300m Hurdles for Grown Folks
by Steve McGill
Some ideas are great ideas. Some ideas are bad ideas. Some ideas just don’t make any sense at all. Count me among those who feel that adding a 300 meter hurdle event as an official World Athletics event makes no sense at all. I mean, why??? What is the logic behind this? Let me tell you why I feel it is illogical.
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Let me start by saying that I’m all for adding a new hurdle event. Two decades ago I wrote an article advocating for adding a 200 meter hurdle event. I still feel that such an event should be added. The logic is simple: sprinters have three events to choose from while hurdlers only have two. Sprinters have the 100, 200, and 400, while hurdlers only have the 100/110h and the 400h. So, if sprinters want to double, they can do so quite easily. They can double in the 100 and 200, or in the 200 and 400. While there are some sprinters who can excel in all three, most will focus on just two. And those two are never the 100 and the 400. One of the two will always be the 200. For hurdlers, there is no 200 meter option. The 100/110 meter hurdles and the 400 meter hurdles are very different events. So that middle distance, so to speak, of 200 meters has always been missing for hurdlers. Adding it wouldn’t take a whole lot of effort. It would be the same spacing as the 200 meter hurdles that is used for the 13-14 year-old age group in youth track. Athletes would start at the 200m start line and clear the last five hurdles of the 400h race, the same as the 13-14 age group does now. The only question would be determining what the height of the hurdles would be. I’m thinking 30 inches for the women and 39 inches for the men, as 39 is between the 42 inches of the 110h and the 36 inches of the 400h. Another option would be to space the hurdles about 20 meters apart, which would allow for about seven or eight hurdles to be set up (depending on how long the run-in off the last hurdle would be).
A 200 meter hurdle race would allow for doubling. It would be the place where the sprint hurdlers and long hurdlers could meet. You could see a Grant Holloway going head-to-head against a Karsten Warholm or Rai Benjamin. That would be exciting. But as it is now with this new 300m race, such a showdown will never occur. It’s still a long hurdler’s race. So now the long hurdlers have two hurdling events they can specialize in while the sprint hurdlers still have one. So again, I ask, why are we doing this?
Another thing that bothers me is that the race does not mimic the high school version of the 300 meter hurdles. In that race, athletes clear 8 hurdles; in the professional version, the athletes only clear seven. In the high school race, the distance from the start line to the first hurdle is 45 meters (same as the 400 hurdles); in the professional version, the distance to the first hurdle is 50 meters. In the high school race, it’s a 10-meter sprint to the finish line off the last hurdle. In the World Athletics version, it’s 40 meters. Basically, the World Athletics 300m hurdle race mimics the master’s race (in the 60-year-old age group), in which the athletes start at the 300m start line and then clear the last seven hurdles of the 400h race. The only difference is the hurdles are higher. The oldheads run over 30-inch hurdles (men) or 27-inch hurdles (women).
So we can’t even compare the times of the professionals to those of high school hurdlers. When you hear about Warholm running 32.67, or Femke Bol running 36.86, your mind is blown until you realize they have a longer sprint to the first hurdle and one less hurdle to clear than the high school kids do. Sure, their races are still impressive, amazing, inspiring, etc., but not as impressive as we’d like to believe. The high school 300h record is 35.02, by Reggie Wyatt back in the day (2009), which is far off from 32.67, but when considering that that Wyatt had an extra hurdle to clear, and 30 meters less off the last hurdle, and five meters less to the first hurdle, the gap between the two shrinks. Same with Bol’s 36.86. Sydney McLaughlin ran 38.90 in high school. That would probably translate into 37-mid, which means the high school version of Sydney wouldn’t be far off Bol’s world record.
A final reason I’m not thrilled about this new hurdling event being added to the World Athletics program is that it feels like a cheap way to garner world records. Of course dudes like Warholm, Benjamin, and Alison Dos Santos are gonna be all over that world record. Same for women like Bol and McLaughlin and Anna Cockrell. So when you hear “world record!” you’re gonna have to remind yourself the event has never been contested before this year.
A question I have is if the event will be contested at major international meets like the World Championships and Olympic Games. I don’t see how it can be, honestly. The athletes who would run the 400 hurdles are the same ones who would run the 300 hurdles. Doing both would be redundant, for one thing, and for another thing it would be way too demanding to go through rounds of both events for a double to even be feasible. Plus, long hurdlers might be needed in the 4×400 or mixed 4×400 relay. So in that regard, I again ask the question, what’s the point of adding this event?
To me, it would make much more sense to add a 200m hurdle event that would provide hurdlers with legit opportunity to compete at the highest level in more than one hurdling event.
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