The Olympics and Paralympics provide us with an opportunity to witness the true potential of the human body every four years. At their best, athletes do things that most of us can only imagine.
The competition where the fastest humans on the planet go to the track is arguably the most fascinating of them all. There aren’t many other sports where performance can be compared side by side with such clarity.
“You have your own lane in sprints,” explains Eilidh Doyle, a 400-meter sprint and hurdles specialist who placed third for Great Britain in the 4 × 400-meter relay.
It’s not like the 1500m, where you might be immediately impacted by someone else’s strategy. You essentially declare, “I know what the strategy is, and I’m going to carry it out since nobody else can tamper with it,” as you stand in the start lane.”
A straightforward formula lies at the core of sprinting: running speed = step length * step frequency.
Either you walk more slowly or you walk more quickly. Sam Gleadhill, a biomechanics and strength and conditioning researcher at the University of South Australia, thinks that’s the most fundamental thing you can do. “The caveat to that, though, is that if you improve one of those variables, you don’t want to decrease the other.”
