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One year on from a record-setting athletics program at the 2021 Olympics, the track and field world descended upon Oregon’s fabled Hayward Field for the World Athletics Championships, with the chance to prove that Tokyo was no fluke and that track and field’s glow-up is here to stay.
For context, Tokyo was the highest quality track and field meet of all time according to the World Athletics Competition Rankings, with athletes setting a staggering 52% more national records compared to the previous Olympics in Rio. The athletes in Oregon had their work cut out, and while these World Championships didn’t quite surpass last year’s Olympics on the competition rankings ladder, they did do enough to secure second place overall and earn the title of the highest quality World Champs in history.
Despite finishing behind the Olympics on points, 65.2% of gold medal winning performances in Oregon were superior to the corresponding gold medal performances in Tokyo. And by removing the 2022 Championships from the shadow of the Olympics, we get a clearer picture of the quality on display at Hayward. 13 World Championship meet records were set, more than doubling the amount of championship records set three years earlier in Doha. In fact, in the last seven editions of the World Championships, no more than 6 championship records were set at a single competition, and not even Bolt’s historic parade around Berlin’s Olympiastadion could push the 2009 championships close to the record haul in Oregon.
The magic at Hayward was headlined by generational superstars. Sydney McLaughlin lowered her own 400m hurdle world record by an astonishing .73secs, and her time of 50.68sec would have been good enough for 7th in the 400m flat final. Mondo Duplantis sailed over 6.21m in the pole vault to claim another world record, and he not only owns the seven best jumps in history but he now also vaults higher than my brother long jumps too. And there was a surprise world record on the final day of competition, with Nigeria’s Tobi Amusan storming to 12.12sec in the 100m hurdles despite entering the championships with only the fourth best performance in the world this year. It was a stunning ending to a championship where Noah Lyles also became the third best 200m runner in history.
So with the heat check complete, objectively speaking, Oregon lived up to the hype, and consolidated the current state of play for track and field. The new normal has been established, and the next generation of athletics is officially here.
This next wave of athletics is of course buoyed by the rise of superspikes, and no conversation on sensational performances would be complete without mention of the infamous shoes which now adorn the feet of the world’s greatest athletes. Generally speaking, superspikes consist of a plate (carbon fibre or otherwise) paired with a stack of resilient and compliant foam, the combination of which can quite literally propel athletes to better times through interactions with ground contact time, stride length and efficiency among other things. While they were subtly introduced by a limited number of Nike athletes in Doha back in 2019, in 2022 93.3% of the individual sprint medalists were wearing some iteration of a superspike when they crossed the line, and 11 of the 13 championship records were set in events where supershoes are available. Even Karsten Warholm, who just a year ago labeled the supershoes as “bullshit”, was wearing some particularly chunky Pumas in his bid to overcome an untimely hamstring injury and repeat his jaw-dropping Tokyo heroics.
Tobi Amusan added fuel to the fire when she revealed she was wearing the Adidas Adizero Avantis on her way to a world record, which are designed for 5-10km runners and contain more foam than the new breed of sprint spikes (although they still sit within the legal limits). Of course, it’s not all about the spikes - Sydney McLaughlin holds every 400m hurdles world record from the age of 14 onwards, and with all due respect to the rest of her competitors, would probably still win medals wearing Crocs.
But the spikes in general are doing to track events what the supershoes did to marathon times - providing a mechanical advantage which has created somewhat of a paradigm shift in some events. This shift is perhaps best demonstrated by the depth of performances, with the women’s 200m being a prime example - 22.08sec wasn’t good enough to make the final in 2022, despite being good enough for a medal at 10 of the previous 11 World Championships. Disentangling how much of this stems from physiological vs technological advances is complicated, but it does appear that the spikes benefit some events more than others. Long jump spikes with stacked soles have had no notable impact on performance marks over the last two years, whereas the previously long-standing world records in the men’s and women’s 400m hurdles are now only good enough for the 6th and 14th ranked times in history respectively. Given how deeply the spikes have infiltrated the sport and the way World Athletics have seemed to settle on their relatively passive shoe regulations, it looks like they’re here to stay whether we like it or not.
It’s also worth noting that the track surface at Hayward Field is not the same surface that was purported to give a 2% advantage in Tokyo, and is instead from the same company supplying the Commonwealth Games Stadium - Beynon Sports, seemingly paving the way for the spikes to take most of the technological credit for the superb performances.
While the spikes and the track were key points of contention in the aftermath of Tokyo, in 2022 these issues took somewhat of a back seat to a debate on the false start rule courtesy of Devon Allen. A former Oregon Duck, Allen returned to Hayward as the world leader after dropping the third fastest 110m hurdle time in history just one month earlier. With the ink still drying on an unprecedented contract which will see him play for the Philadelphia Eagles in the NFL while simultaneously maintaining his track career, the stage was set for a fairytale homecoming. But it took just 99ms for it all to unravel when Allen false started by the smallest of margins in the final, just 1ms on the wrong side of the permitted 100ms post-gun minimum.
The false start was imperceptible, and the general public were understandably flabbergasted by the fact you can be disqualified for a false start despite moving after the gun. Some were quick to point out that rules are rules, and there will always be people complaining when they fall on the wrong side of them. But there’s just one problem with this - not only is there insufficient evidence to convincingly support the 100ms rule, but there’s also evidence against it, including from a 2009 study commissioned by the World Athletics themselves. The science behind start reaction times has been laid out brilliantly in both simple and technical terms elsewhere, but in short, even national level sprinters can react as fast as 80ms following a start signal when measured by a starting block force plate system.
Of course, there’s the very real possibility that Allen genuinely anticipated the gun and was rightly disqualified. But there are also a number of factors on Allen’s side, with changes in false start software or hardware leading the charge of potential explanations. For example, seemingly innocuous changes in things like the volume of the starting signal can be enough to improve reaction time substantially. Further, there’s evidence indicating that the secret force threshold used to determine reaction time has previously been adjusted without any communication to athletes or coaches, leading to a specific and substantial decrease in women’s reaction times in 2012 and making another change in 2022 a genuine possibility.
But if it was an error or change in software or hardware, wouldn’t this impact everybody and not just Allen? Yes it would, and yes it did - thanks to the ever-astute PJ Vazel, we know that in the World Championships between 2011-2019, there were a combined 5 reaction times under 115ms in the men’s 100m and 110m hurdles. In the 2022 Championships alone, there were 25 reaction times under 115ms in the same events. Devon Allen’s own semi-final reaction time was 101ms, and he wasn’t the only one hard done by - there were two athletes in the women’s 100m semi-finals just prior who were also disqualified with reaction times in the 90-99ms range.
Given the discrepancies in reaction time between this championship and others combined with the lack of available data on the equipment, do we really have enough evidence to be confident that the equipment has the resolution to accurately detect a 1ms difference? And even if so, are we confident that 100ms is the absolute fastest that a human can possibly react to a starting signal? If the answer to both of those questions isn’t a resounding yes, then track fans were robbed of an epic showdown, Devon Allen was robbed of a once in a lifetime opportunity to win a World Championship in front of a home crowd, and multiple other athletes were unfairly stripped of their chance to chase their dreams too.
For what it’s worth, Allen accepted his fate graciously, but he shouldn’t have had to. Whatever the reason for the change in reaction times, intentional or not, it’s clear that a change in system occurred, and we should use the current momentum on the topic to action a change in protocol. At a minimum, we need consistency between starting systems. Transparency in force characteristics used to determine the reaction time, and trialing other methods for detecting a false start, as recommended by numerous researchers, are also desirable. And in an ideal world all of the above would take place, the 100ms rule would be dropped to a more evidence-based threshold, and a ‘warning window’ would be introduced to trigger a race restart for reaction times within a certain grey area.
Track and field has never been short of controversy, and for World Athletics, the false start debacle might have even been a welcome distraction from recent public pressure on intersex athletes, classification of transgender athletes and the ever-present doping cloud hovering over the sport. If you ask some people, the false start rule isn’t the only thing that needs fixing in order for athletics to attract and sustain a wider audience.
How to ‘fix’ athletics is a recurring conversation on social media and beyond, and has culminated in many well-intentioned but misguided strategies. But from a completely biased Australian point of view, athletics is alive and well - we had one of our best championships ever, finishing 6th on the medal table ahead of traditional track and field powerhouses such as Germany and, most importantly, ahead of Great Britain. Eleanor Patterson and Kelsey-Lee Barber will deservedly go down in Australian athletics folklore, and their performances were orchestrated by brilliant coaches young enough to guide more champions in decades to come (Alex Stewart and Mike Barber respectively).
The future isn’t just bright for Australia - the average age of world record breakers at the championships was 23, and a host of athletes under the age of 21 brought home medals, including Athing Mu (gold, 800m), Keeley Hodgkinson (silver, 800m), Yaroslava Mahuchikh (silver, high jump), Jakob Ingebrigtsen (gold, 5000m), Mykolas Alekna (silver, discus) and Erriyon Knighton (bronze, 200m).
So instead of compromising the sport to appease attention spans more suited to TikTok, we simply need to do a better job of showcasing what the sport is truly about - the performances and the people behind them. And that’s exactly what Oregon did. There were few better stories than stadium announcer Geoff Wightman commentating his son Jake’s surprise 1500m victory. America’s medal frenzy also proved popular, with NBC reporting that these Championships reached more viewers than any other in history. And the presence of the games was larger than ever, with whoever is running the World Athletics Instagram account apparently holding a PhD in Memeology, additions such as the fam cam humanising the performances, and independent outlets such as Citius Mag providing accessible and digestible insight from top athletes.
While being entirely satisfied with the current state of the sport would be ignorant, a new wave of athletics has certainly arrived, and Oregon, the highest quality World Championships in history, provided the best showcase yet.