But...but...but...Bolt is 6'5"!!!

Xyamaca wrote:

You're all right. His height has absolutely no bearing. In fact, I heard a midget is about to break the 100m WR.

And I heard that the giraffe is the world's fastest land animal, the wandering albatross is the world's fastest flyer and the blue whale is the world's fastest swimmer.

Taking fellow Jamaican Olympic legend Don Quarrie as an example Bolt is 5.1% faster at 100m but an incredible 12% taller. What are we to make of this?

If Bolt's height is his secret he should be running 9 flat.

Have you no logic? wrote:

Xyamaca wrote:

You're all right. His height has absolutely no bearing. In fact, I heard a midget is about to break the 100m WR.

And I heard that the giraffe is the world's fastest land animal, the wandering albatross is the world's fastest flyer and the blue whale is the world's fastest swimmer.

At least I have enough logic to keep my point within the human species. Congrats on the logic of comparing apples to oranges to grapes. You made perfect sense.

vic conte wrote:

Any of you ever play pickup football growing up? It is always the short speedy ones that do the most damage. You never hear kids say "he's tall so he's going to be too fast for us"...

Now all of a sudden height is an attribute that is complimentary to speed? 100% bullsh-t.

Your comparison is ludicrous. Apples to oranges. You can't compare a short guy's agility, weaving in and out and short bursts of speed to a taller guy running in a straight line. Bolt's height isn't an advantage until he hits roughly 50m, which is why he's the come-from-behind king.

Look at this list - there is no one faster than Lemaitre: http://www.adriansprints.com/2011/07/lists-of-fastest-white-men-in-history.html The closest would be the anomaly Shirvington - 6'0" - and all of them were aided in some way (max or close to max wind or altitude).

Sprintgeezer wrote:

That "unaided" 9.92 was actually aided by a maximum legal wind reading of +2.0, and was not even a sub-10 basic.

That 6'3" white guy is no faster than the other best white guys before him, who have been shorter than him--he just got lucky with a huge wind.

And you know how I feel about maximal wind readings--there is a decent chance that it was more than +2.0

I can't believe anyone could question the fact that the longer a "fast" stide is the better. Simply common sense.

Nobody is talking about a slow tall guy here. If everything else is equal the guy with the longer stride will win any sprint.

Xyamaca wrote:

Have you no logic? wrote:

And I heard that the giraffe is the world's fastest land animal, the wandering albatross is the world's fastest flyer and the blue whale is the world's fastest swimmer.

At least I have enough logic to keep my point within the human species. Congrats on the logic of comparing apples to oranges to grapes. You made perfect sense.

Actually, your post was completely logic free.

Unless you are going to tell me that a 700 foot tall man would be a great sprinter (better than a 400 foot man who is better than a 100 foot tall man who is better than a 10 foot tall man...) everything that you said, and even everything that you have ever thought, is completely illogical.

My condolences to you having to live an entire lifetime trapped within an impenetrable fortress of sheer stupidity.

OK you got me. I give in.

Were you champion of debating class of something? I just cannot flaw your argumentation.

But please elaborate on my mental state while we are arguing biomechanics and physics?

Whaaat: "Bolt's height isn't an advantage until he hits roughly 50m, which is why he's the come-from-behind king."

Really? So what is his advantage in the first 50m, where he is clearly the best in history, and over each individual segment of the 100m, where for instance in 2009 he destroyed every other sprinter on the track, who were both doped and ran excellent races?

Plus, HOW MANY TIMES DO FRANCIS, JOHNSON, AND OTHERS HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT THE ROIDS GAVE JOHNSON THE ADVANTAGE IN THE SECOND 50M, NOT IN THE FIRST 50M?

Keep throwing more shxt at that wall.

It's great to see you going down in flames on this thread.

kanny--

Regarding Lemaitre and other fast white sprinters, you are right, that Lemaitre has been a bit faster. I should have said "essentially no faster", which is what I meant.

That list on adriansprints is laughable, though. First of all, Asians are not "white", so you can forget about the Japanese.

Second, even if they were white, the list fails to include Su at 10.06 (+0.1), and also Zhang.

Third, Patrick Johnson is not "white".

Nor is Troy Douglas, who is full-on black.

So we are left with the guys on the list, plus Osovnikar at 10.14 (+1.3) at 5'10", Kuc at 10.15 (+1.2) at 5'9", Macrozonaris at 9.91 (+3.7) which adjusts to 10.07 and which would have been 9.97 with a max wind like Lemaitre had, at 6'.

Kovacs went 10.09 (+0.3), and Nemeth 10.08 (+1.0), both just behind, and neither of them were tall, IIRC. Maybe 5'9" or 5'10".

You can forget about Mennea, he was doped up on HGH.

Collio is fast at 5'11", Borzov was around 6'

So we have a whole bunch of guys at 5'9" and 5'10", then the field tapers to 5'11", 6', and 6'3".

Lemaitre is the fastest, but not by much, which makes sense considering the distribution that is expected. In fact Shirvington was just as fast as Lemaitre, and Macro was only about .05 behind.

Compare that to how Bolt rates against the other fastest-ever black guys...the next closest guys have all been doped, and even at that, the next-closest is .11 slower, and there is nobody, but nobody, as fast, even massively doped.

Now the next-closest white guys could have been doped, too, but the difference is still much greater, by a factor of more than 2x...and Bolt has no Shirvington equivalent at 9.58, let alone a Macrozonaris equivalent at 9.63

So, even if Lemaitre's 100m time were attributable entirely to his height, it has afforded him NO advantage over Shirvington and only .05 over Macro. It would be as if Bolt went 9.86 like Obikwelu.

And if that weren't enough, you are slicing the baloney too thinly, comparing only within race. There's no good basis for that limitation. It would then be easy enough to point to Asians, the fastest of whom have all been short by Bolt standards.

And all this assumes that Lemaitre has been clean, which is one of the first assumptions that the Bolt apologists reach for, unless it suits their purpose to ignore the possibility, as here. They can't have it both ways.

No, discussing Lemaitre does not help the apologists' case, at all--all it says is that Bolt should be running 9.86 like Obikwelu or 9.85 or 9.84 like those slightly shorter than him, as Lemaitre does to a slightly shorter Shirvington.

In fact, it hurts their case rather than helping it.

Thank-you for bringing that up.

Sprintgeezer wrote:

Whaaat: "Bolt's height isn't an advantage until he hits roughly 50m, which is why he's the come-from-behind king."

Really? So what is his advantage in the first 50m, where he is clearly the best in history, and over each individual segment of the 100m, where for instance in 2009 he destroyed every other sprinter on the track, who were both doped and ran excellent races?

Plus, HOW MANY TIMES DO FRANCIS, JOHNSON, AND OTHERS HAVE TO TELL YOU THAT THE ROIDS GAVE JOHNSON THE ADVANTAGE IN THE SECOND 50M, NOT IN THE FIRST 50M?

Keep throwing more shxt at that wall.

It's great to see you going down in flames on this thread.

Go watch his last 100m, then come back and tell me what happened. All you've done is prove me right, in case you havne't been reading your thread. Most agree that he has used his height to a huge advantage.

Stone: "If everything else is equal the guy with the longer stride will win any sprint."

But, of course, everything is NOT equal, which is why Shaq, Bol, Ming, Sun, or anybody else over 7', are not good sprinters, even if they were to have good vmax, which, BTW, they don't.

Sprintgeezer wrote:

Stone: "If everything else is equal the guy with the longer stride will win any sprint."

But, of course, everything is NOT equal, which is why Shaq, Bol, Ming, Sun, or anybody else over 7', are not good sprinters, even if they were to have good vmax, which, BTW, they don't.

None of the people you've mentioned have been sprinting since elementary school. Instead, they all ended up playing basketball. Why? Slow down and take a deep breath, the answer will come to you.

Do you not see the irrationality of your logic? If YOU think that Bolt is untouchable/protected and lets say thats true, why would it matter if I or anyone else KNEW he was dirty? Outside of posting a youtube video of him being injected with some drugs or some testing officials discussing some positive tests that they covered up, it's near impossible to prove otherwise.

On top of that, I didn't say or implied that I know Bolt is dirty. So trying to once again limit the options as to who or what I am is reaching. To go as far as saying I have a vested interested is flat out stupid. I coach guys who have competed against him so if he's dirty, my interest would obviously be in favor of him and anyone else being dirty, being removed. I have zero connection to Bolt other than the fact we're both both male and human. Nor am I ambivalent.....which if you've actually read my comments would be easy to comprehend.

i think that his height WOULD give him an advantage. yes the superior stride length would kill shorter sprinters so long as he had the strength to generate the same sort of turnover.

that being said, you dont see that many fast tall sprinters because the strength needed to generate that turnover is often times too much to achieve naturally. most times, guys with long legs, while theoretically having the potential to be elite sprinters, just dont have the strength and coordination required to get a quick turnover with much longer legs. i think that in itself speaks to the dope. bolt would have been naturally elite in the 400 i think, where form is less important than just pure athleticism (as i think was mentioned on another thread today) but he dropped down in distance and needed help getting the strength to move his legs.

id be interested to know some of his measurables as far what he could squat, dead lift, broad jump, vertical jump, etc.

I'm going to be fair to the poster "deacon".

He is somebody who posts regularly on the sprint forum "sprintzone", on which I have never posted. I have registered a name there and do occasionally read that board, but I have been too heavily invested in posting here on letsrun to bother with it. I do not "steal" material from that board, with the single rare exception of a video link that I haven't yet been able to find myself.

That forum has an interesting mix of sprint posters--some are excellent on some issues, and some are absolute nutjobs on all issues.

Deacon seems to be somewhere in-between. He is clearly a Jamaican fanboy, as he constantly supports and apologizes for Jamaican athletes, especially it seems in the case of Powell's historic championship under-performance.

On this issue, Deacon is flagging. He says that "Being tall has always been an advantage in sprinting and always will be.", with no good evidence to back that up, and no good definition of what constitutes "tall".

He maintains that the idea that there "has" to be some trade-off is false, and that there just haven't been enough "tall" guys trained to sprint, to prove his point.

I call b.s.

First, athletes, especially in Jamaica, get into sprinting early, before they achieve adult height. Taller kids tend to do better than shorter kids, even in the 100m. The taller athletes are not selected out, or "trained to be slow". Likewise in the US, tall guys who train athletically for things like basketball and football do a lot of significant training that is conducive to sprint speed, especially to a quick first few steps of acceleration. Especially if they are good enough to continue to college, they represent trained power athletes, with particular skills on top.

Nobody expects these athletes to run 9.58, but if height really were intrinsically an advantage in the overall 100m or 200m, it would be reasonable to expect them to compete favorably with shorter guys who are perhaps more highly or specifically trained in the sprints.

But do they? No. Why not? Because they don't try, or aren't encouraged to? You have a lot of NFL guys, especially, who run their mouths about how fast they are at sprinting, but they never deliver, with a few exceptions like Moss--and even Moss was only OK, with the "gurus" at sprintzone figuring that he probably would have gone 10.3, or at his best in a speculative context, 10.1

Which is a half-second slower than Bolt.

In US high school and college, many of the football positions train sprints, for that all-important 40. You have lots of footballers in the ranks of the NCAA t&f teams, but the number of "tall" guys is very low. Are they actively dissuaded from running track? I have never seen it, and I have seen the opposite.

In thinking about whether there "has to be" a tradeoff, the question of human scalability must be considered--but it is scalability not simply in the biologic organism, but in relation to the particular requirements of the activity undertaken--in this case the 100m, with all of its different requirements and phases.

Now let's say you took Gay and made an exactly physically scaled Gay 1.5, who was 1.5 greater in every physical dimension than the Gay 1.0--would that Gay end up 1.5x better in the 100m? I cannot say that I know the answer to this, because nobody knows. We know that some things scale linearly, and that some do not. The overall effect in terms of a 100m time, we do not know.

Now, getting to his point about merely "height", he does not appear to be arguing for scaling in all dimensions, only in that of height...but implicit in his statement is that leg length, at least, is scaled. So it is leg length that we are talking about now.

I don't know what Bolt's inseam is, and what the inseam of other top 100m guys is, and even so, again, whether that scales in some way, not necessarily linearly, to 100m performance. Because nobody knows how the scaling works, it is just as easy to presume that maximum advantage is gained around say 5'11", as it is to say that maximum advantage is gained around 6'6" or greater.

The thing with the 100m is that it is a hybrid event, unlike say the 50m, during which, in elite competition, there is acceleration throughout. There are some requirements of the 100m that do not scale linearly, like angular momentum. I have forgotten my moment of inertia stuff, but IIRC it involves the sum of some (radius)squared products. There are good reasons why longer-limbed athletes, all other things being equal, are disadvantaged in certain aspects relevant to 100m performance.

The argument then becomes this: yes, but Bolt is NOT ONLY longer-legged, he is ALSO better than anybody else has ever been, in other respects like muscular force production--and not just in an absolute sense because he is bigger, but in an absolute sense, even more than you would expect from a linear scaling, to account for his superiority over all acceleration phases.

Because he actually has gone 9.58, 9.63, and goofed-and-negative-leaned 9.69, he IS clearly better--that is not the issue. The issue is HOW he achieved that superiority.

I assume for the sake of argument that his "form" is no more "perfect" than has been anybody else's, and that although he has shown excellent top-speed form in the past, so have other sprinters.

Is he just intrinsically superior, muscularly? Pound-for-pound, better than any other sprinter, including dopers, so that he can compensate adequately for whatever disadvantages long limb length entails? And not just a bit better, but LOTS better, considering that he is better than even dopers to 50m, and crushed Powell and Gay over every 10m segment, and every runner in the 9.58 final to 20m?

Knowing about what certain PED's can do for muscular ability, any such suggestion strains credibility. Not to mention the requirements at top speed, which also must account for angular momentum/moment of inertia.

Top speed is essentially 2 things:

1) sufficient force applied in the forward direction to accelerate you enough to compensate for the decelerating effects of drag, both from the air and between you and the track, and from any actual backwards force you might apply in contacting the track, and

2) sufficient upward force to permit your CG to first raise and then return to the same height at the time of the subsequent footfall.

It's all about force production, and the optimum distribution of that force production in the horizontal and vertical directions. Force production and application to the track are enabled by both form and physiology--and assuming Bolt doesn't have superior form to every sprinter who ever lived, he therefore has superior physiology, which again would require superior pound-for-pound muscular physiology, even over that of dopers. Impossible to believe.

Bolt doesn't have a higher vmax just because of his leg length--it is due to force production and force direction. Bolt CAN run slower, with the same stride length, by applying less force. Any of us can do it. Everyone's got an optimum.

It takes lots of training (and roids come in handy) to get a sprinter to have a nice long stride without overstriding. Lots of people chop it short, especially when fatigued. A longer advantageous stride requires more force, for any particular athlete, along with better force distribution. Once the latter is nailed, the former is what is critical.

That is why all the guys with good long strides who went 9.80-and-below were dirty...Greene, Gay...because after good form was achieved, it was all about maximal force production, and the maintenance of that maximal force production--and THAT is what roids give you.

LOOK at Bolt's (and Blake's, and MJ's) advantage in the 200m over 200m greats like Smith, Lewis, and Fredericks. He's 0.40-0.50 better than they ever were! Why? Because they needed to meter their effort in the 200m to a much greater extent than those guys, especially Bolt. That maximal force endurance, or endurance at near maximal muscular effort, is what the drugs get you. Francis and Johnson knew this well.

Is Bolt just intrinsically that much better than anybody who ever lived, including dopers, that he can more than compensate for the negative effects that he suffers? Not likely. The more likely explanation is that he himself is doped, and doped highly, at that.

Look at the guys close to him--Blake: massively doped. Johnson: massively doped. Gay: doped with steroid molecules, maybe massively. Powell: doped, who knows to what extent and with what. Just how much better is he than the closest untainted 100m time? If you believe it's Bailey or Surin, he is an incredible .26 faster. If you believe it's around 9.90, then an insane .32 faster...when it took FOREVER to lower the WR from 9.95 to 9.90, a mere .05

Not only has Bolt doped, I would say that there is no reasonable doubt that he has doped. Deacon even goes so far as to use Greene as evidence that there doesn't have to be any trade-off...the same Greene who is universally (except for maybe Deacon) viewed as having been doped.

In that sense, his comparison is very apt--no, there doesn't have to be any trade-off, if an athlete is doped.

You completely missed the point.

I'm not talking about athletes, I'm talking about world class sprinters, I assumed that was obvious.

Usain Bolt is the greatest of all time because he has a stride unlike any other 100m sprinter. That and his superior speed endurance. That combination is why he runs those alien times.

Do you really believe at 5-9 he's running 9.58?

While here.

You do realize that white sprinters are at a huge disadvantage due to a number of physical characteristics only found in western African athletes.

Stone--

I don't think I did, I think it is you who have missed the point.

Let me illustrate by asking a question: when you say "all other things being equal", exactly what things do you mean?

And yes, I absolutely acknowledge that there is something intrinsically superior about the west african gene stock when it comes to executing a 100m sprint, because the best of those athletes beat the best from other gene pools, not just at this moment, but historically among the best times, EVEN IF you filter those results, as I did, to remove the "tainted" ones.

But that is of no import to the current discussion.