New Japanese JR record for 100m... 10.01 seconds!

Even one just paints general stereotypes and believes what they want.

NHK just ran an extended clip of him on 9pm news tonight.

First of all, in typical Japanese high school tradition, the facilities are pretty non-existent. The clip shows him training with his team mates on a typical dirt school ground.

No fancy track, nothing. A big part of his workout is developing explosive power. He is throwing medicine balls as high as possible to develop explosiveness. He is also pushing car tires across the dirt to develop drive.

The school ground is only about 50m so most of his running is trying to develop the forward lean and drive for the first 30m of his run. His foot turnover looks very fast.

Ito ran a 10 flat for the Japanese record many years ago and he was just a whippet of man. I seriously doubt this kid is taking anything.

When you see the kid in his class uniform with his school mates, he looks about 12.

Nothing fishy here Geezer.

You mention how Ito was skinny which is interesting because I had thought this kid didn't look very big for a 100m man. But compared to other Japanese sprinters (look at Yamagata) he seems kinda sturdy

Its funny though because I think Seko was bigger than all of them lol

Adam Smith wrote:The clip shows him training with his team mates on a typical dirt school ground.

No fancy track, nothing. A big part of his workout is developing explosive power. He is throwing medicine balls as high as possible to develop explosiveness. He is also pushing car tires across the dirt to develop drive.

The school ground is only about 50m so most of his running is trying to develop the forward lean and drive for the first 30m of his run.

sounds impressive. would american colleges be interested in recruiting him and giving him a scholarship?

maybe he doesn't even have a good track coach right now who can give advice on technique and training.

ventolin^3 wrote:

Mr. Obvious wrote:WR aren't a moral item and nobody cares who you consider better.

moron

a wr is just a measure of a guy's talent

No it isn't. It is a measure of how fast a guy ran.

you of course remember seeing darrel cruise to that 10.01 with at least 1 gear left to spare - the most awesome run from a sprinter i ever saw considering his age - 10.01 in those days meant something

if he'd run that race flat-out, it was at worst 9.95

that is the measure of the guy's talent at the time & that meant morally the wr shoud be at worst 9.95

this kid won't have surpassed darrel's "talent" until i see a 9.94 at worst from him

doesn't matter what his talent was, doesn't matter what he could have ran. He ran 10.01. That's the record.

Adam--

And from that you conclude that he is likely to be clean?

If anything, that suggests that he is likely to be using!

10-flat is a serious time by anybody's standards. It requires superior SE. To get to 10-flat, training only 50m accelerations on dirt? Where did that top-end form come from? Where did that SE come from? And all by the age of 17.35 years?!

It stretches credibility.

Like I said, it's not impossible--but I still need verification other than homegrown hero worship.

We will see how he progresses through the season--if he is able to reproduce this kind of time outside Japan, what his meet schedule is like, if he is likely to have been subject to any testing.

Sprintgeezer - do you know how FAT timing works? Your bizarre obsession with certain times being 'bogus' defies logic.

With these systems there is basically no room for error.

The time is verified and real.

How is this unbelievable? Didn't Usain Bolt run 19.93 with a headwind at the same age?

just based on how sprint geezer reacts to fast time's I'd bet he'd have a heart attack if he saw the top 100m-400m sprinters on the youth top list, would probably call them all drug cheats or say they are lying about their age

* wrote:

Tim Montgomery ran 9.96 as a junior.

But the track was 3.7 centimeters short.

Would have been 9.97.

Tim Montgomery was loaded even in High School. Thats why he had trouble when he got into his mid 20's his body's natural hormone levels were shot to sh*t. If you think kids don't use in Highschool you're retarded.

So he had to keep using above the normal protocol just to keep pumped.

I hope some kids read this, this is why you don't do drugs kids.

Also look at Flojo, dead at 38, or Marion Jones bankrupt ex-con.

Sprintgeezer wrote:

Third of all, in early season? Sure, solid times have been laid down by others in early season in years past, but it is the exception rather than the norm. Will he still peak this year? What will you guys be saying when he is sub-10?

But that doesn't get you to 10-flat earlier than anybody else ever has.

Where was he indoors? Did he do anything at all?

You are making the mistaken assumption that the Japanese year corresponds one-to-one with the one you are accustomed to.

Sprintgeezer wrote:

Bob: "Many useful aspects of the culture carry great weight in Japanese society even today."

Like elder abuse?

Where do you get this stuff? If there is much elder abuse in Japan, it could well be because the elderly often live with their adult kids, with the burden of care usually falling on the daughter-in-law. They generally don't abandon their elderly parents to fetid "nursing" homes.

Your suggestion that Kiryu is 5'9", rather than the 5'6" reported elsewhere, is significant. Is that verified?

Maybe not the most authoritative source, but here's his Japanese Wikipedia entry. The height and weight are in the sidebar on the upper right. It also says he ran 10.87/21.6 in Jr. HS and 20.7 against a 0.4 m/s head wind last year as a second-year HS student.

Whoops. I mean HERE's that Wikipedia entry:

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/桐

;生祥秀

Bob Dobbs wrote:

Whoops. I mean HERE's that Wikipedia entry:

http://ja.wikipedia.org/wiki/桐

;;生祥秀

For some reason, the LR server insists on inserting a stray character in the Japanese string above. Remove the semicolon from the URL before you paste it into your browser.

Here it is again, in case it makes it through the LR server intact this time:

;生祥秀

Well shit. LR really needs some I18N; utf-8 ain't that hard to handle.

At any rate, the Wiki entry says he's 175 cm tall and weighs 67 kg.

Hi Bob,

Actually I live in Osaka. I agree that customer service is quite good in Japan. But what irks me is this image that Japanese are such hard workers. In general Japanese spend a lot of time at work/school/practice but are very unproductive. They spend lots of time pretending to work. Even for them their image of being hard workers is an important part of their self-image. But it is all image. I know from my experience as a high school and university teacher that most students rarely study. I know that teachers stay late at school so others will think they are working hard. It doesn't matter what you are doing, as long as it seems like you are working. I have read studies where they compare the productivity of Japanese and American workers and find that Americans are much more productive...Japanese work more hours but Americans are more productive.

One maybe irrelevant story....I was scheduled to run with a university ekiden team yesterday morning at 6:00. I got there to find they had cancelled the run because of rain. For me that was kind of shocking..In Washington if you didn't run when it was raining, you would never run.

All true. I worked a big English-language daily newspaper in Tokyo years ago, and every night the staff would sit around waiting for the kacho to go home (or ask them to go for drinks) before they'd even consider it. But I think you can attribute much of the superior productivity in the U.S. to greater use of automation, although that gap seems to be closing. I no longer see Japanese bank clerks counting stacks of 10,000-yen notes by hand.

That's funny, isn't it. I can count on having the local riverside bike paths to myself whenever it rains. I'm from Seattle (Edmonds, actually), so I just put on my baseball cap and go. I vaguely recall Sammy Wanjiru once telling Brett from Tokyo that he didn't run in the rain. Maybe he picked that habit up at Sendai Ikuei.

that guy in the pink shorts looked no where near 175cm.

I would have believed 5'7" or 170cm.

Either that or the track is small.

did it do it wrote:

that guy in the pink shorts looked no where near 175cm.

I would have believed 5'7" or 170cm.

Either that or the track is small.

Whatever. I'm just passing along what several Japanese-language sites say.

Brett: "You are making the mistaken assumption that the Japanese year corresponds one-to-one with the one you are accustomed to."

I don't think so.

What I am assuming is that the Japanese track year essentially corresponds to the one that the track world is used to, which includes Diamond League, World Challenge, and other meets throughout the summer, leading up to the WC later in the year.

Since Japanese track is in the track world, I assume that they prepare for this schedule in roughly the same way as do all other participants in the track world.