In sports requiring athletic movement, a huge part of the success of every world-class Olympic champion – including me – boils down to physicality and athleticism. As sports have become more and more popular, with increasing amounts of money being paid to the elite athletes, superior, God-given physical ability has become imperative. Citius, Altius, Fortius, the Olympic motto, explains it best. To win – or even compete – for Olympic medals, you have to be able to move faster, jump higher and be stronger than the rest of the field.
Unfortunately, a lack of real understanding about athleticism and biomechanics leads some athletes to believe that they really aren’t athletically gifted. There is an assumption that anyone with athletic talent will be talented across the whole spectrum of athleticism, but that is not true. Plenty of people have athletic gifts in some areas but not in others.
I could easily say that I am not a naturally gifted athlete because I was terrible at basketball as a kid. I was pretty good on defence, but to this day I still miss getting the ball in the basket more often than I make it. Despite being 6’1” tall and a world-class athlete, I cannot dunk a basketball.
I’m also a lousy golfer. I first picked up a golf club 16 years ago. Over the years, even though I have never been a regular player and my play has always been sporadic and inconsistent, I have regularly committed myself to taking lessons and playing more often. Even so, I have failed to ever really improve. Friends and golf instructors tell me I must play more often than I do to better my game, but I have friends who don’t play any more than I do and they have continued to improve, while I have not. This year it finally dawned on me that I lack the golf-related skills that come naturally to someone like Tiger Woods, who could then put in the work that has made him great. So I finally decided to quit trying and gave up a sport I have never really enjoyed anyway.
I’m just not great with most ball-related sports. A few years ago, I was at my best friend Ray Crockett’s house. Ray was a star American football player and won two Superbowl rings with the Denver Broncos. His son Darryl, then four years old, and I were the only ones at the house. So when Darryl said he wanted to play catch, we got out the football and started throwing it back and forth a few times. Finally Darryl said, ‘Throw it to me, Uncle Michael!’ I had been trying to throw it to Darryl, but I was – and remain – an inferior ball thrower.
My obvious lack of ball-related talent could have led me to claim that I was an unlikely world-class athlete who became the fastest man in the world and a multiple Olympic champion solely because of my hard work. That would be a great story and very inspirational, especially since I did work extremely hard. But it wouldn’t be completely true.
I simply have an aptitude for certain sports over others. I always knew, for example, that I would enjoy skiing, even though when I was growing up my parents could not have afforded to pay for me to participate in what is a very expensive sport. I had to wait to take up skiing, since I also couldn’t take part while I was competing as a track athlete because of restrictions in my endorsement contracts. But the first chance I got after I retired, I put on skis for the first time while attending the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002. I took a two-hour lesson, and by the afternoon of that same day I was skiing on my own. The second time I skied I had advanced to intermediate-level slopes. Six years later, despite never taking another lesson and with just a few ski trips a year, I ski expert-level terrain and can confidently say that I am very good at it.
I’m just as naturally gifted when it comes to riding things on wheels. When I was a kid I loved riding both my skateboard and my bike. Two years ago I bought my son a skateboard and a ramp for his birthday. I had stopped riding skateboards when I was a young kid, probably at around 13 or 14, but when we headed outside to try it out I decided to get on. At 40 years old I discovered I could perform jumps and stunts that I had never tried before.
PHYSICAL GIFTS
In short, to be an Olympic champion you must have the superior athletic talent required for the sport you are participating in. The right body helps as well. Ian Thorpe wears a size 17 shoe, and Michael Phelps wears a size 14. In addition to this physical advantage, both these athletes have natural abilities superior to the average human that make them ideally suited to swimming. At the 2008 Beijing Olympics I watched Michael Phelps, who holds a staggering 16 Olympic medals including 14 golds, break records and demolish his competition, and make it look easy. Phelps, who is probably one of the most naturally gifted swimmers in history, was able to do things no one has ever done in swimming at the Olympic level.
Daley Thompson is one of the most physically talented people ever, a trait he wasn’t reticent to acknowledge during our interview. ‘I’ve met only a couple of people, Michael, that I feel were more physically talented or naturally gifted than I,’ he said. Then he added, ‘I’ve only met a couple of people who I feel probably worked harder than me. But I’ve never met anyone that I felt has both of those.’
He was so superior in part because he was a powerfully built athlete with perfect proportions. He’s not too tall, he’s not short, he’s not too trim, he’s not too big. He’s the perfect size. When I look at Daley, I think of the sculpture of David. He’s that kind of specimen.
Beyond his physicality, he possessed a trio of natural gifts. In most sports – whether it’s soccer, basketball, baseball or the decathlon – you hear a lot of people talk about speed, which is important. You don’t hear as much about strength, but that’s equally important. Combine those two athletic attributes and you get explosive power – the ability to move quickly but with force. That’s what Daley had. He wouldn’t be the fastest and maybe not the strongest, but he is probably one of the most powerful athletes ever. And that advantage comes from his DNA. It’s what made him so great.
Of course, that natural athleticism would never have been realised without his formidable work ethic. Daley wasn’t much of a strategy type of guy. He was just a superior, hardworking, grind-it-out type of athlete. Ironically, he might have struggled had he competed in today’s environment, because he lacked the technical component. Daley’s attitude was: ‘I’m physically prepared, I work hard, I can jump higher than you, I can run faster than you, now I’m just going to go out and beat you.’ However, it’s no longer enough to work hard and have superior athletic ability. To be in contention for medals nowadays, you have to be able to put those two together, but you also have to be technically sound. You have to understand your event and how to execute.
Before anything else, however, you have to make sure that you have the right body for the sport you’ve chosen. As a child Chris Hoy, five-time Olympic gold medallist and multiple world champion, attended a school that encouraged sports participation. ‘I just used to love sport, any form of competition,’ said Chris, now Sir Christopher, who is an ambassador to the London 2012 Olympics. ‘I did rugby, I did track and field until age 17 and I did rowing.’ He was pretty good at all the sports he played, especially rowing, which he loved. ‘The trouble with rowing is you’re limited not by your physiology, but by your size. In rowing terms I’m pretty short at just 6’1”. The best rowers in the world are 6’6” plus; they’re big guys. I knew if I had any ambitions of taking rowing to a higher level, then I was going to have to be a lightweight rower. And even then I was going to be pretty short for that. But I was physically suited to cycling.’ After racing around the world on the BMX circuit from age seven to 14, Chris transferred his skills to mountain biking, then road racing. ‘Eventually, when I was about 17, I found the track. And I stuck with that. I think the first time you ride in a velodrome it’s a whole new experience. You get bitten by the bug and you just want to do more of it.’
But don’t rule out competing in a sport you love and you’re good at just because your body doesn’t look like those of most competitors in the sport. Many of Ian Thorpe’s physical attributes could have been considered drawbacks. Instead of being tall and lean like most swimmers in the 2000 Sydney Olympics, he was tall and massive. ‘I look like I should play football, but I’m in a pool,’ Ian told me. Although his size provided benefits in terms of power, it also came with drawbacks. ‘For me, although I have physical attributes that I can see lend themselves to some success, they also have a really high energy cost,’ he said. So he focused on developing superior technique and made sure that he became ‘the most efficient swimmer in the pool’.
MODUS OPERANDI
Athletes always have to deal with the balance between technique and athleticism. In many sports, like sprinting or golf, trying harder by using strength and power alone may actually cause an athlete to perform worse.
In sprinting, you want to develop strength and power. But they have to be developed in a particular way and for a specific purpose: not only to allow you as the athlete to generate more speed, but also to actually help you execute better technique. For example, as a 400-metre runner, I knew that the last 100 metres of that race would be the most difficult because of the toll that sprinting the first 300 metres would take. The 400-metre race is a very long sprint, so the final 100 metres I’m in what is called fatigue mode, where my body is tired and wants nothing more than for me to stop pushing it to sprint. The way to train for this particularly important phase of the race is to first focus on technique. Proper, efficient sprinting technique is important in all phases of the race, but nowhere in a 400 are you more vulnerable to sloppy or inefficient technique than the last 100 metres. So my objective was always to minimise the differential in stride length and stride frequency between the non-fatigue stage of the race, or the first 200 metres, and the fatigue stage of the race.
The best way to control the efficiency of the technique during that fatigue mode is to develop good upper-body strength. This often comes as a surprise to people, because they don’t understand what arm strength has to do with sprinting and certainly can’t understand what having good shoulder strength has to do with leg stride frequency. The arms drive the legs, and when that arm strength starts to go because of fatigue over the last 100 metres, the arms don’t swing with the same power or velocity as they can, and the legs, which are already heavy from fatigue themselves, respond to what the arms do. To counter this issue, my strength coach and I developed a programme that included developing the shoulder, chest, bicep, triceps, deltoid and trapezoid muscles – all muscles related to the arm, shoulder, neck and torso area. Some of these muscles are directly related to arm strength and velocity, and some are muscles that support those primary muscles. After I started on this strength programme in the off season prior to the 1993 season, I improved my personal best by two tenths of a second and ran 43 seconds three times that year, a feat I had only accomplished once in the previous three years of my professional career.
This was a result of working with my coach, Clyde, and my strength coach Danny Brabham, taking the feedback from what Clyde was seeing during my races. Video analysis showed a significant breakdown in technique during the fatigue phase of the race whenever I really pushed the front part of the race. We knew that in order to run faster times I would have to push the pace of the front part of the race but couldn’t afford a breakdown in technique on the back end of the race. So we worked with Danny and explained what type of strength I would need and where I would need that strength in order to combat the upper-body muscle fatigue at the end of the race and avoid a breakdown of technique.
ATHLETES, TECHNICIANS OR BOTH?
Some sports are more technique based and some are more physical. And some Olympic events involve so much technique and so little physicality that some question whether they’re really sports at all. This argument has become particularly heated over the last several years while, in an effort to remain modern and current and to maintain and grow its fan base, the IOC has added new Olympic events, including trampoline and bowling. But are all these new events sports?
I would argue yes. All of the events in the Olympics where individuals or teams are competing against one another are sports. The mix-up comes when people automatically assume that if something is a sport, the participants must be athletes, and that’s not true.
Sport is about competition and anyone can compete, whether they are athletes or not. But not all sportspeople are athletes. All Olympians aren’t athletes. This sometimes offends the people taking part in some of these sports, but my position is not meant to offend. I just don’t believe that the individuals taking part in sports like archery or shooting are athletes. I believe the Olympic motto of ‘Stronger, Higher, Faster’ sums up the requirements for sports participants to be considered athletes.
While an archer or a shooter isn’t an athlete in my opinion, that doesn’t mean he or she is any less skilled or works any less hard than athletes. In many ways I have tremendous respect and admiration for participants in sports like these that are so heavily skill based. In my own sport of athletics, even as a sprinter where races are won and lost by hundredths of a second, if I place my foot just slightly outside the area where it should land on a step it is not going to make a huge difference to the outcome of the race. Quite the contrary for an archer or a shooter. The skill and muscle memory that are required, and the consistency that is needed in their movement, are things I only wish that I could duplicate. Just the slightest millimetre off in movement or technique can cost the participant a medal. The years and hours of training that it takes to perfect this technique require no less commitment and no less focus than it did for me to win gold medals in my sport. So while they may not be athletes, they are incredible technicians.
By definition, a technician is going to focus almost exclusively on technique. That’s not as clear when it comes to athletes, who need both technique and power. Even though the argument is always about whether an athlete should place more focus on technique or physical training, the issue is really at what stage in an athlete’s development and at what stage in an athlete’s training cycle should you place more focus on technique rather than physical training. At Michael Johnson Performance we have found that the early stages of an athlete’s development – the years between the ages of 12 and 15 – are the prime physical development years. These are the years when an athlete’s body goes through its natural changes and development, and also when it is ripe for physical development. However, most parents helping their kids and most coaches working with kids tend to focus mostly on skill during that period, figuring that the athlete’s physical development isn’t as important because the athlete has the speed, power and strength that he has and there is no real improvement to be had here. That is simply not true. And it’s a shame, because in many cases the focus placed on skill and technique to the detriment of physicality deprives athletes of reaching their full potential in their sport.
SUPER-SIZE ABILITY
As Chris Hoy and Ian Thorpe would discover, magic can happen when DNA dovetails with natural aptitude and honed technique. But there are different levels of ability even at the highest level of sports, and those differences, even at their most subtle, make huge differences at the Olympic level.
Tyson Gay is one of the greatest sprinters of all time. He is a world champion at both 100 metres and 200 metres. He is the American record holder at 100 metres. When he gets into his running, his turnover, the simple ability to pick his legs up and put them down, is unmatched by anyone else currently and possibly in history. He is not the greatest starter in the business, but he has such superior natural turnover that he can overcome his poor start, catch the other athletes, and still pull out victories. He is a great 200-metre runner, one of the best ever. He has also run 44 seconds for 400 metres, which means he has a unique combination of speed and strength and speed endurance – the ability to hold significant speed for a long time – relative to the sprint races.
Despite all that, Tyson Gay will probably never win another World Championship gold medal or ever win an Olympic gold medal in the 100 or 200 metres, because in 2008, the year after Gay won double gold in the 100 and 200 at the World Championships in Osaka, Usain Bolt came on the scene and started to rewrite the history books by doing things no one had ever done before in the history of the sport.
I was working as an expert analyst for the BBC on 16 August 2008, the day that history was made and the world was struck by a bolt of lightning. And even though I had spent my life running fast and helping others to run fast, Usain blew my mind by running faster than anyone thought possible. How had he managed to redefine the limits of how fast we can go? The answer lies, in part, in Usain’s physicality.
Usain, who is 6’5” and one of the most gifted athletes ever in the history not only of athletics but of sport in general, has a unique ability to take that height and execute a sprint previously thought to be more suited to an athlete 5’10” to 6’ tall. Traditionally, athletes of his height are unable to turn those long limbs over quickly enough to generate the quickness required over such a short sprint, and therefore cannot take advantage of having a longer stride than the competition. Usain, however, manages to cycle his legs in order to take full advantage of his longer stride without those long legs having a negative impact at the start of the race, when the shorter athletes would normally have an advantage. Somehow he has no difficulty unfolding his long legs out of the start position and quickly driving out of the blocks.
Over history, 100-metre champions like Carl Lewis and Linford Christie were taller than the average sprinter and they were almost always at the back of the pack at the start of the race. Not until they could get out of the drive phase, which takes place in the first 30 or so metres, would they be able to get into their long stride and pull out the victory in the second part of the race. Usain Bolt is so much better because he doesn’t have to wait that long. He has either the natural ability, or he has figured out how, to start and execute the drive phase of the race like an athlete much shorter than he is. He gives up very little if anything to his competitors at the start of the race, so by the time they’ve all gone through the drive phase he is even with them. Then, in very short order, he is able to put significant distance between himself and the field.
Ironically, like so many Olympic champions, Usain didn’t start off thinking that he would focus on the sport that eventually made him famous. As a kid he was simply so active – playing and climbing on everything – that in self-defence his parents gave him housework to do in the mornings to keep him occupied. Tanni Grey-Thompson, who was born with spina bifida and competed in a wheelchair, says her parents got her into sports for the same reason. ‘I had way too much energy and was probably a bit annoying,’ she says. ‘So I think they thought the more sports I did, [the more] it might tire me out.’ That echoed history-making gymnast Nadia Comaneci’s experience. She had so much energy that she kept jumping up and down on everything she could find, including the sofa, and her mother finally enrolled her in gymnastics. The decision, of course, would shape her life.
In Usain’s case, however, the man who would redefine sprinting didn’t stumble on to running right away. ‘I was a cricket lover all my life, so for me it was all about cricket. Then all of the sudden I’m a track star.’ Once Usain committed to sprinting, he wrapped his long arms around the concept, including those events he supposedly wasn’t physically suited for. ‘He surprised me,’ admits Usain’s father Wellesley, who was also known as a fast runner in his youth. ‘The 200 was where I thought he would do well. For the 100, that was a shock to me. I always said, “You’re too tall. They’re going to leave you in the blocks.” He said, “Daddy, I am running, not you.” That’s what he said! “I am the one running, not you.”’
I first heard about Usain back in 2000. Jamaica has produced many a great sprinter, so when you hear of a teenager from that island running great times and winning junior championships, you take notice. At just 15 and already 6’2”, he was making his name as a runner at 200 and 400 metres – my distances.
HOW LOW CAN YOU GO?
A decade after Usain first walked through the gates of William Knibb School, he entered Beijing’s Bird’s Nest stadium in 2008 to run the race of his life. Driven as much by a desire not to lose as by his grandmother’s admonition to ‘Go over there and do your best, and whatever you do, you’ll satisfy,’ he broke the world record not once, but twice. His astounding performance reopened one of mankind’s oldest questions: how fast can a man run? For a century, the world record for the 100 metres has been the measure. One hundred years before Usain’s historic race in Beijing, the record stood at 10.6 seconds.
At the Berlin Olympic Games, my hero, the great Jesse Owens, ran a time of 10.2 seconds: a world record that would stand for over 20 years. Germany’s Armin Harry reignited the whole debate about the limits of human speed when he ran 10 seconds flat in 1960. Suddenly it seemed that running 100 metres faster than 10 seconds might be possible. But the world would have to wait another eight years until the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico. High altitude and thin air helped athletes push the boundaries, and Jim Hines won the 100 metres in 9.95 seconds.
The 10-second barrier had been breached. Hines’s win would be the most talked about 100 metres until Canadian Ben Johnson’s at the Seoul Olympics in 1988. Unfortunately for the sport, Johnson’s urine sample, collected on Saturday 24 September 1988 after Johnson had set a new world record of 9.79 seconds and apparently won gold, was found to contain the metabolates of a banned substance: an anabolic steroid called Stanozolol.
For those who believed that such astonishing times were beyond natural human physiology, this was all the proof they needed. Rightly or wrongly, no 100-metre world record would ever be viewed without suspicion again. It would be over a decade before Maurice Greene matched Ben’s mark of 9.79. In doing so, he became the 14th man to officially hold the 100-metre world record. Six years later, in 2005, a small island in the Caribbean Sea laid claim to having the world’s fastest man, Asafa Powell. By 2007 this quiet Jamaican had lowered the mark to an astonishing 9.74 seconds. Perhaps the success of his compatriot is what persuaded Usain to start experimenting with the 100 metres.
Much has changed in track and field since Donald Lippincott ran 10.6 seconds for the 100 metres in 1912, including the starting blocks, the track, timing methods, footwear, training techniques and nutrition. Physically, meanwhile, a man is much the same now as he was a century ago. In Beijing, Usain Bolt ran a second faster than Lippincott, and he could clearly go even faster. After setting a 100-metre world record of 9.69 seconds, he broke his own record by over one tenth of a second.
I met Usain in Kingston after visiting with his parents in Usain’s home town of Trelawny, a rural parish three hours’ drive from the capital across Jamaica’s Blue Mountains. A year after Usain had stunned the world with his mind-boggling Olympic double gold, the first question he asked was whether I missed competing now that I was retired. ‘I just want to relax,’ he said. ‘I don’t think I’m going to miss track, because it’s hard. It’s hard work.’
Usain may already be anticipating being able to put his feet up when he retires, but for me, I never managed to slow down – not entirely. Back home in Dallas, where I grew up, I’m dedicating my time to helping others achieve their athletic dreams through my performance centre. Some of the best athletes in the world come to Michael Johnson Performance to learn how to run faster, get stronger, and improve all facets of their athletic performance.
Since Usain Bolt’s speeds, we’ve been a whole lot busier. He’s inspired people all over the world. The people who come to me want to learn from the best, and I guess my achievements and a life at the pinnacle of track and field make me that man. Now that my days of winning gold medals are over for me, the laps around the track have been replaced by the laptop. But the philosophy that moulded my own athletic career has stayed the same.
PERFECTING PERFORMANCE
Now more than ever, I believe that running fast is more than just a God-given talent. It’s a skill that can be perfected by coaching and the application of good technique. That belief is the cornerstone of my performance centre. Paula Radcliffe holds the world record in the women’s marathon but knows that improved flat speed can make all the difference at the next Olympic Games. That’s why she comes to me. The same goes for guys hoping to become the next multi-million-dollar stars in the NFL, where speed is one of the most prized assets. They’ve come here to get faster, ahead of the NFL Combine, a test that could change their lives. Arsenal Football Club send their Academy athletes to us. The UK Bobsleigh team also attends training camps organised by Michael Johnson Performance. Like Paula, their bodies are already well tuned for the task at hand. They come here to improve their technique.
This place is as much a lab as a gym. We humans don’t think of ourselves as machines, but in many ways that is how we perform, how we move. Biomechanics is a science that applies mechanical principles to the human body. For sprint coaches, that science is a vital tool for perfecting technique, because to run really fast, technique is crucial. Efficiency makes you faster.
When I run, for example, other than my arms, you don’t see any movement in the torso. Ironically, when I started getting recruited by different colleges, some of the coaches said, ‘Hey, you’re going to have to change your style.’ I had always been a little bit more upright than the others, and some of the kids, including my friends, would make fun of my running stance. But I was faster than they were, so eventually some of them began to try to run like me, even if I did ‘run funny’.
Still, when a variety of coaches told me I would have to change, I just figured, ‘Well, that’s part of what I am going to have to do to improve. Great, fine, not a problem.’ Luckily, the coach I ultimately chose, Clyde Hart, never said anything about changing my upright running style. Instead, we worked on improving technique, including correcting the habit I had of throwing my head up when I got fatigued, which would make me even more upright.
By 1990, when I started to get all of this focus and attention from the sports media, the television commentators began to talk about how different my upright style was and said that if I leaned more as I ran I’d be able to break the world record. That became a huge subject of discussion. Ironically, it turned out that my style was actually much more efficient than everyone else’s.
Being upright gave me the ability to produce much more power than some of my competitors or than the typical sprinter. I was naturally blessed with more fast-twitch muscle fibres and so therefore speed than the average person. Beyond that, from a physical standpoint, my body is such that I can consistently lift weights and I would never get really big. I could lift large amounts of weight and I had very good strength at my peak as an athlete, but you didn’t see it and I didn’t have to carry the extra weight around. It was like having the power of an 18-wheeler in the body of a Ferrari. That was an advantage, because as a sprinter you need to lift for strength but you don’t want to get too bulky, which compromises flexibility, along with fluidity and technical soundness. But if I hadn’t learned how to drive it correctly, my Ferrari body might as well have been a VW Beetle.
Technique is extremely important as a sprinter and, as I noted previously, a lot of it boils down to how efficiently you move. Just imagine looking from above at a sprinter in action. Do you see one foot land within the plane of his body and then the other foot land in front of his body as well? That’s good, efficient technique. If one foot lands out to the right of his body, the next foot is going to land out to his left, and then he’s zigzagging down the track, however slightly, as opposed to straight. As small as those little differences are, that zigzag will cost a competitor a couple of centimetres with each step since the foot went the same distance but landed outside to the right and then outside to the left. That makes a big difference ultimately.
As a runner, how you use your upper body is equally important. The legs are like the engine that runs your body. In your car you’ve got an engine but you don’t crank the engine; you don’t turn that engine with your hand. You use an accelerator. Your arms are like the accelerator. They drive your legs. They also determine the efficiency of your legs.
So now if you’re looking at a sprinter running directly at you down the track with his arms pumping up and down, you should see each hand coming up just to the side of his head or right in front of his nose. If one hand comes across his shoulder, then the other is going to come back across the other shoulder the other way and that’s going to pull his body over that way. If his right arm goes all the way across his body to his left shoulder as it goes up and down, that’s going to pull his body to the left. The other side is going to go back the opposite way and pull to the right. That will cause the same zigzag movement down the track that was visible in the bird’s eye view.
For the movement to be efficient, you want the arms to come across no further than the midline of the body. If they don’t come up to your nose and instead go over to your shoulder, that’s too far. Which brings us back to physicality. If you got really bulky and put on too much weight in your shoulders and arms, all that muscle would make it hard to keep that arm going up and down in a straight line and not cross the midline.
For every Olympic sport there is a set of techniques that produce the most efficient and powerful movement, and there are body types that will work best within those parameters. The same applies for the different specialities within that sport. I can look at an athlete doing a general workout and I can tell you from his physical build whether he’s more suited for 100 metres, 200 metres or 400 metres. They’re all sprints, but each demands different levels of quickness, speed endurance (how long they can run fast) and endurance (how long they can last, period).
Although many thought my running style was unusual, it incorporated method and technique. The strides were not short, as many had thought. In fact most people only assumed this because my superior and very quick turnover gave the illusion of a shorter stride. I had great leg speed. There was economy of movement and speed aiding the speed endurance central for 200 and 400 metres. That relaxed, upright posture – shoulders in line, head still – meant I was able to flow along the track.
Coach and I worked with the US Olympic Committee (USOC), who had footage of me and the technology to analyse my running technique and mechanics. The USOC created a model for ideal sprint technique, and when my technique was plugged in against the model, I outran the model. What we found from this analysis disproved a couple of different assumptions about my technique that had been talked about repeatedly by the commentators and sports writers as well as other coaches. The first was that my stride was short, and the other was that my knee lift was low. Neither was true.
I was relieved when Coach and I discovered that my running style was actually a benefit. Previously we had received a lot of criticism for not changing my style. We always took the approach that we didn’t see that my style was creating any negative effect, so we saw no reason to change it just because it wasn’t like other people’s running style. We tried to explain it, but to most people it didn’t make any sense. All they knew was that my style was different from what they were accustomed to seeing and different from what the other sprinters were doing; so, in their simple logic, I had to be the one who was wrong. Now we had an answer for all those critics who kept saying that I could break the world record if I only changed my running style.
We knew all along that it didn’t make sense to change my natural style just because people said I should or because everyone else sprinted differently. Having proof of that made us feel really good. Even better, during the two days we spent looking at the information and analysing the findings, we learned that not only was my stride length and knee lift within the normal range, but also my more upright posture was actually helping me to generate more power and quicker turnover. My more upright position puts my upper body and torso over my hips, which allows me to generate a larger amount of downforce with each step. Downforce is power, and power is speed. The greater the force that each step strikes the ground with, the faster you run. Being able to create more power and strike the ground with more force helped me to run faster. Additionally, being more upright while sprinting allows each foot as it goes through its cycle to generate a tighter cycle. A tighter cycle is a faster cycle. The more forward lean you have, the longer the trip your trail leg must make around the cycle. The trail leg is the leg that has just struck the ground and is in the process of recovering or cycling around while the other leg is making ground contact.
We didn’t just stop with that. We developed training to enhance my style and continued throughout my career to improve on the efficiency of my sprint style.
My style, however, was never ideal over the shortest of sprints, the 100 metres. My biggest advantages over the longer sprints, speed endurance and efficiency, are not major advantages for the 100-metre sprint. We like to talk about the 100 metres as being in phases. The explosive start is followed by the drive phase. In the start, keeping low, head down, allows the build-up of speed, pushing off the track with the toes, arms pumping back and forth, using that upper-body strength. It’s all about acceleration. In the drive phase you’re approaching maximum velocity. Head in line with the spine, relaxed, elbows at 90 degrees, stride extended, classic high-knee lift. If it’s close, you’ll need to lean for the line.
Sprinters who race the 100 metres are powerful, of course, and generally not too tall. The shorter you are, the more compact you are and the lower your centre of gravity. Of course, you don’t want to be too short, since a good stride length is an advantage in that final sprint for the line. In general, however, height much over 6’ has long been regarded as a major disadvantage in the early phases of the race. Tall guys with long legs like Usain, who is 6’5”, have a very difficult time getting out of the blocks and into that drive phase. Keeping a low centre of gravity is equally challenging. That’s why Usain’s father was so surprised that his son wanted to compete in the 100 metres, and why even Usain’s coaches didn’t initially believe that he had prospects as a 100-metre runner despite his natural speed. But Usain knew better.
Like me, Usain realised he was physically gifted as a kid. Like me, he was just faster than everyone else. ‘I was always doing great things,’ Usain told me. ‘When I started track and field, I was good naturally. Even in high school, I didn’t train and I was always running fast times and breaking records. It’s just a talent. God put everybody on this earth to do something. This is for me. I’m just doing my part right now.’
Usain’s freakish speed allows him to achieve results that defy logic. Those are things you cannot teach, so it’s no surprise to me that he puts his speed down to the Almighty. To be fair, he hasn’t just relied on his superior physicality and natural talent. He’s worked on his start, and at 25 he now has the power required for this explosive part of the race.
‘Can Bolt be faster?’ everyone asks. Absolutely. Having studied his technique – or lack thereof – I know this unequivocally. His lateral movement is horrible as he gets out and up into his maximum velocity. During a race his thigh actually points into his competitor’s lane, so the force that he is driving through is actually coming out at an oblique angle instead of right down the track. In order to compensate for that, he now has to do some side bending and some de-rotation up above, so that he doesn’t get pulled off into the lane next to him. He also gets a lot of sway in his shoulder motion. You want some rotation but you want it to be stabilised. What you’re seeing is some side bending. Each time the side of his body collapses, he has to actually strike and recover. That causes him to lose a lot of time.
When I asked Usain about his weaknesses, he confided that he feels he still needs to work on making his starts consistent. And he doesn’t think that he’s fully perfected his last 30 metres in the 200-metre race. ‘I notice sometimes I start reaching. I’m trying to get to the line so much I start reaching too early,’ he says.
It’s almost scary to think about how fast Usain could go if he cleaned up some of his running and brought his technique up to the level of his congenital gift. Regardless of the sport and whether it requires natural athletic ability or natural skill or a combination of both, I don’t believe that anyone can achieve Olympic success, competing against the best in the world, without having that kind of natural superior talent. It is easier for a sportsperson in a skill-based sport to achieve success through repetition and early adaptation than it would be for someone to gain athletic ability through repetition. I think it is virtually impossible for someone to develop superior athleticism through training and repetition. In my opinion, athletes can often develop a certain skill through repetition, but probably not enough to be the best in the world.
On the other hand, some Olympic athletes have proved me wrong and actually overcome what they or others perceive as a lack of raw, physical talent by perfecting their technique.
TECHNICAL SUCCESS
‘So many people told me when I was growing up that I’d never make a good swimmer,’ double gold medal holder Rebecca Adlington told me. ‘So many people said I kicked way too much for a distance swimmer.’ Rebecca, who describes herself as ‘very big … and not the leanest of girls’, not only chose to ignore them, she went on to prove them wrong, even though she was ‘rubbish in the gym’, with her shoulders giving way when she lifted weights of any significance. ‘I can’t actually do it,’ she said. ‘Yet, put me in a pool and I would keep going all day and I don’t ever find it a problem. I think, technically, how my muscles work in the pool is so different to anything else.’ So even though Rebecca’s raw physical talent may not be as strong as some other great swimmers, her technique coupled with her mental strength gives her an advantage that often proves unbeatable.
That’s why she and her coach Bill Furniss focus so intently on perfecting how she moves in the water, starting with her position in the water, which is higher than most. ‘It’s always been a thing for me that if my technique’s not right, I don’t swim well. That’s why I’m so glad I’ve stayed with the same coach since such an early age, because he knows exactly what to look for. He knows that I’ve got to keep my stroke at a certain length for the first 150 metres of my race. If I shorten it, I won’t have a good race because I can’t get into a rhythm.
‘Getting my stroke right is something we always focused on. My coach is 57, so he’s pretty old school in how he coaches. With swimming now, everybody wants to try loads of different stuff on land, and film, and do all this technical stuff. My coach says, “No, do the work in the pool and it’ll pay off. It’s the work in the pool that matters.” Over the years he’s always been strict with his swimmers, including me, about having good technique. As soon as he notices your technique going, he’ll say, “I don’t care if your times aren’t quick. Hold your stroke.”’
You’ll find that same emphasis on technique in many an Olympic champion’s story. Technique was emphasised so early on in Nadia Comaneci’s career that she never had a chance to develop bad habits. ‘The base of gymnastics has to be really clean and technically correct,’ she explained. ‘Every skill has to be learned the right way, otherwise you cannot build on more difficult moves.’ That wasn’t an issue for Nadia, who at the age of 14 would earn the first perfect 10 ever awarded to a gymnast for her routine on the uneven bars. Nadia, who was already known for her performance of innovative and challenging skills, would add another six perfect 10s during those 1976 Olympics Games. Even later in life, Nadia’s execution and technique remained flawless. ‘I remember at one point, even after so many years, my coach Béla Károlyi’s wife Marta – who coaches the US team now – said, “Nadia doesn’t know how to do a move incorrectly because she hasn’t learned how to do it incorrectly.”’ What Marta meant was that Nadia didn’t know how to bend in certain moves where that would cause a deduction, for example, because she had learned to do those moves with straight legs.
Few athletes think about technique when they’re young. Nadia’s five golds and Rebecca’s self-evaluation, along with her record, show us what a mistake that is. However, even the most perfectly suited physicality and perfectly executed technique aren’t enough. You have to want to make Olympic history deep down in your core. You have to be willing to do whatever it takes.