A long jump is won on the step before the board

The takeoff gets the camera and the roar, and the jump was already mostly determined one stride earlier.

The board gets all the attention. Red line, white plasticine, a judge with a flag, and a jump that either counts or does not. Meanwhile the stride before it, the one nobody names, has already done most of the work.

On the penultimate step a good jumper lowers his centre of mass. The hip drops slightly, the leg reaches a fraction further, and the body sinks. It looks almost like a stumble in slow motion. What it does is set up a longer path over which the takeoff leg can push, and it converts a small amount of horizontal speed into the vertical component the jump needs. Without it a jumper arrives at the board flat and fast, which produces a long low flight that lands early.

Get it wrong the other way and you sink too much, kill your speed, and jump high off a slow approach. Both errors are common and both look identical from the stands, where all anyone can see is that the jump did not go far.

This is why I distrust the fixation on approach speed as a predictor. Speed matters, obviously, and a jumper who cannot run will not jump. But past a certain point extra speed is only useful if the penultimate step can absorb and redirect it, and that absorption is a strength and timing question rather than a sprinting one. There are jumpers running fast enough to be finalists who cannot use what they have.

The fouling problem sits on top of all this. A jumper adjusting his stride pattern in the last few metres to hit the board is by definition disturbing the very step that determines the jump. Which means the athletes who foul rarely are not just accurate. They are protecting the mechanism.

There is a case, made periodically and shouted down every time, for replacing the board with a takeoff zone and measuring from the actual foot position. It would remove the accuracy penalty and let jumpers run properly.

The traditionalists will not have it. So we keep watching the best in the world lose finals to a centimetre of plasticine, having already jumped the thing correctly.