Is there any 'question' about the typical performance of top decathletes (I know - not all, i.e., Bruce J) in the 1500 meters. Seems many competitions are decided before its run or a close competition is decided (lost) by a 'slow' guy.
I am a biased distance guy but a decathlon fan as well. This became, once again, a deal for me when BC ran it in a time surpassed by 2 of my HS sophmore daughters. He was (and he''s not been the only one) = "greatest athlete in the world."
Not tryin to flame, just wondering if others have a take. I have had similar conversations in past.
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Decathlon 1500 meters?
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Decathlon 1500 meters?
Re: Decathlon 1500 meters?
They run as fast as they need to? Which does not always mean as fast as they can.
Decath
I'm ignorant of the scoring table details per event. Would a high school sophomore performance in the discus, say, penalize one more (earn far fewer points) a similar performance in 1500? Clay did win many events or finish in top 3; so his lead obviously was very large for him to jog in to victory.
Re: Decath
You needn't be. They're available on the web. http://www.iaaf.org/mm/Document/Competi ... CE_744.pdf
Re: Decathlon 1500 meters?
Your daughters don't have to do the other 9 events first. Your daughters don't have to train for 9 other events. Your daughters do not have to carry a lot of muscle weight. Your daughters probably ARE wired for distance running. Bryan Clay is not by any stretch of the imagination a distance runner. He is a sprinter/jumper who is strong enough to do well in the throws, but the 1500 just has to do with what's left over. If he trained for a month just on the 1500 and ran it fresh, he could probably get down to 4:30, which is smoking fast for a fast-twitch anerobic kinda guy.
Note: This is not a criticism, just an observation:
Being disappointed in Clay's 1500 is equivalent to those who were disappointed in Bolt's last 25m of the 100, saying he didn't run as hard as he could. Or, compare it to Hellebaut in the WHJ. Once Vlasic missed on her last jump, Hellebaut could have taken three more jumps at the next height. She didn't. Should we complain? Or, compare it to Wanjiru's final 400m in the men's marathon. If he hadn't raised his arms so much, and had got up on his toes and sprinted, he could have run several seconds faster! Should we be disappointed? The 1500 of the decathlon is quite similar to the last stretch of a marathon. In both cases, unless the competition is close or an important record is at stake, there is every reason to ease up and celebrate. The goal is to win. If that is certain, they can finish any way they please. They have already proven they are the best.
he's not likely to crack 9000 let alone the wr if he doesn't push his 1500
obviously this wasn't the place to do it - win only however, next year ( or after ) at gotzis, he'll have to push it
Has any decathlete ever come from behind after nine events to win by running a blazing 1500m in a major meet ?
good question or has a (big)decath. been decided by1500 mark one way or the other (bllazing or otherwise)?
Bruce Jenner: "Training for the 10 track-and-field events of the decathlon was an eight-hour-a-day, seven-day-a-week job. "To train to that level, you have to be so obsessed with what you are doing. In the off-season, I would run 70-mile weeks. I did an enormous amount of lifting and an enormous amount of technical work," he says. His work paid off, and Bruce captured the hearts of the nation by winning the gold medal in 1976. "I'm very proud of that moment. I worked very, very hard and did an enormous amount of training for it and went to the big show and performed my absolute best,"
I think Jenner ran 4:12pr and maybe 4:16 in 76 Oly??? and are these correct? ...Russ Hodge, 6'3" 225. 10.3, 25'2" 61'!!,47.6 and 4:11.0 in the 1,500. Saw him compete numerous times - what a talent
Joe Detmer ran 4:04 to come in second in the NCAAs a couple of years ago and said that he might have gone sub-4 if he had not gone out so slowly. That is pretty good for a guy that was not even on athletic scholarship (until the last year or so) but was an Academic All-American in Engineering.
That's not just pretty good IMO, that's unreal. Could have gone sub-4 for a decathlete? I've honestly never heard of such a thing. Fastest decathlon 1500m ever in the Olympic Games? I'm sure someone out there knows it or can find it a lot faster than I can...
Rob Baker ran 3:58 to qualify for the '80 trials. (He had a 160+ Discus. )Sometimes the performance in the 1500 is not always about finishing 1st but often about meeting a goal.
I think its been discussed here before, but I think they need to set up the deca 1500 as a "chase". Give the each guy a head-start over the guy behind him in the points (the leader after 9 events would start first) equivalent to the points needed to pass them. That way the first guy crossing the finish line will always be the overall winner and everyone else will finish the race in order of their overall deca placings. I know that the argument against this is its a disadvantage to the guy(s) out front, but I think the benefit to the overall deca event far outweighs that. To give you some perspective, Clay would have been given almost a full lap head start in Beijing before the 2nd place guy got to begin.
Last edited by Grasshopper on Sun Aug 31, 2008 10:47 pm, edited 1 time in total.
I like the idea but hadn't heard it before. Works great in XC skiing to use a pursuit so that you know who the true "leader" is at any given time... With the exactness of times and points, I'm assuming you'd have to plug it into a computer that would manually start the race? (4:14.75 to 4:10.35 for example would be hard to get exact otherwise and although it rarely would come down to tenths, you wouldn' want it to be inaccurate)
Re: Decathlon 1500 meters?
Bryan Clay is not by any stretch of the imagination a distance runner. He is a sprinter/jumper who is strong enough to do well in the throws, but the 1500 just has to do with what's left over. If he trained for a month just on the 1500 and ran it fresh, he could probably get down to 4:30, which is smoking fast for a fast-twitch anerobic kinda guy.[/quote]
Most of this is all true, but I find the argument of "smoking fast" a little exaggerated. Getting down to 4:30-speed would require an aerobic capacity of 55-60 mlO2/kg/min which would still be low for sub-national 200-800 meter runners or on the level of heavy icehockey players. High levels of aerobic fitness can be achieved either by peripheral muscular adaptation, training central heart and bloodcirculation or both. 1500m loads the central circulation. Most decathletes have to "get their miles" in warmups, cooldowns and sideproducts of large amounts of specific training for the technical events and fear of injury or getting slow by lactic training keeps them from doing aerobic intervals or focusing on running techniques fitting their heavies bodies at slower speeds. I´m sure that most of those guys could get down to times of 4.05-4.15. Actually there was some french guy ten years ago, who ran a fresh 1500m sub-4 minutes and could do sub 4.10 in a decathlon? It´s a question of the worth of the effort and use of time: decathletes do not get too many point with improvements of 10-25 seconds on the 1500m. They only have that certain amount of time to put in in training. A spin-off of this discussion: why are there so few top-coaches in the multievents with over 8000 or 6000 points done as athletes? Could it be that only those with limits of learning it all know how to tell it on 
In Sydney 2000, Chris Huffins led after 9 events, only to be overtaken by Erki Nool and Roman Sebrle after the 1500.
not quite an answer to your question, but sebrle's wr was due to a blistering 1500 of ~ 4'21, which was miles better than he'd ever run before someone can do the number crunching, but i think if he'd only matched his 1500pb that day instead of crushing it, he'd have gone "only" about 8975 & shy of wr
When I got back to work after the OG a sports-savvy friend (not a track nut) says "I've got no respect for Clay, dogging that 1500 the way he did". The memory of Jenner remains strong for many of my buddy's kind.
'He said' here is something that I heard him say in response to the question about going faster. It would be interesting to get his splits and see if he was right. Remember that he ran 2:29.1 or so to move up to 4th in the NCAA indoors and that was the fastest Hept 1000m ever.
Good idea and it would make it more exciting, but it would be complex to implement so it won't happen in our lifetime. Everybody has to run the same distance, so they can't control it by starting everybody from a different spot on the track. So the problem arises with how to differ each individual athlete's start down to the tenth of a second (or whatever is the minimum to produce a points difference). They'd have to do something like give everybody a special watch, synchronized wirelessly to the official clock, and programmed individually with a time differential according to each athlete's points standing. The watch for each athlete would count down from the time difference assigned to him, then it would light up when it reaches zero and then the athlete can run off. Video analysis would be required to determine false starts. Alternatively, they could have a big screen that highlights your name or number when you are eligible to move off. But that would require every major decathlon-hosting stadium to have such a screen, and the screen would have to be positioned for good visibility from the starting line of the 1500m.
An interesting aspect of the original issue is the power necessary for a
particular runner to run a particular time. I am unsure how this would be best estimated, but a first starting point could be to assume that total energy expenditure during a race is proportional to the runner's mass, which gives us P = K x m/t. We would have, for El G, Bryan Clay, and Niklas Wiberg (one of the better decathletes in the 1500m): El G: K x 58 kg / (206 s) ~ 0.28K kg/s BC: K x 84 kg / (279 s) ~ 0.30K kg/s NW: K x 84 kg / (256 s) ~ 0.33K kg/s (Data according to IAAF. Note that the weight need not have applied at the time of the run.) In this first approximation, decathletes run at a higher power than world class specialists in the 1500m---and for a longer time. An analogy would be a van and a sports car with the identical motors: They are equally good when looking at things like horse powers, but the sports car is faster on account of its lower weight. Note that at this distance, the main limiting factor should be endurance, not muscle strength (where the decathletes are be obviously ahead). The tentative conclusion would be that decathletes do have world class endurance. Does anyone have a better estimate of power? I find the results above a little too good, but I lack the knowledge of energy/momentum loss in humans to quickly find a better estimate. My mechanics classes usually dealt with losses due to friction and air resistance in sliding or rolling motions---the mechanisms are obviously slightly different for runners (or the bicycle would never have caught on). Then again, this may just be the result of greater natural size of lungs and heart in the typically taller decathletes.
This is exactly what the Modern Pentathlon does with the final event. The highest-scoring runner takes off, then other go as the time differential makes up the point differential. As I recall, they altered the scoring about 30 years ago so that they could finish the event this way. They might only have the even timed to the second, but it still does not make too much difference. You might have the runners that are more than 1000 points behind all start together, however.
I have talked to several knowlegable Trackies that agree. I think I do also to a certain degree. 5 additional minutes of stress/pain/exhaustion, call it what you will, was what he should have done. He won with a whimper when it was not necessary that he do so. Having said that he's a fabulous athlete and my hat if off to him.
The current decathlon tables are non-linear, though. That would have to change if the idea is to ever be implemented.
And I'm not sure it's a great idea, anyway. It's just one final event out of ten, and the order doesn't change all that much. And most athletes would start more than one lap behind the leader, which would make the whole race confusing to follow.
Plus it is a bad idea anyway. IT'S NOT TRACK as we know and love it. You want handicap races, go to summer all-comers meets. In real Track, you start even, you finish uneven. Simple.
i've never ever got very far with these sort of questions what i tried in past wasn't very satisfactory, but it's all i got assuming the runner is running steady pace for those 1500s ( hicham at constant 7.28m/s for 3'26 ), you are in equilibrium & ignoring air-resistance, you are limited by friction only thus energy expended in running 1500m is Frictional force * distance = coefficient friction * m * g * 1500 Power = above/t Power/wt ratio = above/( m* t ) = coefficient friction * g * 1500/ t which ignoring constants means it's simply proportional to 1/t or the "speed" mass cancels out & it comes down to simply how fast you run as measure of your power/wt ratio
I actually like the idea of a staggered 1500 start. Steve, the difference here is that the 1500 is the LAST event, not the first. This adjustment would make the first 9 events like the first 8500m of a 10k, with the runners then starting the 1500 in the "right" order and position.
Or turn your argument around: In track, the runner who finishes first wins. Staggering the start of the Dec 1500 would make that happen. And, really, the technical hurdles are not difficult at all. Start the official clock when the leader starts. Line the athletes up in point order. Program a laptop to emit a starting bang at the right intervals. Subtract the athlete's starting time from his clock time to get his official time. No decathlete worth his salt will false start, but have an official at the starting line who can call false starts, and add 1 second to the official time of any athlete who false starts. Simple. When we desperately need to make the sport more attractive to spectators, this is one simple, easy to implement adjustment that would help. Finally, this adjustment would give a strong visual picture of how well the leader did in the first 9 events, when people see how far ahead he starts. This should help them appreciate him all the more, when the only event they see him compete in is the 1500 - for Clay, his worst.
Completely agree, DecFan. And while I understand the criticisms of Clay, I just can't agree with those. What if he went out hard and hit the wall and then lost the gold? The WR was out of reach for him at that point and so he did what he had to to secure gold. I have no idea how close to his "hardest" he ran (does anyone?) but he won the gold and deserved it.
The non-linear tables complicate the issue, but a change in the scoring tables would not be desirable. For this to work perfectly, the officials have to predict accurately the finishing time of the winner. Otherwise the finish order on the track is approximate, not exact. There would still be a very brief delay - equivalent of a close 100, waiting for the photo to be read - before official results are available. How much of a distortion is likely because of the the non-linear tables? Predicting the winner's finish time can normally be done within 10 or 15 seconds based on past times. Let's say the officials predict the winner will run 4:35. The second place athlete is 169 points behind; if the leader runs 4:35, he would have to run 4:10 to catch him, so he starts 25 seconds behind. But the leader tires, and only runs 4:50. If they tie at the end, with the 2nd place athlete having run 4:25, they would have scored 778 and 619 - only a 159 point differential, so the 9-event leader would still win. The runner coming from behind would have to finish about 1.5 seconds ahead in this case to actually win the decathlon. For the great majority of cases, the finish order on the track will be the finish order in the competition. If the leader runs at his anticipated time, the order will be exact. If he runs faster, the point differential per second will be a bit higher; if he runs slower, the point differential per second will be a bit lower. In both cases, if athletes finish within a couple of seconds of each other, there will be a brief delay before official rank order is known. Personally, I think the advantages of this system greatly outweigh the disadvantages.
Jenner = 4:12.xx in 1976 Oly. It would be interesting (I think) to have side by side by side etc comparisons of Olympic and perhaps selected decath performances. Jenner states that he ran 70 miles per (some?) weeks - far more than most decath guys. Per Hammy - most uninformed/undereducated to the sport were 'spoiled' by Jenner
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