Fast small children are not the same thing as fast young athletes

Under-13 sprint results reward high turnover and short levers, which is why so many selected children stop improving at fifteen.

Go to a district under-thirteen sprint final and look at who wins. Very often it is a small child with a busy, scuttling action and a step rate that would look absurd on an adult. Over sixty metres that action is quick, because the levers are short and short levers cycle fast, and the race is over before anything that resembles top speed has been reached.

Two years later that child is invisible.

This is not a tragedy of effort or a failure of coaching. It is arithmetic and biology. Prepubertal children run mostly on frequency because they cannot produce much force relative to their body mass, and they have very little to lift anyway. Sixty metres is almost entirely an acceleration event, and acceleration at that age favours the child who is coordinated and light. Then growth arrives, limbs lengthen faster than the strength to control them, and the athletes who were being beaten start winning because they can now put force into the ground for longer.

The selection systems do not wait for that. Squads, funding and attention are handed out on results at exactly the age when results measure maturity as much as talent, and the child who developed early gets the coaching hours while the one who will actually be fast at nineteen gets told they are not a sprinter.

What would I do instead. Watch the shape rather than the clock. A young athlete who is losing a race while running tall, with a knee that comes through in front and an ankle that does not collapse, is showing me something that will still be there in five years. A child winning by taking eight small steps where others take six is showing me a temporary advantage. Both deserve coaching. Only one deserves the assumption that the current gap will hold.

I would also stop treating stride frequency as a compliment at that age. It is often a report on how little the child weighs.

There is a counterargument worth taking seriously, which is that early winners get confidence and confidence keeps children in the sport, and dropout is the sport's real enemy. Fine. Then find another way to keep the others.

Because the one thing that will not keep them is being told at thirteen that they are slow, by a stopwatch that was measuring their birthday.