Bolt: A Column by Len Johnson

Has a chink been revealed in Usain Bolt’s armour?

Playing in a charity cricket match in Jamaica, the world’s fastest man at 100 and 200 metres, continued to make headlines, clean bowling West Indies cricket captain Chris Gayle. Earlier, he had smashed Gayle for six (hit him out of the ground, for any non-cricketing fans) before being run out.

Run out? Yes, that’s right, the world’s fastest man was run out. Now, there’s many contributing factors to a batter being run out, but the basic one is that you’re not as fast as you think you are. You mis-judge the run.

So there you have it Tyson. There it is Asafa. Usain Bolt’s weakness is that he’s not as fast as he thinks he is. Admittedly, given that we all know he is as fast as 9.58 and 19.19, this may be of limited assistance.

Actually, it all reminded me of Rick Darling and Graeme Wood. This pair opened the batting for Australia during the late 1970s when the country’s top players had defected to the rebel World Series Cricket Tour. They were probably the two quickest runners playing Test cricket at the time, but their judgement of a run was horribly awry. So much so, that their first four Test matches together saw one of them run out each time.

In another connection, the charity match that brought bolt and Gayle together was being played at a time when West Indies cricket has been blighted by a dispute between the top players and the board administering the game. The dispute appears to have been settled just in time for this summer’s tour of Australia. Maybe Usain will come out to watch his good friend Chris play? We can only hope so.

All of which brings me to relays, Usain Bolt’s other team event and a performance area which Australia has judged to be a priority towards London 2012. With a bronze medal in the men’s 4x400 metres relay, it can be fairly argued the emphasis is not misplaced, though it was worrying that our other two relays in Berlin _ the men’s 4x100 and the women’s 4x400 _ were not even close to making their finals.

Now, in a 4x100, it helps if you can have Usain Bolt and Asafa Powell run the last two legs. Provided the baton gets to Bolt, sheer speed can make up for any other deficiency. Jamaica does not have too many deficiencies. Steve Mullings, a finalist in the 200 metres, ran first leg in the gold medal team; Michael Frater, a sub-10 sprinter and individual silver medallist at the 2005 world champs, ran up the back-straight.

Indeed, sheer speed was a feature of all three medal teams. Marc Burns and Richard Thompson, two of the members of Trinidad’s silver medal team, were 100 metres finalists in Berlin; all four had run 10.05 or faster this year. Slowest man on Great Britain’s bronze medal team was 10.13, and so it went through the eight finalists.

By contrast, Australia did not have one member of its squad who has run a world championships B-standard (10.28 seconds) in the past two years.

You can’t expect to run fast as a relay if you can’t run tolerably fast as individuals. Four men running 10.30 just won’t beat four faster men getting the baton around tolerably well.

Some rough calculations based on the IAAF biomechanical analysis of the men’s 100 metres final suggest that four 10.3 runners can run no faster than 38.50 as a relay. Both Bolt and Powell ran approximately 0.9 seconds slower for 1-10 metres than for 10-20. Potentially, that should be what you save in a relay if, on average, you take the baton in the middle of the exchange zone.

So if all four men can run 10.3, three will save an average of 0.9 each: 10.3 + 3x9.4 = 38.5. Slowest time into the Berlin final was 38.72, so there’s virtually no margin for error.

Now you might change deeper in the zone, giving you a slightly faster optimal time, but that’s a higher-risk strategy. Equally, someone who can run 10.3 for a straight 100 will run a little slower round a bend, so I reckon the assumption is pretty valid.

It all seems to suggest that some relay thinking is flawed. Four lesser sprinters may well beat four better ones by moving the baton with greater efficiency. But to develop a 4x100 of medal winning potential, you’re going to need four sprinters at least capable of a B-standard individually.

Either that, or you’re going to have to pray for a run-out or two!

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