The hundred metres is decided by who slows down least

Nobody is accelerating at the finish line, so the race is really an argument about who loses speed most gracefully after sixty metres.

Everybody in a hundred metres final reaches top speed somewhere around sixty to seventy metres, and everybody is slower at the line than they were at seventy. The winner is frequently not the fastest man in the race at any single instant. He is the one whose curve falls away least in the last third.

This reframes what the event demands. If the race ended at sixty, it would be an acceleration event and the training would be almost entirely about force production and the drive phase. It does not end at sixty. The final forty metres are run in a state where the muscles have been contracting maximally for six seconds, the nervous system is struggling to keep recruiting at the same rate, and the athlete's technique starts to loosen in ways that cost contact quality.

Speed endurance is the ugly name for the quality that fixes this, and it is trained by running fast for longer than is comfortable, repeatedly, with long recoveries. It is unpleasant, it produces most of the hamstring problems in the sport, and it is the part of a programme that gets cut first when a championship is close and everybody is nervous.

The tactical version of this argument is about relaxation, which sounds like a coaching cliche until you look at what it costs. An athlete who tightens the shoulders and jaw at eighty metres is recruiting muscles that oppose the ones doing the work, spending energy on nothing, and shortening his own stride. The cue to relax is not motivational vagueness. It is a real instruction to stop paying for antagonist contraction you do not need.

What I find odd is how little of this reaches the broadcast. We get a top speed figure and a reaction time. We almost never get the split profile that would show a viewer that the man who won was fourth at fifty and simply held on better, which is the actual story of a great many finals.

Run the graph on screen. It would ruin some reputations and make others.

The fastest man rarely wins. The one who stays fast does.