You cannot rescue a bad start, only the fourth step

Sprinters lose far more time in the transition out of the drive phase than in anything the blocks ever did to them.

A sprinter comes off the track after a poor race and says the start was bad. The coach agrees, because that is what it looked like, and the next fortnight is spent on blocks. Twenty starts a session, video from three angles, pedals moved a centimetre in and out. Meanwhile the actual loss is sitting between strides four and eight, unexamined, where it has been all year.

The blocks are a small part of a hundred metres. Genuinely small.

What the blocks give you is a position and a first push, and beyond a certain level of competence the difference between a good push and an excellent one is a few hundredths at most. The transition, on the other hand, is where a sprinter converts a forward-leaning, driving action into an upright, cycling one, and that conversion happens over roughly five strides in which the body angle, the stride length and the contact time are all changing simultaneously. Getting it wrong costs a tenth without looking like anything went wrong at all.

The two failure modes are opposite and both common. Some athletes pop upright by stride three, usually because they lack the strength to hold the lean, and they arrive at top speed early and then decelerate for sixty metres. Others stay down far too long, chasing an idea of aggression, and run the middle of the race in a shape that cannot produce maximum velocity. In video, both look like starts. Neither is.

I would spend the fortnight differently. Run repeated thirty metre efforts from a standing start, no blocks at all, and film from side-on with a static wide shot. The blocks are removed because they are a variable and because they are a distraction. What you are watching for is a smooth, continuous rise in the torso, no step where the angle jumps.

Then, and only then, put the blocks back and see whether the pattern survives.

There is a fair objection: in a championship final between athletes of equal speed, hundredths at the gun do decide medals. Sometimes they do. But that is a very small population of races and most of the sprinters spending their winter on block clearance are not in it.

They are losing three tenths at forty metres and rehearsing the first four.