonishing speed for pretty much the last half of the race. There is also a noticeable decrease in speed just before 95m... Also looking at the footage again I still think we haven't seen everything from him yet. It was as if there is still another burst of speed waiting - that we could have seen in final 10m?!?!

Unknown said...

http://berlin.iaaf.org/mm/document/development/research/05/31/54/20090817073528_httppostedfile_analysis100mmenfinal_bolt_13666.pdf

BTW - I'm not convinved on the final 10m time....

joel said...

I thought you might be interested in this analysis of Usain Bolt's record run in the 100 meter dash. It shows an exact mathematical calculation of Usain Bolt's power - in horsepower. It uses the actual measured data and develops formulas for Usain's speed using physics and calculus. A great learning tool for advanced high school or college physics and math. The voice-over narration is generated by our Speech-Over product using text-to-speech voices.


http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xLXbLWiN1rQ

Joel
www.speechover.com