quantumofsport.com

Felix americanus victorious

The current golden girl of athletics, American sprinter Allyson Felix, won the Diamond League crown in the women's 400m with a fairly mediocre 50.37s run in the penultimate event of the Diamond League series in Zurich last night. This is her first season of doubling up in earnest in the 200m and 400m and her relative lack of experience in running the one-lap was clearly in evidence as she struggled to set an even tempo, setting off quickly and then over-relaxing before drawing upon her basic speed to see her home. Thus far she has run much better in the 4x400m relay, where things are a little bit more instinctive. She'll be looking to add the 200m overall title to this in the last event in Brussels on the 27th August.

Super-smooth Allyson Felix in action earlier in the year in Manchester (May).
 

Other US athletes who put in excellent performances last night were the bullish David Oliver in the 110m hurdles (12.93s); Wallace Spearmon in the 200m (19.79s) and the - still only 26 years old - Jeremy Wariner with a 'world lead' 44.13s in the 400m. The latter two took their respective overall titles with these wins.

Britain's Mo Farah continues to go from strength to strength after his double gold at the European Championships as he smashed David Moorcroft's 28 year-old 5000m record of 13:00.41, clocking 12:57.94, in finishing fifth to the younger Bekele, Tariku.

We'll have a Gay new time

For Monaco read Manchester, for machine read man, as American sprinter Tyson Gay ripped up the street yesterday “to WR” in the straight-line 200m, clocking 19.41s, to break compatriot Tommie Smith’s 44 year-old mark of 19.5. The latter, most famous for his Black Power salute in the 1968 Mexico City Olympics, was in the crowd to witness his record get beat and seemed pretty sanguine about it all.

Tyson Gay doing some well-earned post-race strutting in unfamiliar environs after a blistering 200m  

The custom-built track in downtown Deansgate débuted last year, when Usain Bolt claimed a 150m world record and had an expanded nine-race schedule this year, with various events ranging between 100m and 200m, including some hurdling.

The organisers did an excellent job of mixing both established and up-and-coming UK athletes with some big name US and Caribbean talent. In the warm-up acts, home winners included Mark Lewis-Francis, showing signs of a return to form, with 10.21 in the 100m, Laura Turner in the women’s 100m, a highly impressive double for arguably, ‘pound for pound’, our finest male athlete, Andy Turner, in the high hurdles and a longer 200m hurdle race and, in the penultimate race, Jessica Ennis, who managed 16.99s in the 150m, having too much flat speed for Christine Ohurougu. The biggest overseas highlight for the spectators aside from Gay, was the wonderfully loose-limbed Allyson Felix, who, fresh off the back of a 400m victory in the first of the Diamond League events in Doha on Friday, comfortably won the women’s 200m.

And so to Gay. What had looked on paper a nailed-on certainty given his form - he recently became the first man in history to break 10, 20 and 45 seconds for the sprints - was more in doubt come the starting gun, thanks to the not-so-great ambient conditions (a slight headwind) and the preceding collection of decent but not super-fast times. However, the doubt was soon dispelled as, after a fast start by the genial St.Kitt’s veteran Kim Collins, Gay tore down the track, accelerating in the second 100m, where he was split recorded at 9.53s, to finish over a second clear of the others. Bravo.

The street environment kind of works but, rather like the vegetarian sausage, it retains the form of the very thing it would seek to get away from, in this case the prefab athletics track. It’s obvious why this should be of course: the commercial pressures of setting up a world record time situation. However, rendering it a proper tarmac street scrap would make it more engaging for the watching public. The solution, it seems to me, is to find a more 'natural' setting, something along the lines of the Coe / Cram 'Chariots of Fire' dash round the perimeter of the Great Court at Trinity College, Cambridge, as the bell strikes noon. The 25 second gap between the chimes of Big Ben and the tolling of the hour would be perfect material for instance, if someone could conceive of a suitably historically resonant Westminster course.

The winning mind by Sebastian Coe

This explicitly dual genre book, marketed under business/sport, came out in paperback last month and was first published in April 2009. The premise is that winning in the sporting arena has parallels with winning the hearts and minds of the populace in politics (Coe was elected MP for Falmouth and Camborne in 1992 and later worked as William Hague’s chief of staff) and winning the contracts in the business world, the case study being Coe’s spectacular achievement in spearheading the long-time unfancied London’s successful bid for the 2012 Olympics.
 
The chapter titles tell you immediately that this is going to be a corny old ride: Creating the vision; Setting the goals; The starting gun; Staying the course; Increasing momentum; The final lap; Bringing home the flame. The metaphor propagates within the chapters, in the sub-headings and the ‘take-home’ messages printed in bold type. Choosing three pages at random, we have as prompters for examples from the world of sport, politics and business:-

“There is no template for success.”
“Seize the day.”
“You have a finite amount of energy. Your physical and mental energy come from the same source. You’re taking both from the same well.”

You get the picture.

Coe is certainly well-intentioned but to the intelligent reader this approach comes across as vapid and platitudinous; moreover, it’s hard to see who this is really aimed at. I ended up tolerating the evangelism and concentrating on the sporting autobiography.

Henman wins inaugural UK Seniors Pentathlon

Competitors:

Roger Black, Desmond Douglas, Tim Henman, Gary Lineker, Nigel Mansell, Brian Moore.

After some tough preliminary rounds, these six redoubtable figures of sporting yesteryear took part in a challenging pentathlon yesterday in the south of England, ostensibly for charity but you know how it is...once a competitor, always a competitor. QoS followed the action.

Go Karting

A 10-lap sprint on the colts / geriatrics circuit at Silverstone, “Nige” was obviously the hot favourite, all the more so with no Constructor’s Championship to obfuscate the personal talent. He duly delivered, impatiently brushing aside the instructor guy, he led from start to finish, lapping the spluttering Moore twice. A fall from the car on a gratuitous victory circuit was potentially embarrassing, but commentator Murray Walker was quickly on hand to drop his mike and apply the Band-Aids. Tiger Tim and Lineker battled it out for second and third, with a sneaky schoolboy manoeuvre on the final corner enough for Henman. The impassive Douglas held off Black for fourth.

World Indoors: An OK for Team UK.

Across the water from the glitz and glamour of the Bahrain Grand Prix, a strong team of UK athletes was competing in the futuristically named Aspire Dome, Doha, Qatar, in the 13th IAAF World Indoor Championships, full results from which can be found here.

Indoor athletics has always been hard to promote effectively, I suspect mainly because track and field is instinctively such a primal outdoors activity that the notion of holding it indoors is a touch ridiculous. The status of these championships is thus not particularly high and for many competitors it is more of a stepping stone than an end in itself. Witness for one the absence of the two dominant figures in men’s athletics, Usain Bolt and Kenenisa Bekele.

Everything indoors is compressed: the track is 200m rather than 400m; the main sprinting event is the 60m (on a stretch inside the oval); the sprint hurdles are also over 60m; the longest event is the 3000m; decathletes become heptathletes, who, in turn, become pentathletes. As for the field events, the jumps are all as per outdoors (+ pole vault) but, for obvious reasons, only the shot put is retained of the throwing events.