400 Hurdles are Looking Hot!
by Steve McGill
While track and field has been on fire this month at the collegiate level, things are just beginning to heat up for the professionals. With the United States and other countries holding their national championships later this month, let’s take a look at who’s getting off to hot starts in the professional ranks and are therefore early favorites to take home gold at this year’s World Championships in August.
For the purposes of this article let’s focus on the 400 meter hurdles, as there were two monumental performances that took place at the Diamond League Meet in Oslo on June 15th — one by Karsten Warholm on the men’s side, and the other by Femke Bol on the women’s side.
[am4show not_have=’g5;’]
[/am4show][am4guest]
[/am4guest][am4show have=’g5;’]
As for Warholm, he is emphatically back after a 2022 in which he struggled with injuries that led to a disappointing performance at the World Championships. The previous year, 2021, saw him demolish the previous world record of 46.78 (set by Kevin Young in 1992) several times, and become the first and only hurdler ever to run the 400 hurdles under 46 seconds — something I didn’t think we’d see happen for at least another couple decades. At Oslo, Warholm was beating his chest and yelling incoherently during the introduction of the competitors, and that’s when you knew he was ready to do something gigantic once again. And sure enough, he did, dropping a 46.52, good for a new meet record (breaking his old meet record), a world lead, and blowing away the competition. Second-place finisher CJ Allen, who is on the come-up and establishing himself as one of the top hurdlers in the United States, ran a fantastic personal best of 47.58, which would’ve won many an Olympic and World Championship final in past years and decades, but here it put him more than a full second behind the victor. Sheesh!
What you have to admire about Warholm is that he gets out. No taking it easy on the first 200 and then finishing strong the second 200. He runs the first 200 like the whole race is only 200 meters. Stride-pattern-wise, it’s always hard to tell on TV how many steps 400 hurdlers are taking to the first hurdle, but it looks like he took 20. From there, he was taking 13 strides between all the rest of the hurdles until the last one, where he took 15 strides. It’s interesting to me that he still doesn’t have a set stride pattern, and that it still tends to fluctuate from race to race when it comes to hurdles nine and ten. In the past couple years, he has gone 14-14 there; other times he’s gone 14-14; and still other times he’s done what he did at Oslo — go 13-15. At Oslo, his 13 steps to hurdle 8 and to hurdle 9 looked to be a bit of a reach, but he looked like he was determined to go 13 the whole way. But he realized while sprinting toward the tenth hurdle that it was going to be too much of a reach, so he quickened his last several strides in front of the hurdle and 15-stepped that one.
I’m thinking Warholm should stick with 13 strides through seven hurdles and then 14-step the last three hurdles. For him, I don’t think that 13-stepping the whole way will mean running faster times. He’s actually losing more time by trying to hold on to the 13-stride pattern too long than he would be if he intentionally changed down to 14, or even 15, on the final straight-away.
Now let’s talk about Bol, who is arguably the second-best 400 hurdler of all time behind Sydney McLaughlin, but still has no gold medals to her name because of McLaughlin, as well as Dalilah Muhammad to a lesser degree. But in the past, Bol has fought hard and gloriously, conceding nothing to McLaughlin. She has dominated the event whenever racing against all other hurdlers other than McLaughlin. I’m pretty sure her only loss last year came against McLaughlin at Worlds. But as another World Championship looms on the horizon, it doesn’t look like Bol is conceding anything. She’s come back faster, stronger, more determined, and more dominant than ever. In Oslo, she ran 52.30, good for first place by a country mile, or 1.54 seconds, over second-place finisher Rushell Clayton, who finished in a very respectable season’s best 53.84. So yeah, Bol smoked the field.
In looking at the replays of the race, I noticed something that got me very excited (and, as a fan of Sydney McLaughlin, a bit worried): Bol was 14-stepping through the first five hurdles. Whoa! This is news, y’all, this is news! Bol was not 14-stepping at all last year; she was 15-stepping the whole way. At Worlds, Sydney 14-stepped through the first seven. The first race in which I saw her 14-step was at USA’s last year, where she did through five, like Bol did at Oslo. When I saw Sydney 14-stepping — and doing so with such ease and fluidity — I knew she was ready to do something monstrous. And she did, with that ridiculous 50.68 she dropped at Worlds. Now it’s time to say the same thing about Bol. She’s ready to do something monstrous. Oh, it’s gonna be hot in August. Hot hot hot!
So, it had to go something like this: Bol saw Sydney 14-stepping and she said to herself, I need to 14-step if I’m gonna have a chance of beating her. So here she is a year later, 14-stepping through five. That’s what you call a competitive spirit. I can almost guarantee that both Sydney and Femke will be under 50.50 at Worlds this year. They’ll push each other to it just like Warholm and Rai Benjamin pushed each other to astronomical heights two years ago at the 2021 Olympics.
As for Sydney, she has yet to run a 400 hurdle race this year, but has run the open 400 and looked very good doing it. Her coach, the legendary Bobby Kersee, is known for having his athletes experiment with other events in order to help them improve in their specialty event. Last year, Kersee had Sydney running 100h races early in the year in order to improve her speed and her ability to lead with either leg. He had Keni Harrison, the 100 meter hurdler who just recently moved to California to train with him this year, doing some 100 meter dashes prior to her hurdles opener. Sydney, meanwhile, has a bye to Worlds, so she doesn’t have to run the 400h at USA’s. It could be that we won’t see her in the 400h until after USA’s. We’ll see.
What I do know is that the 400 hurdles at Worlds, on the men’s side and on the women’s side, will be must see TV. The only downer is that defending World Champion Alison dos Santos, who owns the third-fastest time ever, behind Warholm and Benjamin, is apparently out for the year due to a meniscus tear suffered in training a few months ago. Hopefully he’ll be able to make it back in time for Worlds, but from the articles I’ve read, it’s not sounding promising.
[/am4show]
