Page 75 - My FlipBook 1

“It just happened that one of them took place in
my event during the time that I was away.”
A handful of coaches had started using high-
speed video and analytic measurements to help
fine-tune race techniques. “It was a paradigm shift
in sprinting,” says Ralph Mann, the former hurdler
and Olympic silver medalist hired by USA Track &
Field to teach the methodology. In 2003, Michael
Lewis published Moneyball, which explored the
use of nontraditional statistics in Major League
Baseball to gauge player value. “That showed us
that there were ways to find a little bit of difference
that actually made a big difference,” Mann says.
As made clear by video analysis, a sprinter opti-
mizes propulsion not by pushing off the back foot
but by anchoring the front foot and pulling the body
forward. A foot in front of one’s body, Mann notes,
generates a force that can be “three, four times your
bodyweight. That’s about 25 percent more than
when your foot is behind. If we ran at the same level
but you pushed from the back and I attacked the
ground from the front, I’d beat you every time.”
Mitchell embraced the methodology. An Olym-
pic medalist, he was banned from the sport from
1998 to 2000 for failing a urine test. Unlike many
elite coaches, he wasn’t an educator, nor did he
have a science background. “But he accepted that
science could help him,” Mann says.
Mitchell taught Gatlin about “air time,” and
“ground-contact time,” and how to sense the best
angle at which to land his foot on the track. Gatlin
was a willing pupil. “He feels things better than any
athlete I’ve worked with,” Mann says. “As a sprinter,
Justin is the perfect example of an artist. That’s his
great advantage. With something like this, it helps
to be more of an artist than a technician.”
Day after day, Mitchell and Gatlin would remain
at the track long after everyone else had left. “It
was like The Karate Kid,” Gatlin says. “Dennis would
put me in the blocks, and I’d take a couple of steps
out. And he’d say, ‘No, wrong, do it again.’ I’d try
again and he’d say, ‘No, wrong, do it again.’ And we
would do it again and again until I’d get it right.”
With Florida under quarantine and group practices on hiatus, Justin Gatlin has Before long, Gatlin was running as fast as he’d
been training on his own, in the suburbs outside Orlando. ever run. In 2015, he set his personal best time in
The Olympic sprinter, thirty-eight, still hopes to compete at the Summer Games in Tokyo,
which have been postponed due to the coronavirus pandemic. the 100: 9.74 seconds. That he was thirty-three con-
tradicted the common assumptions about the rela-
tionship between age and speed. Many in the track
world remained suspicious. It didn’t help that
one point, he stood up from his goat stew to At a meet in Doha in 2006, his reported time was Mitchell would be caught up in a scandal involv-
demonstrate how he’d learned to run. The place 9.76, one hundredth of a second faster than the ing an agent who offered to procure testosterone
was closing, so only a few diners were around to existing record. Then the IAAF, track and field’s and HGH for Daily Telegraph reporters posing as
see him positioned between the Formica tables. international governing body, announced that his movie producers. (An investigation would later
“If you watch old videos, from 2004, 2005, I used time to the thousandth place had been 9.766, which find that Mitchell and Gatlin were not involved.)
to run like this,” he said. He lifted one knee above rounded up. Instead of breaking the record, Gat- Mitchell was still his coach when Gatlin com-
his waistline, then kicked his foot forward, as if he lin had to share it. peted at the 2017 Worlds, in London. It was Usain
were trying to toe-tap the adjacent table. “Doesn’t By the time he returned to competition, the dis- Bolt’s last competitive race. The retiring champion
look bad, right? But every time I stepped that far, tinction was irrelevant. Usain Bolt, five days before had never failed a drug test, and the crowd cast
I had to wait for my center of mass to cross my body his twenty-third birthday, had run 9.58. And it Gatlin as his foil. “Everyone there, Usain included,
to get to the next step,” he said. “Time wasted!” wasn’t only Bolt. As many as five sprinters were wanted a fairy-tale ending,” Gatlin said. “Being per-
Still, with that approach, Gatlin held the world regularly running as fast as Gatlin ever had. “There ceived as a villain gave me energy.”
record for 100 meters—though for less than a week. are always these revolutions in sports,” Gatlin said. The sprint ended in (continued on page 94)

75 SUMMER 2020