A good start is worth less than a bad one costs

Reaction time gets the replays and the arguments, but the damage in a sprint is almost always done in the two steps after the gun.

Reaction time is the most over-discussed number in athletics. It appears on the broadcast graphic, it decides disqualifications, and it is worth close to nothing. The spread between the sharpest reaction in a sprint final and the dullest is a few hundredths. The spread between a clean block exit and a scrambled one is far larger, and nobody puts it on screen because there is no sensor for it.

Think about what the blocks actually are. Two angled surfaces that let you apply force backward for longer than flat ground would allow. The gain does not come from leaving quickly. It comes from leaving at a low body angle with force still pointing behind you, so that the first three or four steps accelerate rather than lift.

That is where starts go wrong. An athlete anxious about the gun pops up. The shin angle steepens, the shoulders arrive over the hips before the hips have gone anywhere, and the second step lands under the body instead of behind it. Braking. Every contact after that is spent undoing the previous one.

My argument is that most start coaching aims at the wrong error. Sessions get built around gun response, cue words, twitchiness. Meanwhile the fault that actually costs metres is postural and it happens after the athlete has already moved, when nobody is filming any more because the interesting bit supposedly already happened.

There is a fair objection. In a final where four athletes finish within a hundredth, hundredths are exactly what matter, so why dismiss reaction? Because reaction time is largely fixed by the individual and barely trainable, while block exit is a skill that responds to repetition inside a single season. Spend the coaching hours where the returns are.

The false start rule sharpens the point. One twitch and you are gone, so athletes hedge. They sit fractionally passive in the set position, waiting rather than loading, and a passive set position guarantees a poor first push regardless of how fast the ear works. The rule did not just police cheating. It changed technique, and I am not convinced anyone intended that.

Watch the next race with the crowd shot ignored and your eyes on the hips. The athlete whose hips travel forward and stay low for four contacts has won the start. The graphic may say somebody else did.