The Karsten Warholm Experience
by Steve McGill
So yes, 2020 was a pretty dead year overall for track and field, as the coronavirus pandemic led to the postponement of the Olympic Games in Tokyo, and to the cancellation of many other major meets. Many of the biggest names in the sport didn’t compete at all, or hardly at all. The meets that did take place had few audience members in the stands, or none at all. There were virtual meets, with athletes competing against each other across continents. Some of those meets were actually pretty cool, but there were also some “2020 moments,” like when Noah Lyles apparently broke Usain Bolt’s 200m world record, only to find out later that he hadn’t raced the full distance. In the land of hurdles, there were a few good races from the likes of Orlando Ortega and a few others. But we were definitely feeling the void. The only thing that even came close to giving hurdle fans the type of electrified energy that only an Olympic year can provide was the world record chase by Norwegian 400m hurdler Karsten Warholm. Despite everything 2020-related, Warholm managed to have a season for the ages as he relentlessly pursued his quest to conquer Kevin Young’s 28-year-old world record of 46.78. He didn’t break it, but he sure came close.
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In five races from August through September, Warholm attempted to boldly go where few men before him have ever gone. Though Young’s record currently still stands, it seems like it’s only a matter of time before Warholm claims it as his own. In the meantime, his 2020 season, when added to his previous two seasons, puts him in the conversation regarding who is the greatest male 400m hurdler of all time. Of course, Edwin Moses’ dominance during a 12-year career in which he set entirely new standards for the event makes him such an iconic figure that it would be hard to convince any hurdling aficionado that any other long hurdler can be put above him. Young owns the world record, as well as an Olympic gold medal, so he’s in the conversation. Other luminaries who belong in the conversation include the likes of Felix Sanchez, Kerron Clement, Angelo Taylor, Bershawn Jackson, Andre Phillips, Harald Schmid, Danny Harris, John Akii Bua, Derrick Adkins, Samuel Matete, David Hemery, Glenn Davis, and Warholm contemporaries Rai Benjamin and Abderrahman Samba. And that’s off the top of my head, so I’m sure I’m forgetting others.
Warholm still has a lot of tread left on the tires, so to speak, as he is only 24 years old, so he undoubtedly will accomplish much more before he hangs up the spikes. In the meantime, he can already say something that no other hurdler in history can currently say: he has run under 47.00 twice – once in 2019 and once in 2020. Meanwhile, without any major competition to train for, and surely having trained under dire circumstances through the pandemic, and having no one to compete against who was at his level (as neither Benjamin nor Samba competed outdoors this year), he managed to put together a phenomenal series of races that could arguably go down as the best ever, even though the amount of races was limited. From August 24 through September 17, he ran five insane races: 1) 47.10 on August 14 in Monaco, 2) 46.87 on August 23 in Stockholm, 3) 47.62 on September 8 in Ostrava, 4) 47.08 on September 13 in Berlin, and 5) 47.07 in Rome on September 17. And he ran these times in races where no one else was even breaking 49.00.
No one in the history of the event, not even Moses, has ever had a stretch of five races to match Warholm’s. The only thing I would point out, and this is not to diminish his astounding accomplishments, is that ran these races in outer lanes, where he wouldn’t have to worry about tight curves, and could therefore had the space he needed to open up his stride and really go for it. Still, the watch doesn’t lie, so he did what he did.
It was becoming evident, even before 2020, that Warholm was distinguishing himself from his peers, Benjamin and Samba, as he handled them both pretty easily in 2019 and won convincingly at that year’s World Championships. This pandemic has prevented us from seeing the rivalry between these three phenoms develop. Samba, who was the man in 2018, was injured for much of 2019, so we haven’t seen him at his best in quite a while now. Benjamin, meanwhile, was dominating everyone except Warholm throughout 2019, and he was finishing close enough to Warholm to keep us believing that he could be his equal in 2020, but we never found out, and we don’t know if we’ll find out in 2021 either. But this much can be said about Warholm: he’s an absolute monster. Fearless, courageous, crazy (in a good way). The man expends a lot of energy whooping and hollering and pounding his chest before races, and he still goes out there and crushes the field. I’m thinking, Hey man, save some of that energy for the race. But Warholm doesn’t need to save energy. He’s got energy to burn. Makes me wonder what a typical workout of his looks like. I remember how Bershawn Jackson used to float and glide the first half of the race, and then come on like a madman in the second half. Such a strategy would seemingly be sacrilegious to Warholm. He bursts out of the blocks like a 100m sprinter and doesn’t do any gliding or floating at any point in the race. Age-wise, he’s entering his prime. I honestly don’t know if anyone will be able to keep up with him once we get back to a regular competition schedule. He might already be in a class by himself. Hopefully, we’ll find out.
I can’t talk about the 400m hurdles without talking about stride pattern. In Warholm’s case, he now is consistently 13-stepping all the way through hurdle nine, and then 15-stepping to hurdle ten. The 15-step is a problem. In the 46.87 race, it got him too close to the last hurdle and he smacked it, even though he kept on driving through the finish line. It looks to me that, rhythm-wise, he’d be better off switching legs and 14-stepping that last hurdle. Thirteen-stepping would cause him to overstride, and the 15-stepping is causing him to chop his stride too much. So, 14 would be perfect. He has 14-stepped in the past, but I don’t think he trusts that other leg anymore, or else he’d still be using it. If he can get to the point where he does trust it again, he will put himself in position to dip below the world record. I feel certain about that, for obvious reasons.
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