Hurdling is a stride pattern problem wearing a technique costume

Most races over the barriers are lost to the rhythm between them, not to what an athlete does while crossing one.

Coaching hours in the hurdles go overwhelmingly into what happens above the barrier. Lead leg, trail leg, the dip of the torso, the arm that balances it. All of that matters and all of it is visible, which is probably why it absorbs the attention. Meanwhile races are being lost in the flat running between the obstacles, where the athlete is either arriving right or arriving wrong and there is almost nothing in between.

The geometry is unforgiving. The barriers sit at a fixed spacing, the athlete has an agreed number of strides between them, and those strides therefore have a length dictated by the track rather than by how the athlete feels. A sprinter on the flat can lengthen naturally as he accelerates. A hurdler cannot, because lengthening means arriving too close to the next barrier, so as speed rises he has to hold the same stride length and take it faster. That is the actual demand of the event and it is a very different one from flat sprinting.

What goes wrong is usually at one end or the other. Early in the race an athlete who accelerates well finds himself cramped, chopping to fit, losing the speed he just gained. Late in the race a tiring athlete cannot hold the length and starts reaching, arriving fractionally far away, hitting the barrier or floating over it and landing badly. Both look like technical faults over the hurdle. Neither is.

This is why I think the useful measurement is touchdown time, the interval between landing after one barrier and landing after the next. A sequence of those numbers across a race tells you exactly where rhythm broke, and it separates an athlete who is slow from one who is fast and disorganised. Those two problems need completely different training and they look identical from the stand.

The corollary is that a hurdler's flat speed work should be done in the stride pattern the event demands rather than in free acceleration, at least some of the time.

Fix the arrival and the technique over the barrier usually fixes itself. It rarely works in the other direction.