A long jump is decided before the athlete leaves the ground

The run-up is a precision task disguised as a sprint, and a centimetre of error at the board erases a career-best effort.

Six jumps, three of them red-flagged, and the commentary calls it a lack of concentration. It is almost never concentration. It is a stride pattern meeting a wind that changed.

The approach is around twenty strides, accelerating to close to maximum speed, and it must finish with the take-off foot landing on a board a few centimetres wide. That is a control problem the athlete cannot solve by looking, because visual correction at that speed is far too slow for the last steps. What actually happens is that the jumper regulates over the final four or five strides using peripheral vision, making adjustments of a few centimetres each, which is why coaches obsess over a checkmark partway down the runway rather than over the board itself.

Now change something. A tailwind of two metres a second lengthens every stride slightly. Over twenty strides that accumulates into a large error at the board, and the athlete arrives long, fouls, and looks careless. A headwind does the reverse and produces a jump that takes off twenty centimetres behind the line, which is distance simply given away and never appears in any statistic.

This is why I find the foul rate a more honest measure of a jumper than the season's best. A consistent athlete who fouls once a competition is managing the approach. One who fouls three times is either not adjusting or is set up too aggressively, chasing a big mark and gambling on conditions holding.

There is a real strategic argument about that gamble. In a final where the top eight get three extra jumps, the first round is a qualification decision, not a distance decision, and the correct play is to move the run-up back and guarantee a mark. Plenty of jumpers refuse, take the aggressive setup, foul, and then spend the rest of the day jumping under pressure they created themselves.

Coaches who plan the run-up like a bowler plans a spell, conservatively first and aggressively once the day is secure, tend to have athletes who make finals.

The ones who chase from jump one tend to have highlight reels and no medals.