Triple jump experts, how do you explain the huge gains by American record holder Tori Franklin who has PRd by 4 + feet?

rojo wrote:

Stanley Allen Taylor wrote:

Would you please list only the metric measurement. We need to get rid of the feet and inches and only report athletics marks in metric.

Field eventers understand metric marks - I get it - but the average distance runner in the USA has no idea so I listed both.

________________________________________________

Thank You For Listing Both,

Someone has to have their head examined if they are going to take the time to write to you and ask to remove feet from your posts.....MUCH better with both.

3045

What is at the root of the skepticism is fair but misguided. It may be a combination of factors. She is clearly stronger than her college years. Follow her Instagram feed and you will see a progression in her partial squats that is reasonable. That is a moment that most NCAA track athletes do not do based on the obsession with Olympic lifting partials. She is stronger making her faster. She has the talent to make it to that many finals during her career. Lastly, she got a real coach. The level of coaching for the horizontal jumps in the collegiate ranks leaves a lot to be desired. There are many disciples of Pfaff and Boo that are of lesser quality.

If she is fortunate enough to not go into the work force upon graduation and combine new strength, speed and real coaching maybe her potential is now coming to fruition. Good for her.

Not exactly sure of the answer but that is about 1ft 4 in per phase. The breakdown won't exactly be like that. I've seen a chart of pro men where the last phase accounts for the plurality of the distance. From my experience coaching HS, most jumpers take a huge first phase, step through the second phase and force a jump into the pit. Maybe she switched up her approach and she can control herself better through the entire jump.

As a distance runner and a Jump coach (certified), I will agree the the TJ is a very technical event big gains can be made by drill and focus. Most young athletes have difficulty getting the most out of the second phase. I will have athletes gain 3-4 feet in one season just by learning how to efficiently perform the second phase. Another common error is over rotation in the final phase, this can take feet off of a jump, as they essential propelling themselves downward into the pit. Getting that right equates to big jumps. When you really break it down - a foot gain is simply 4 inches (roughly 10cm) per phase.

I'd like to weigh in here and mention a few key points, regarding her VERY NOTICEABLE improvement (especially to world level marks).

- The pre-college triple jump school in the Great Lakes area is bad. Very bad. It is seldom ever scheduled in high school meets, and when it is, coaches don't know squat about how to teach it. Young jumpers then opt for running and long jumping as far as they can for a hop while landing on the same foot, hoping for the best in the step (no pun intended), and making it into the sand with what's left. This builds an awful habit, a very hard one to change in only four years of college.

- I had the chance to watch Franklin jump at State and at Saginaw a couple times. To justify her improvement, first off let it be known she has legs strong enough to kick you off the ground a few yards; her foot contacts make some loud snaps. But it was also noticeable that she was very conservative with her speed as she already showed imbalances in her hop phase, even on a slower approach. This I want to believe is how she coped with the lack of ability ingrained in her since her pre-college years. But on her recent videos she has got to be going around 0.5sec/100m faster on that runway, and that makes a huge difference.

- Final point is, I believe the best thing that can happen to an American triple jumper is to go overseas and compete/watch foreign triple jumpers. Triple jump schools in other countries teach athletes to be bouncers before jumpers from the beginning, which translates into more ability to manage their phases effectively.

I am excited for Franklin and wish her the best in her jumps career. However, as for 15+m (49's+ for LRCs), I believe she would really need to nail those three contacts to perfection. She is not the tallest (anywhere between 5-7 to 5-9) jumper, so she'll lack the leg length of Ibarguen/Rypakova, yet not the fastest like Savigne/Mbango. But it might as well happen, who knows!!!

TJ is is not a real sport. Could there be anything more random and strange? Long jump, high jump. Sure, they make sense. Even shot put - who can throw a heavy thing the furthest. TJ?

Strange “sport” wrote:

TJ is is not a real sport. Could there be anything more random and strange? Long jump, high jump. Sure, they make sense. Even shot put - who can throw a heavy thing the furthest. TJ?

You have obviously never watched a human TJ 59+ft. Once you do, your perspective will change.

My brother was an Olympic finalist. 6th.

Women's TJ is not at the same level as Men's.

They make big gains, because the Women's event is weak.

11m/sec wrote:

Strange “sport” wrote:

TJ is is not a real sport. Could there be anything more random and strange? Long jump, high jump. Sure, they make sense. Even shot put - who can throw a heavy thing the furthest. TJ?

You have obviously never watched a human TJ 59+ft. Once you do, your perspective will change.

The issue is not the difficulty level. I'm sure it's extremely impressive at the highest levels.

The issue is why the hell is TJ a sport. I can think of all kinds of random things that woudl be hard to do. Run as fast as you can for 100m, jump and spin, jump twice more but only on your left foot, rub your belly, do a flip, then run a mile backwards with hurdles while juggling shot put balls.

crumpet wrote:

My brother was an Olympic finalist. 6th.

Women's TJ is not at the same level as Men's.

They make big gains, because the Women's event is weak.

If only your brother had said that he was a woman, then he might have "won" against women.

I may have jumped the gun on suggesting the jumps where windy, albeit, I still see that as a possibility. I have seen high school athletes and even NCAA athletes make big improvements, but an athlete in their mid-20s after jumping for 4 years at a major D1 program, making that big of an improvement in one season is almost insumountable. Also, jumping 5 straight PRs is amazing. I can't imagine what Keturah Orji who has never lost to Tori is thinking right now.

Btw, for distance fans, Tori's improvement would be equivalent to a miler going from 4:00 to about 3:52.

New Coach who knows his stuff

In that case, how would you justify the large assortment of distance events to people who think "Why the hell so many events for purposes of winning a long run contest"? Or even between distance categories, if you are a middle distance specialist, why differentiate between 800m/1500m? If you are a distance specialist, why differentiate between 5000m/10000m (and let's not bring the steeplechase into the equation)? What about extra long distances: half marathon/marathon? They all test the ability to resist running for extraordinary distances, then why so many options? (And I am limiting myself to Olympic distances, you would need to add all the odd-distance events that are still run: 600m, mile, 2k, 3k, 8k, 12k, 25k)

You would say, because they all ask for different abilities from the runners: speed endurance, aerobic capacity, muscular resistance, yadda yadda. And these are all valid. So the same applies to the jumps: high jump is the ability to reach verticality, long jump to reach horizontality, and triple jump is also maximum horizontality in three contacts. I actually believe as the general athlete population is getting more explosive, contests such as Vertical, standing long jump, and multi bounds might become events. They might be catching up to the current catalog of distance events ;).

TrackCoach wrote:

I can't imagine what Keturah Orji who has never lost to Tori is thinking right now.

Well, USATF should be interesting!

Keturah certainly noticed. She tried to take the record back the very next day at SECs and had to settle for merely 47-11, breaking her NCAA record (but not her PR from the summer). Now we TWO women competing for World and OG medals! (Keturah was 4th in Rio)

Strange "sport" wrote:

The issue is not the difficulty level. I'm sure it's extremely impressive at the highest levels.

The issue is why the hell is TJ a sport. I can think of all kinds of random things that woudl be hard to do. Run as fast as you can for 100m, jump and spin, jump twice more but only on your left foot, rub your belly, do a flip, then run a mile backwards with hurdles while juggling shot put balls.

If you are asking sincerely, it likely has something to do with the fact that TJ has the highest impact forces in all of T&F. So TJ is an event in the sport of T&F because it is unique from the other events in that one must absorb/apply an incredible amount of force, mostly vertically, while keeping their balance and moving as far as possible horizontally.

TJers are extremely athletic. They can and often do excel at almost any sport they want.

To me, the perceived implication from our OP, based on his track (ahem) record (who can blame him for skepticism?), is a PED link to explain eye-opening improvements by a certain female triple jumper. However, perhaps he's truly asking for expert opinions with an open mind.

Speculation is like salt rubbed into an open wound in our already-troubled sport. A vigilante with a firm opinion -- but without evidence -- that drugs led to a noticeable improvement in performance can hop, step, and jump onto a LetsRun forum and sling mud from his or her righteous soap box. This results in some dreadful victimization.

But, sadly, the vigilante mentality becomes more prevalent because of a long, painful, disgusting legacy in the sport. And one of our most admired middle distance stars from Kenya just heaped a ton of salt upon our wounds. It's only natural to have an adverse reaction to almost any athlete's sudden head-scratching improvements.

In truth, Tori Franklin has reached new lengths in the TJ because of a little-understood natural phenomenon that just so happened to have caused gravity fluctuations from moment-to-moment at four different sites where she competed. Suddenly, the atmospheric physics at a low-altitude venue, for a just a fraction of a moment, shifted to a Mexico City-like environment (no, not with that awful air), and, like magic, these coincided with when Tori sprinted down the runway. It was pure chance, pure luck, I say, and it had nothing to do with drugs, nothing to do with improved technique, nothing to do with wind.

That silliness is groundless, of course. So is any speculation that Tori Franklin is a drug cheat. At this time. Chalk it up to a history of PED abuse in track & field.

It's hard not to get emotional when we are talking about a real human being with real feelings. However, being a world class athlete means you will be suspected by many to be cheating. Any clean athlete that has reached this level, where they are so good that people think they must be on drugs, ought to proclaim victory.

THAT is how people look at champions! Like they are unbeatable due to some force that can't possibly be available to everyone else. When you reach that level of mastery you have to be proud of yourself rather than get worked up about someone questioning it. You have to keep your composure and smile at the doping questions, truly smile from the heart. Take it all in, the praise along with the accusations, while you have the honor of being our world record holder. If you're truly clean, both aforementioned sentiments are a huge compliment.

Tori Franklin, I salute you!

Start with Bob Beamon's jump and then go from there.