Finals are slower than semis and it is not nerves

Three rounds in four days quietly reshapes a field, and the athlete who arrives freshest is often the one who ran ugliest.

Somebody wins a semi-final by three metres, looking untouchable, and then finishes fifth in the final two days later running two tenths slower. The broadcast reaches for pressure. I reach for the timetable.

Repeated maximal efforts do not simply tire an athlete, they change what the muscle can do. The fastest units are the ones that degrade first and recover slowest, so what a sprinter loses across rounds is not endurance but the top end, the last few per cent of the speed curve. That loss is invisible in a heat, where the athlete only needs to qualify, and decisive in a final, where everyone is within a tenth.

The strategic consequence is that qualifying rounds are an event in themselves, and the athletes who understand this treat them as an exercise in spending as little as possible. Shut down at eighty metres. Take the automatic place, never the time. Run the outside lane you were given without trying to improve on it. It looks unambitious and half of the crowd will grumble that they came to see a race, but it is the same decision a distance runner makes when refusing to cover a move.

Coaches who cannot get their athletes to do this usually have a psychological problem rather than a physiological one. Young athletes want to win the heat. Winning the heat is worth nothing except a marginally better lane draw, which matters far less than arriving on Sunday with your fast fibres intact.

There is a schedule argument buried here too. Three rounds compressed into a short window favours a particular type of athlete, the durable one who recovers quickly, over the one with the single highest peak. That is a choice the sport has made without ever debating it. You could space the rounds and get faster finals. You would also get an evening programme that does not fit a broadcast slot, so it will not happen.

Fine. But when a champion is crowned in a final that was slower than both semi-finals, the honest caption is not that the pressure told.

It is that the schedule picked a winner and the athletes just executed it.