Flojo's 10.49

mcgato wrote:

You can see the men's triple jump in the background of FloJo's record. Here are some results from it:

Willie Banks 18.20 (+5.2)

Charles Simpkins 17.92 (+5.2)

Robert Cannon 17.63 (+4.3)

Mike Conley 17.62 (+3.3)

Al Joyner 17.58 (+5.2)

Kenny Harrison 17.56 (+4.9)

Ray Kimble 17.53 (+4.8)

Ancillary marks include one with +4.9 and a number with no wind indicated.

This is the best evidence to prove that the 0.0 reading is suspicious in the 10.49. The entire TJ final was +2.0 in wind.

Here are the ancillary marks

18.06 +4.9 Willie Banks

17.62 +3.4 Willie Banks

17.61 Robert Cannon

17.56 +2.7 Al Joyner

17.55 Mike Conley

17.55 Robert Cannon

17.50 +2.5 Kenny Harrison

17.49 Kenny Harrison

17.38 +2.1 Al Joyner

17.37 Ray Kimble

17.36 Mike Conley

17.32 +4.3 Mike Conley

17.30 +2.4 Robert Cannon

17.29 Al Joyner

17.25 +2.7 Willie Banks

old coach man wrote:

This is the best evidence to prove that the 0.0 reading is suspicious in the 10.49. The entire TJ final was +2.0 in wind.

Here are the ancillary marks

18.06 +4.9 Willie Banks

17.62 +3.4 Willie Banks

17.61 Robert Cannon

17.56 +2.7 Al Joyner

17.55 Mike Conley

17.55 Robert Cannon

17.50 +2.5 Kenny Harrison

17.49 Kenny Harrison

17.38 +2.1 Al Joyner

17.37 Ray Kimble

17.36 Mike Conley

17.32 +4.3 Mike Conley

17.30 +2.4 Robert Cannon

17.29 Al Joyner

17.25 +2.7 Willie Banks

What's with the Athletes where you list no number for wind, e.g. Robert Cannon 17.61? Not available or no wind?

I read through this and somebody said dibaba was likely clean. Are you kidding?

You think Hermens is holding the good stuff only for Bekele/Geb and Bekele's former fiance?

Flo Jo's WR is as fraudulent as the ones still on the books by Ma Junren's athletes.

reading through wrote:

I read through this and somebody said dibaba was likely clean. Are you kidding?

You think Hermens is holding the good stuff only for Bekele/Geb and Bekele's former fiance?

Why would Jos Hermens have any contact with Tirunesh Dibaba?

I like how this is three years old and it was picked up like wejo asked the question this morning.

How fast should a person who runs 21.34 for 200m be able to run in the 100m whether or not they were taking drugs?

Fraggy wrote:

How fast should a person who runs 21.34 for 200m be able to run in the 100m whether or not they were taking drugs?

10.52 100m

The way she finished the 10.49, she would have had an epic 200m time right there. And don't forget that she ran 48.xx split on the 4x400m team. But her line about running marathons, which became a plot line on a show called 227, I think is to blame for today's penguin craze, because Oprah ran a marathon in 1994 and that is the typical origin of the craze, but where did Oprah get the idea? Surely from Flo Jo. What other well-known African American woman was talking about marathons other than Flo Jo in the late 1980s?

I not only saw the race, I remember seeing the splits in some academic journal somewhere.

Flojo's 10.49 is the only officially wind-legal elite 100m race ever run in which there was no increase in the splits from 50-100m, or 60-100m (I forget exactly now).

However, somebody else has the splits like this:

10.49 Indianapolis:

PierreJean has mentioned that he recorded each 10m section/segment from 40m onwards for Flo-Jo in;

40-50m: 0.92e

50-60m: 0.90e

60-70m: 0.89e

70-80m: 0.90e

80-90m: 0.90e

90-100m: 0.93e

Regardless of which is correct, as of 2009, Flojo has the best splits ever from 40-100m, as evidenced by this analysis of a hypothetical "best" women's 100m:

Women

Reaction Time (RT) Limit: 0.100s

• 0-10m: 1.78s, (Minus RT) Irina PRIVALOVA (RUS) '91

• 10-20m: 1.06s, FLO-JO (USA) '88 & Marion JONES (USA) '99

• 20-30m: 0.99s, Christine ARRON (FRA) '98 & Marion JONES (USA) '98 & '99

• 30-40m: 0.94s, Gail DEVERS (USA) '96, Marion JONES (USA) '98 & '99, & Ekaterini THANOU (GRE) '99

• 40-50m: 0.92s, FLO-JO (USA) '88

• 50-60m: 0.90s, FLO-JO (USA) '88

• 60-70m: 0.89s, FLO-JO (USA) '88

• 70-80m: 0.90s, FLO-JO (USA) '88

• 80-90m: 0.90s, FLO-JO (USA) '88

• 90-100m: 0.92s, FLO-JO (USA) '88

Total: 10.20s (10.2s)

Total + RT Limit: 10.30s (10.3s)

The splits in the hypo are all from the 10.49, except for the 0.92 from 90-100m which is, I believe, from the windy 10.54

Speaking of which, the splits in the windy 10.54 were:

These splits were obtained from "Scientific Research Project at the Games of the XXIVth Olympiad - Seoul 1988'', Bruggemann, G. and Glad, B. (eds), IAAF and Charles University, Prague (1988)".

RT: 0.131s (round-down to 0.13s), Wind: +3.0m/s.

10m: 2.00w (1.87w)

20m: 3.09w (1.09w)

30m: 4.09w (1.00w)

40m: 5.04w (0.95w)

50m: 5.97w (0.93w)

60m: 6.89w (0.92w)

70m: 7.80w (0.91w)

80m: 8.81w (0.91w)

90m: 9.62w (0.91w)

100m: 10.54w (0.92w)

A similar progression is observable in the second half of the race--the speed maintenance observed was likely made possible by the wind, as it was in the 10.49

While there is no practical doubt about the wind in the 10.49, that race also demonstrated what I consider EXCELLENT FORM THROUGHOUT THE ENTIRE RACE, in combination with a good RT and excellent fitness.

I still maintain that because of the impossible confluence of factors--fitness, technique, wind--that record will never be broken in our lifetimes, regardless of whether or not she was using.

If she was, that's just icing on the cake.

10.49 is seriously fast, not just for a girl.

Regarding FloJo's physique:

I have seen, in person, WR-holder sprint women both who were caught using, and who weren't caught, and who were likely clean. Was FloJo using anabolics? Impossible to say.

Women vary tremendously in the degree of "masculinization" they exhibit, because they vary tremendously in basic body type. Also, since their physiognomy isn't primarily based on testosterone effects, it can be altered significantly more than men's physiognomy through testosterone-elevating training.

For me, there is a number of clearly different female sprint body types:

1) long and lean--Arron, Jones, Jackson

2) disproportionately strong lower body--Thanou and VCB

3) balanced--FloJo, Jeter, Privalova, Pintusevich-Block

4) demonstrably, and clearly, doped--White and Issajenko

5) the natural--Rudolph, Ashford, Felix

There are more in each category, obviously.

IMHO, everyone has a finite amount of muscle mass that their biochemistry will allow them to support, given the proper training--the question is how that muscle mass is distributed.

If running and jumping is the focus of training, as it is in sprinting, preferential muscle development can be expected in the upper legs/butt/abs--TO THE DETRIMENT OF DEVELOPMENT ELSEWHERE.

This accounts for profile #2.

Longer sprinters in profile #1 can distribute the same muscle mass over a greater length, and therefore look slimmer than profile #2.

As Charlie Francis used to say, you sprint with your upper body, and lower body development should ideally not come at the direct expense of upper body development, but should perfectly complement it--profile #3.

The jump to profile #4 occurs when you add drugs to the lower body of profile #2, and get a huge overall body; or when you add drugs to the entire balance of profile #3 and amplify the whole thing.

Girls like FloJo and Jeter aren't big, they just look big on camera. Imagine VCB if her upper body matched her lower body, and then put that person side-by-side with somebody from profile #3, and you would see what I'm talking about.

None of this is to say that the athletes in profile #3 weren't using--they could have started off with a slight body type and used anabolics to just amplify the original physiognomy, or they could just be the products of good balanced training, and be taking some drug other than anabolics.

Some sprinters in profile #3 are/were using. It is difficult, especially for women, to simultaneously maintain high muscle mass and stay lean. When you see a girl with large muscles, she always has a good amount of fat to go along with it--nature's balance (think Serena). I've seen this many times. If they try to lose fat, their body preferentially keeps some fat at the expense of muscle, which gets metabolized to some extent.

This is why muscular women can't stop working out. They will lose the muscle before they lose all the fat--ouch. To stay lean and "toned", (profile 3) rather than muscularly dense, workouts are needed that balance fat burning with muscular force production--workouts exactly like the 400m-and-shorter workouts that FloJo did.

But when you train like that, you can't maintain the kind of muscular density of a White or an Issajenko without the use of anabolics. Period.

Of course, athletes in profile #2 could also be doped, and not have the natural potential to hypertrophy as much as they have in the lower body.

As is obvious, even athletes in profile #1 could be doped.

The only ones we can be somewhat certain about not taking anabolics are in profile #5. If they do take anabolics, they rather quickly jump to one of the other profiles--Jones to #1, Thanou to #2, Pintusevich-Block to #3, White to #4.

Was FloJo on anabolics? Maybe. They key would be in the rapidity of her progression--but it would be impossible to say definitively, given that she had the precise type of training program that would, IMHO, be the only one that could possibly produce the same types of gains naturally.

For me, she's not CLEARLY in profile #4, based on physiognomy alone--but then again, I feel the same way about Jeter, whose trajectory is for me dispositive evidence of her using.

I don't know enough about FloJo's exact trajectory to come down one way or another, but I'm sure some of you guys do.

d, what do you know?

My 2 cents.

There's an excellent article on the wind speed issue by Kevin Sully in March 2014,

"The Wind Read Zero: An oral history of Florence Griffith-Joyner’s 100-meter world record":

http://dailyrelay.com/the-wind-read-zero-an-oral-history-of-florence-griffith-joyners-100-meter-world-record/

He interviewed 12 people who were there that day,

including Peter Hürzeler (Omega Timing), who ran the wind gauge.

At the point where the gauge was placed, the wind direction was at 93 degrees to the track, and the velocity was 5.0 m/s,

so the net velocity in the race direction was 0.0 .

These measurements can all be trumped by unexpected physics or by human error. For all the anecdotes about "wind gusts" or "continuous strong winds" the rules were clear about how wind measurements were taken. The rules of measurement were followed so she gets the record (at least there's no evidence they weren't followed). It won't be removed from the books until someone runs faster under the rules. In FloJo's case there's no doubt she owns the record - it's only a question of which race to take. Then there is the PED issue. As with Lance Armstrong it will take the personal testimony of one of a Joyner or Kersee somebody else close to her to begin to overturn her records. That's unlikely. And even if that does happen there are still no positive drug tests to confirm any eyewitness testimony. And one other thing - sometimes you get a six sigma outlier that confounds the conventional wisdom.

I actually saw Flo Jo in person at the US Nationals in San Jose, CA in 1987. I was sitting in the first row on the back straightaway and Flo Jo walked by me. I could have leaned over the railing and touched her head. I was surprised how short and small and short she was. She definitely looked more muscular in 1988.

statfool, that claim about the wind direction being orthogonal to the track seems exactly right from the pictures of the flag blowing--there was a very strong cross-wind in the video. What there is no doubt about is that if pushed in a significant final, flojo could have run 10.49 wind-legal. She looks just awesome in the power of her stride throughout the second half of that 100m wr, as supported by the record split times. She doesn't celebrate like crazy because it was just a quarter-final and she hadn't seen the time. If anything she did more to look feminine at that time after having hugely bulked up. It is true that she had been more of a 200m runner, like Bolt. As far as the difference between wind-legal 10.62 and illegal 10.49, that's no huge difference and if she didn't have the other already in the bank, I'm sure she would have run it again that season. Of course, the obvious claim is that she doped, but here we are 26 years later and there is to this day not a single person that has come forward with any evidence on that, whereas the Chinese under Ma started testing positive just a few years later and the Eastern European doping programs were all exposed.

Flo-Jo's transformation from her 1984 Olympics and 1988 is dramatic. Think of Wilma Rudolph in the 1960's. Lean and smooth muscles, not ripped like a body-builder with low body fat. That's what Flo-Jo looked like in 1984.

I was in an elevator with Flo-Jo at a hotel during the 1988 Olympic Trials and I was surprised that she was not that big at all. Maybe 145 pounds but very cut.

Diet change and more dedicated weight training without steroids could explain her physical change.

The 10.49 was wind aided. The evidence is obvious when you also take in consideration the times the other runners ran in that 1988 Olympic Trials 100.

Yet that she retired right after the 1988 season at the top of her peak and could have rivaled Carl Lewis, Steve Cram, and Said Aouita in appearance income for a few more years does make you wonder. She probably gave up at least a million dollars by retiring at that point.

I didn't know Florence personally, but I have been around her several times and know people who knew her very well. A good friend of mine lived with her for a short period of time.

First, no one that knew her called her FloJo, that was a media creation.

Florence's body change didn't happen in one year, it was probably over a 2.5 year period. But, if you you saw her in '84 and then only again in '88, the change would be shocking. She was not that muscular, certainly no more muscular than some sprinters competing today. Prior to 1986, Florence looked under trained, her body looked more like H.S. cheerleader. Long before she was setting records, Florence claim to fame was eye candy; she didn't have the body of a world class athlete. Her husband, Al Joyner became her coach in 1987 and is on the record that year stating he had Florence on a serious weight lifting program.

If Florence was dirty, the people closest to her didn't know it. Florence is perhaps the only athlete that was steel being tested after death. Her family even offered her body to be exhumed for more testing. Al Joyner and people personally connected Florence have never wavered in their claim that Florence was clean.

Florence was not an intellectual or introspective type person, Florence was quiet and notwithstanding her flashy dress, she has been described as down-to-earth and uncomplicated.

With a doubt, Florence was under trained prior to hooking up with Bobby Kersee as a 'semi' pro athlete and trained even hard under Al Joyner the following year. Florence had been plagued with personal problems through high school, college and as an elite athlete. 1986 was the first year she had the money and her personal affairs in order enough to train full time.

Florence always had tremendous top end speed, but she was not explosive. Florence was an exceptionally poor starter, which is why prior to 1986, she she had the most success in the 200m. But, she also lacked the ability to maintain top end speed and would lose a lot of her 200s races in the last couple of meters. Better training would address both of those problems.

None of what I said accounts for Florence's dramatic body change and performance improvement. I am not sure if any athlete can improve by that much in close to the twilight of their career, Btw, Florence was not exactly chop liver prior to 1988, she had 10.96/21.96 PRs. For comparison, in 2007, SAFP had a 100m PR of 11.31, in 2008, the next year she ran 10.78 and won the Olympic gold medal. Melaine Walker, Usain Bolt and several other Jamaicans made similar improvements to Florence in one year.

And with out a doubt Florence's 10.49 was wind aided, unless you believe it's possible for every athlete in a race to set a PR.

Darrell Robinson (44.69 in HS) claimed that Bob Kersee gave him steroids and advised him on their use, Robinson also claims to have sold FloJo HGH in march of 1988, make of it what you will.

Average_Joe wrote:

Former 5k Guy wrote:

Then FloJo dies a few years later via natural causes at a very young age.

.

It is funny how falsehoods like this simply will not die no matter how many times they are corrected.

Florence Griffith Joyner died from asphyxiation caused by an epileptic seizure. That was the coroner's report. That is not "natural causes". She had epilepsy. It killed her. The end.

Really if you want to tell us how you think Flojo was dirty, be my guest. I do not care enough to try to spoil anyone's fun. But if you are going speculate about it, please to not continue to perpetuate myths.

Yes and if you believe that, I've got a bridge to sell you.