THE TRAGEDY OF FALSE STARTS
On the Olympic start line, asks Matt Scace, how much does reaction time matter in sending athletes off to disqualification?
In his first 100-metre race in Tokyo, Andre De Grasse watched two competitors false-start before he could win the heat. In his semifinal, another. In the final, one more for consistency before he flew across the finish line for bronze.
By the end of his 100-metre campaign, De Grasse saw three athletes fail to race — all because of a costly flinch.
Coming off the starting blocks quickly is an ability that requires strict biomechanics and powerful first steps. But the moment before, when the brain tells the legs to fire? In the grand scheme of a 100m or 200m race, what matters more to athletes is leaving the start line without putting a “DQ” next to their name, says Jason Kerr, head coach of Guelph University's track-and-field program.
“You're on the edge of the world,” the former national level sprinter says.
World Athletics, the governing body that sets the rules for the Olympics and world championship meets, has waddled on false starts over the past two decades. But after multiple strategies — the most recent adjustment charged the first false start to the field while the second axed the offender on the second failed attempt, regardless of who committed the first — these Olympics have a zero-tolerance policy if runners jet off any faster than 0.10 seconds. If they fly under, officials may give them a yellow card as a first warning.
Sprinters will practise from starting blocks at least twice a week in training, but those sessions involve getting their legs bent at their most powerful and efficient angle, aligning their shins and plunging as much force as possible into those first few steps.
“I don't think that there are a lot of coaches that are spending a lot of time or losing sleep over how to train reaction time better,” Kerr says.
Part of this lies in the science behind human reaction time. While it's still disputed, there's a lack of evidence proving humans actually can react within a tenth of a second. (The current statistics on max human reaction time lies around 0.15 to 0.3 seconds.) Even more difficult for sprinters is that the starting gun isn't a variable that can be controlled: The official holding the gun above the head will, after signalling the sprinters to set, wait until seeing full stillness in the field before firing.
Instead of trying to control reaction times, coaches lay focus to how athletes respond to uncontrollable barriers, the minor ones that include random noises or how long they hold the set position. The most treacherous one, however, is always on full display at the Olympics: stress.
“What we do is we get them to try and clear their mind. And then whatever that noise is, that's going to trigger them to move,” says Bob Westman, a longtime Canadian track coach. He coaches Canadian Alicia Brown, who's part of the Olympic 4x400m relay team, and Canadian Paralympic sprinter Marissa Papaconstantinou, who'll be in Tokyo later this month for the Paralympics.
Westman says he wants athletes to clear their minds instead of clustering focus on when the gun's going to fire, letting it instead be an automatic trigger from brain to nerve to muscle. Westman says he'll create scenarios intended to allow his athletes to forge experience in different settings — something that's been all the more necessary at Tokyo's dead-empty stadium.
“So you just want to ... create as much circumstance around them, that will be like the real thing — just to add an element of stress to every practice,” Westman says.
Conversations over reaction time are relatively futile anyway, Kerr says.
“I don't think you're going to find a correlation between reaction time and performance outcomes,” he says. The more dominant predictors of outcome are maximum velocity, speed of acceleration and how long an athlete can sustain top speed. “Reaction time is not even predictive of a good start.”
Avoiding a false start, he adds, comes down to the basic practices that help allow for a sound mindbody connection — being rested and keeping a clear head.
When the spikes meet the track, just getting out of the starting blocks and executing years of training is what will make the difference.
“I think understanding that there is zero tolerance and imagine doing something every day for your whole adult life, and then in one instant, because you're so hypersensitive to everything ... all your dreams crumble because you just kind of twitch,” Kerr says.
“I think every human being can empathize and sympathize with that situation.”
... Imagine doing something every day for your whole adult life, and then in one instant ... all your dreams crumble because you just you just kind of twitch.