How to win back our stolen athletics heritage

By John Latigo

Now that the excitement of the London 2012 Olympics is at its peak, it is time to critically examine a possible source of improvement in our performance at subsequent games and, in passing, reflect upon the achievements of the man who"stole" the greatest part of Uganda’s athletics heritage.

Few of you may know this but the world’s most famous 400-meter hurdler, the American Edwin Moses, "stole" the tactics and inspiration he used to rise to fame from our own John Akii-Bua (RIP).

And so it was that the one track-and-field event at both Olympics in Athens 2004 and Beijing 2008; and World Athletics Championship at Helsinki 2005 that attracted my attention most was the 400m hurdles.

The 400-meter intermediate hurdle race is one of the most demanding in athletics. Sometimes called the man-killer event amongst coaches, it combines a very long sprint with the technical and physical demands of hurdling. 

This hurdle race was introduced in Oxford , England , around 1860 over 440 yards with twelve heavy wooden barriers 1.06m (3ft 6in) high fixed in the ground.  In the 1900 Olympics, the distance was adjusted to 400 metres with ten hurdles of 91.44cm (3ft) in height, separated by 35 metres. The first hurdle was placed 45 metres from the start, the tenth 40 metres from the finish. These distances have remained constant ever since.

From the example Akii-Bua set 36 years ago in Munich, the 400-meter hurdle race could well have remained the one event Ugandans would kill as routinely as the Kenyans glide through the steeplechase, hopefully very soon, I hope, our golden girl, Docus Inzikuru, will inspire Ugandans to start a routine killing in this event.

Landmarks

First official world record: 55.0 Charles Bacon USA 1908

First under 52 sec: 51.7 Bob Tisdall IRL 1932

First under 51 sec: 50.6 Glenn Hardin USA 1934

First under 50 sec: 49.5 Glenn Davis USA 1956

First under 49 sec: 48.8 Geoff Vanderstock USA 1968

First under 48 sec: 47.82 John Akii-Bua UGA 1972

First under 47 sec: 46.78 Kevin Young USA 1992 (current record)

 Akii-Bua’s performance in Munich 1972 remains one of the most analyzed athletic track performances of modern times. This is because of his unusual approach to the discipline. I learnt of this when one of my Professors at the Technical University of Darmstadt in the then West Germany showed my Sports Science class a video clipping of that famous race and asked us to analyse it.

My colleagues and I examined the video clip but failed to identify any significant difference between the competitors’ styles of hurdling. We only noted the obvious: that Akii-Bua got to the finish line first. And then came, the eye-opener: our Professor directed our attention to the number of steps each athlete took between the hurdles, and pointed out that Akii-Bua’s steps between the last two hurdles of the event were only 14, as opposed to the 16 steps the other hurdlers had taken.

We learnt then that hurdling requires both great running speed and excellent technique. Good hurdlers run through hurdles rather than jumping over them. Hurdlers will generally go over the hurdles using the same lead leg each time, taking three strides between hurdles in the sprint events and 13, 15, or even 17 strides between hurdles in the long hurdle races. In a long hurdle race, a runner may take 13 strides between hurdles early in the race but be forced to increase the number of strides as fatigue sets in. Some hurdlers may go to an even number of strides, which requires them to switch lead leg.

In Munich, while the other hurdlers took 16 steps before the last hurdle, John Akii-Bua defied fatigue and took only 14 steps, thus switching his lead leg over the final hurdle! There was more to what made this race special. Akii-Bua drew Lane 1, which is generally considered a bad one for two-turn races like the 400 meters. This is because not only does the hurdler in Lane 1 have the two tight turns to contend with, he also has the hurdles to face whilst doing so! There is no penalty for hitting a hurdle, although it usually slows a hurdler down. It may also cause him to run out of his lane, which is cause for disqualification. In Munich 1972, Akii-Bua thus defied not only human fatigue but also the odds to win.

So, how did he do it? By taking longer strides and thus fewer steps between hurdles, Akii-Bua was able to move faster, putting himself clear of the field for Gold.  In effect, he ran through the hurdles rather than pausing to jump over them.

Our Professor said, at this level (i.e. the Olympic level or Athletics World Championship) , each athlete is expected to take 15 running steps to get to all but the last hurdle. He added that because the athletes have already gone over many hurdles, they are already getting tired. The last hurdle therefore required slight adjustment to the running steps to allow smooth transition from running to jumping over the hurdle and back to running again.  Most athletes at the time and even now still use 16 steps.

 So who learnt most from Akii-Bua’s performance? Certainly, his fellow Ugandan athletes did not as can be noted from the lack of representation in the event in subsequent games after Akii-Bua. The Americans, on the other hand, did; they critically analyzed and used video clips of Akii-Bua’s run to train one Edwin Moses. Come the next Olympics in 1976 in Montreal, Canada, Moses broke Akii-Bua’s world record in style -- as John Akii-Bua himself was still in the air returning back to Uganda from Montreal following Idi Amin’s directive to withdraw the Ugandan team from the games.  He remained famously unbeaten in 122 consecutive races, stretching from 26 August 1977 to 4 June 1987 -- a total of nine years, nine months and nine days.

Edwin Moses, the greatest 400-m hurdler of all time, has talked about how watching Akii-Bua influenced his approach to the race. It should have been one Ugandan learning from another.

To me, then, the bottom line is this: if Ugandan athletes are to dare hope to win more Olympic or Athletics World Championship Gold Medals, then coaches must do what they should have started doing 36 years age: use video footage of John Akii-Bua’s record-breaking performance at Munich in 1972 and Docus Inzikuru’s brilliant performance at Helsinki two years ago as a training and inspirational aid for young athletes. Then will we begin winning more medals; and in style.

John Latigo (john_latigo@yahoo.co.uk

The writer is a former Uganda football player