Kevin Young’s 46.78: Will it Ever be Broken?
by Steve McGill
For this month’s great race, we’re going to take a look back at Kevin Young’s 400m hurdle world record race, set in 1992 at the Barcelona Olympics, when he ran 46.78 to become not only a gold medalist, but also the first 400m hurdler ever to run under 47.00. Though there may have been more thrilling races from a competitive standpoint (as Young won quite handily), this race has to go down as one of the greatest individual achievements in the history of the sport, perhaps just a notch below amazing feats like Bob Beamon’s 29-2 ½ foot long jump at the 1968 Olympics in Mexico City and Usain Bolt’s 9.58 at the 2009 World Championships in Berlin.
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It could be argued that Young’s race is on a par with, or even greater than, the performances of Beamon and Bolt. In all three cases, the old world record was blown out of the water. In all three cases, the margin of victory was very big. In all three cases, the athlete did something that many believed to be impossible. In all three cases, each athlete set a new standard of excellence in his event that would last beyond the current generation. It took over twenty years for Beamon’s record to be broken. Bolt’s record hasn’t been broken and who knows when it will. Young’s record, 26 years after he set it, is still the world record. And until this past summer, his performance was the only sub-47 in the history of the 400 meter hurdles.
Most significantly, perhaps, is whose record Young broke. He broke the record of the legendary Edwin Moses – the man who, to this day, is indisputably the greatest the event has ever seen. Because Moses never ran under 47, many of us wondered if anyone would ever be able to do so. Moses had brought the world record down from 47.64 all the way down to 47.02, all while remaining undefeated for twelve years. In addition to Moses, greats like Harald Schmid, Danny Harris, Andre Phillips, and others never broke 47 either.
What enabled Young to be the one to not only run under 47, but to do so in a resounding fashion? What enabled him to run 46.78? I would say it was his stride pattern. In a profile I wrote on Young for this website years ago, he explained that he 12-stepped hurdles four and five on the backstretch. “The fastest part of the race is the backstretch – the fourth and fifth hurdles,” he explained. “You’re still picking up speed at hurdle one, hurdle two, hurdle three. By twelve-stepping four and five, the most important thing is I’m back on my dominant leg when I go back to thirteen.”
Moses was a 13-stepper who took thirteen steps between the hurdles all the way around the track after hurdle one. To take thirteen the whole way was considered the gold, and anything beyond that was considered a fantasy. But as I’ve often pointed out, Moses’ 13-step rhythm early in the race looked very crowded. I’m sure Moses could’ve 12-stepped at least two hurdles somewhere in the beginning of the race – somewhere between hurdles 2 and 5. But he was a mathemetician who knew exactly how long each stride needed to be to maintain the 13, so he stuck with the 13. Young, meanwhile, who had been getting super-crowded on the backstretch, decided to 12-step hurdles 4 and 5 – a risk that was not without its potential pitfalls – and it worked like magic. The 12-stepping eliminated the crowding issue, and as he said, it got him back on his dominant lead leg – the left leg – for the entire second half of the race.
What will be interesting to see is whether or not Young’s once seemingly untouchable world record will be broken anytime soon. Two athletes seriously threatened the world record this past summer – Qatar’s Abderrahaman Samba and Rai Benjamin of the United States. Samba became only the second man to break the magical 47.00 barrier when he ran 46.98 at a Diamond League meet in Paris in June. He pretty much stayed in the 47’s for the rest of the summer. Benjamin, meanwhile, a junior at the University of South Carolina, ran 47.02 at the NCAA National Championships, tying him with Moses for the third-fastest time ever. And he did that while competing in two other events in the same meet. Whoa!
It seems like it’s only a matter of time (get it?) before one of these two breaks Young’s record of 46.78. Both gentlemen are in their early 20’s, and both are primed to do big things with a World Championship year, followed by an Olympic year, on the horizon. And with other great 400 hurdlers like Karsten Warholm and Kyron McMaster and others to push them, I’d expect that Young’s record will be broken sometime in 2019. But I also wouldn’t be surprised if it doesn’t happen, as the two tenths that Samba still has to make up is still a lot of time. Which further goes to prove just how astonishing a performance Young’s was at the 1992 Olympic Games.
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