Block settings are copied, not calculated

Most sprinters inherited their pedal spacing from a training partner and have never tested whether it suits their own limbs.

Ask a sprinter why his front pedal sits where it does and you will usually get one of three answers. It is where his coach put it when he was sixteen. It is what a training partner uses. It feels right. Those are all defensible in a rough way and none of them is a measurement, which is odd for a discipline that will pay for a laser timing gate without blinking.

The settings that matter are the distance of the front pedal from the line, the gap between the pedals, and the angles of both faces. They interact. Move the front pedal back and you raise the hips at the set position, which shortens the path over which you can push and steepens your exit. Widen the gap and you get more time on the front leg but risk the rear leg contributing nothing, which for most athletes is a waste of a limb that could have supplied a genuine share of the initial force.

There is no universal answer because the relevant inputs are individual. Shin and thigh length change the geometry. Ankle stiffness changes how much a steep pedal face can be used. An athlete with excellent hip extension strength can tolerate a lower start that would leave a weaker athlete stuck and scrambling. So the correct setting is the one that produces the best measured outcome for that person, and the outcome worth measuring is not how it feels or how it looks on a still photograph. It is time to ten metres, taken repeatedly, on a day when the athlete is fresh.

That is a boring afternoon of work. Six settings, several trials each, enough recovery between them that fatigue does not contaminate the comparison, and honest arithmetic at the end. Almost nobody does it, partly because the differences are small and partly because a coach who has recommended a setting for four years does not enjoy discovering it was worth two hundredths in the wrong direction.

I would also test it more than once in a career. Blocks that suited a lean nineteen year old rarely suit the same athlete four kilograms of muscle later.

The cheapest improvement in sprinting is sitting under everyone's feet, and it is being decided by tradition.