We overcoach the sprint start and undercoach the part that wins

Blocks are photogenic and easy to drill, and top speed mechanics decide far more of a hundred metres than the first two steps do.

Everybody films the start. Cameras sit low at the blocks, the reaction time appears on screen within seconds, and a whole coaching vocabulary has grown up around shin angles and the first push. It is the most heavily analysed two seconds in athletics.

It is also, in a hundred metres, not where the race is decided most of the time.

The block clearance and the drive phase set an athlete up, no argument. But the race is won and lost in the maximum velocity phase, somewhere from forty metres to seventy, and that phase runs on a different mechanism entirely. At top speed the limiting factor is not how hard you can push backwards. It is how much force you can put into the ground vertically during a contact of well under a tenth of a second, without your hip collapsing and without your foot spending an extra instant on the track.

That is a stiffness problem and a timing problem, and it responds to different training than the start does. Heavy sled work and block starts build the drive phase. They do very little for the ability to strike the ground hard and leave quickly at eleven metres per second, which comes from sprinting fast, which is uncomfortable to programme because it is the exact thing that pulls hamstrings.

So you get a predictable pattern. Squads full of athletes with excellent starts who get caught between fifty and eighty metres, and coaches who respond by working on the start some more, because that is the part they can safely drill on a Tuesday in February.

The honest counterargument is that in a championship semi final, a bad start against a strong field is unrecoverable, and reaction plus clearance are the only components an athlete can reliably control under pressure. That is true and it explains the emphasis.

But watch a race back and count where the gaps open. They open late, on the athletes whose contact time drifts up as they tire, which is a top speed durability question that nobody puts on a graphic.

The blocks make good television. They rarely make the difference.