Nobody wins a race in two steps but plenty lose it there

The start cannot buy a sprint outright, yet a poor one puts a ceiling on everything that follows.

Clearing the blocks is oversold and undertrained at the same time, which is a strange thing to be true of anything.

Oversold, because a sprinter with a brilliant reaction and a clean first two steps has gained perhaps a couple of hundredths on the field, and top speed will hand that back inside forty metres to anyone genuinely quicker. You do not win a hundred metres at the gun. Commentators say you do. They are describing the emotional shape of the race rather than its arithmetic.

Undertrained, because a bad start does not merely cost those hundredths. It changes the shape of the whole run. Come out too upright and you have skipped the phase where horizontal force is cheap to apply, so the next thirty metres are spent trying to accelerate from a posture built for holding speed rather than building it. Come out with the first step landing under the hips instead of behind them and you have to brake to stay upright. Athletes who do this often post a decent ten metre split and then get passed by everybody, because the split flattered a position that had already spoiled the transition.

That transition is where I would spend the winter. Not the set position, not reaction drills with a starter pistol, but the twelve or so steps in which a sprinter rises gradually from a deep push to an upright run without a single step where the mechanics change abruptly. It should look like a plane taking off. In most club athletes it looks like a man standing up out of a chair.

My position, which gets pushback, is that reaction training is close to worthless past the first few weeks. It is a largely fixed trait with a small trainable range, heavily affected by how wound up the athlete is on the day, and every minute spent on it is a minute not spent on the acceleration curve where the gains are large and permanent.

Watch the twenty to thirty metre segment on a replay some time. That is where the race gets decided and it is the least discussed part of any sprint broadcast, because nothing dramatic happens there. The dramatic bit already happened, quietly, at step four.