June 7, 2014
For today’s blog post I’m providing a snippet from an interview I did with Jon Hendershott – long-time journalist for Track & Field News – that will appear in the June issue of The Hurdle Magazine, which comes out June 14th. Usually on the other side of interviews, Hendershott has been writing for T&FN since 1967. Over that period of time, he has covered 9 Olympic Games and 13 World Championships, dozens of USA Championships, and countless meets at all levels of the sport. He has interviewed some of the greatest track and field athletes who have ever lived, including hurdlers Rod Milburn, Renaldo Nehemiah, Kim Batten, Kevin Young, and numerous others. The interview covers a gamut of track-related topics. The passage below addresses some hurdle-specific issues:
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McGill: Do you feel that the hurdling events should constantly be evolving? I for one have argued for several years that the height of the hurdles in the women’s 100m hurdle race should be raised. What are your thoughts on that?
Hendershott: As a fan, I would like to see it. It would make it more of a hurdle event, less of a sprint event. Not to say that the women aren’t good technicians. They are. But I think that adding three inches would be a real plus. It might make it a new event, but I think it would be good. For a long time the women didn’t have the 400 hurdles. But once the IAAF made it into a World Championship event, it exploded. Same with steeplechase, hammer, triple jump. Give athletes an opportunity and they’ll respond to it. It would take some time to adapt, but it would be a positive thing for the athletes.
McGill: How about the women’s 400 hurdles? Should they be raised to 33 inches?
Hendershott: Yeah, that would be more of a challenge. It would be great for everybody involved. Even at the high school level. Four hundred meters should be the official high school distance [in every state]. When I was in college trying to be a 400 meter hurdler, there were certain guys who could run the 300 hurdles like gangbusters, but I had one guy admit to me – a 51 guy named Dave Williams who played pro football – he said a lot of people can run the 330 [yards], but you throw in those last two [hurdles], and the extra 40 yards [off the last hurdle], that separates the men from the boys. I think it would be so much better for the development of the long hurdles. Make the standard high distance 400 meters.
McGill: What about increasing the spacing in the men’s 110 hurdles? I know, as a coach, when I have my athletes doing a workout and I increase the height of the hurdles, I increase the spacing right along with it. It would seem natural that when the hurdles go from 39 inches in high school to 42 inches in college, they need to be spaced further apart.
Hendershott: Part of that goes back to the inception of artificial tracks. You get a rebound effect on these surfaces. If you get a wind behind the hurdlers, that pushes them into the incoming hurdles. If you have a big man – a Greg Foster, Tonie Campbell, Oliver, Kingdom – they’re gonna have problems. Foster and I would talk, and he said he’d rather have a bit of a headwind to keep him from running up too close.
Increasing the spacing might be a good idea. Have them 11 yards apart, make the [race] distance 120 meters. It seems now that guys are tiptoeing just to fit in their three steps. The guys have to hold back as they get charging forward. Then add in the adrenaline of the athletes at an Olympic Trials, an Olympic Games or World Championships. Lengthening the distance between the hurdles wouldn’t be ill-advised. Again, it would take an adjustment. When the women went from 80 meters – which was the international distance for decades – then it went to 100, two more hurdles, the ladies adapted. So these things are certainly adaptable. It takes some forward-thinking coaches and administrators to make these things happen.
