The warm-down is scheduled by television

Between rounds, clearing the by-products of a hard effort is a race against a timetable nobody set for the athlete.

Ninety minutes between a semi-final and a final sounds generous until you subtract the parts the athlete does not control.

Cool-down jogging, done at low intensity soon after a maximal effort, moves blood through working muscle and shifts metabolites faster than lying still does. That is not controversial. The problem is the queue sitting between the finish line and the jogging. There is the mixed zone, where you stand still and answer questions. There is doping control, where you may wait a long time to produce a sample and cannot simply leave. There is the walk back to a warm-up area that in some stadiums sits on the far side of a concourse. By the time an athlete is moving again, the most useful window has often closed.

So the recovery plan that looks tidy on a coach's sheet meets a broadcast schedule and loses. This bites hardest in the events that punish incomplete recovery most, the one-lap and two-lap races, where three rounds in four days is normal and the difference between the third round and the first is not fitness but residue.

I think this is the quiet reason finals are so often slower than semi-finals. It gets explained away as tactics, and tactics are part of it, but there is a physiological version nobody says out loud because it implicates the schedule rather than the athletes. The field arrives at the final having each lost a slightly different amount, and the ones who lost least are frequently the ones nobody wanted to interview.

What could change is duller than it sounds. Give athletes a jogging lane inside the doping control area. Put the mixed zone after the cool-down rather than instead of it. Move the warm-up track closer, or accept longer gaps between rounds even where that inconveniences a start time.

None of it will happen while rounds are placed to fill an evening window. So teams do what they can, which is mostly a stationary bike smuggled as close to the exit as officials will allow, and a coach with a stopwatch counting the minutes the sport is quietly stealing.

A small theft, repeated across four days, and it decides medals.