The new decade is almost here. 2009 was a good one for track and field in general as well as ELITETRACK. The continued dominance of Usain Bolt, Berlin World Championships, no major drug busts, and some of the best sprint performances from both the men and women that have ever been seen. We had some great discussions on the forum as well. In the second annual "Best of ELITETRACK" edition I'd lik [...]

Thanks to all members (and Usain Bolt's performances at the World Championships) for making August the biggest month on record for ELITETRACK. Every metric for monitoring the use and popularity of the site surpassed previous all-time highs from earlier in 2009. I wished I could have been a bigger contributor in the great discussions during this time but business related duties kept me away for th [...]

To continue on my recent obsession of short blogs about Usain Bolt I wanted to throw out another thought....how long can the guy be the best sprinter in the world? Right now he's arguably 10-15 years ahead of his competitors. Even if his performance falls off substantially in the next 8 years, everything we have to go on right now would indicate he would still be the best sprinter in the world... [...]

Yesterday, Usain made easy work of a class field at the Zurich Weltklasse meet. He ran a 9.81 and if not for his own stratospheric standards the time would be amazing. This speaks to the fact that the guy has pretty much changed short sprinting as we know it. His dominance is so great in fact that both he and others are speaking of adding new events to his resume. The long jump and the 400m are th [...]

Last week in Berlin, Usain obliterated his already ridiculous world records. His margin of victory was so great over otherwise fantastic sprinters that it got me to thinking that he might be so good at the 100m and 200m that he could maybe get the world record in EVERY SINGLE SPRINT EVENT without even doing specific training for them. Here's a quick review of the possibility. Indoor 50m- The curr [...]

What can you say? Obvious the time was unreal, but in many ways even more impressive was the margin of victory 0.62 seconds! I think the fact that all of his records have come in WC/OG is also very impressive. No questionable wind, against the best. I am not given to superlatives, but this guy is truly amazing. If he can maintain motivation and stay healthy the shy is the limit. It was interesting [...]

What can I possibly say or write that would do this justice. Some things to consider:Has any athlete ever been this much better than all his peers?Is it good for the sport to have someone who is so far ahead of his competitors (essentially ensuring that they have zero chance to win)?Do the outlandish performances potentially encourage more athletes to use performance enhancing drugs in hopes of be [...]

I just received a short clip of two strides from Bolts WR from Frans Bosch. It is in super slow motion, clearly no exaggerated dorsiflexion at the ankle in recovery and at foot strike. The proof is in the pudding as they say. (Do not have permission to post the video – do not know the source) Work on what matters, the "whip from the hip" as Frans Bosch calls it. [...]

Sorry I've been away for a while (more on that in upcoming posts) but I thought I'd mark my return with some detailed commentary on Usain's 9.58 world record performance yesterday: WOW. On a more serious note, I'm actually curious to know whether the performance was better than last year's run in Beijing. I'm not quite sure myself and I have yet to do a detailed analysis of the splits to see [...]

My good friend Kevin McGill got me thinking about this over the past several weeks. He is trying to find out how the “soft step” concept has become embedded in the belief system of American javelin coaches. This is one of many examples of myths that are adopted as beliefs without anyone really taking the time to research the facts. Has anyone thought to challenge this concept of “toe up” a [...]