Don't float the bend

Before we start, fair warning. This is one of those subjects people hold strong opinions on, because how you run the bend, or how you coach it, is usually something you were taught a particular way and have believed ever since.

All I am asking is that you let me challenge it for a few minutes, and that we look honestly at what the very best in the sport are actually doing. Then make up your own mind.

The bend is the one part of the 200 you cannot cheat.

Whatever you do on it, however cleverly you run it, it is going to cost you speed. There is no line and no cue that makes that disappear, and it is worth saying out loud before anything else, because almost all the advice you will ever get about the bend is aimed at beating it.

You cannot beat it. You can only decide how you would rather pay for it.

So it comes down to two questions. Which of the usual cues are a waste of your attention, and what actually moves the needle on the bend itself.

Start with the oldest cue of all. Hug the inside, get tight to the line, run the shortest way round.

The logic is sound as far as it goes. The inside of the lane is the shortest path, and in a race settled by hundredths, a metre of extra ground is time you will never get back. Every coach who has ever said it is right about the geometry.

They are just wrong about how much it is worth.

Your race distance is measured from a point thirty centimetres off the inside line, so nobody is running the actual rail anyway.

And within the width of a single lane, the difference between the tightest line you can run and a slightly wider one is tiny, both in distance and in how sharp the curve is.

The real cost of a tight bend shows up between lanes, not within your own.

Lane one is a genuinely worse draw than lane eight, and there is nothing you can do about which one you get.

Listen to the people who run the event best and the line barely registers. Noah Lyles talks about staying in the middle of his lane, not shaving the inside of it. His attention goes elsewhere, and yours should too.

Coach it once, get them off the white paint so they do not risk a disqualification, and move on. There are bigger fish.

The bigger fish is why the bend costs you in the first place, and the answer is more specific than most people think. It has little to do with your lungs or the extra distance.

It comes down to one leg.

Put a sprinter on a curve and they lose something in the region of five per cent of their top speed compared with the straight.

Track that loss down and it lands almost entirely on the inside leg, because leaned in towards the turn, that leg is being asked to work from an awful position.

Think about standing up out of a low chair. With your weight square over both feet it is easy.

Now do it with your weight slumped out over one hip, and the same leg that stood you up a moment ago becomes more difficult to execute.

Same muscle, same strength, worse position, far less force.

That is the inside leg on the bend. It produces less force, so it hangs on the ground a fraction longer to hold you on the curve, and the longer it stays down the slower your legs can turn over.

The outside leg quietly does most of the real driving. One leg turns the corner, the other pays for the ground, and neither is doing the clean even job it does on the straight.

So the tax is mechanical. Sprinting on a lean simply puts one leg in a weaker position, and no amount of wanting it changes that.

Which brings you to the only argument about the bend actually worth having. If the tax cannot be dodged, do you pay it quietly, or do you fight it?

The usual response is pay it quietly. Float the bend, stay relaxed, sit at cruising speed, and save the real effort for the home straight where the race is won.

There is something to that, because nobody sprints a full 200 flat out and finishes it well. You have to give something back somewhere.

The trouble is that the runners who are best at the event give it back somewhere else.

Shericka Jackson spent years as one of the fastest 200 women alive, and she puts one of her worst days on a track down to floating a curve in an Olympic heat and getting caught.

Her answer was not to relax more. She went away and drilled the bend, hard, every single day, until she could attack it.

Ask Gabby Thomas or Noah Lyles and you get the same thing in different words. You drive the curve, you do not coast it.

There is a reason their instinct beats the textbook, and it runs straight back to that inside leg.

Speed you give away on the bend is not sitting in a bank waiting for you.

Once you have let yourself slow down, you have to re-accelerate on tired legs coming into the straight, and re-accelerating is slow and expensive.

Floating looks like it saves energy. Mostly it just hands you a gap you then have to close.

The runners who tie up at the end of a 200 are usually not being out-sprinted down the straight. They are the ones who slowed down first, back on the bend, and never got it back.

So what do you actually do with all of this?

Four things, and none of them is the thing you were probably taught.

Stop coaching the line.

Get your athlete off the inside paint so they will not foul, and then leave it alone. It is worth almost nothing, and it is eating attention that belongs elsewhere.

Treat the bend as somewhere to run.

The urge to relax and save it all for the straight is the exact urge that loses races, because the speed you concede on the curve is the speed you cannot buy back.

Run it tall.

The old cue to lean into the turn just makes athletes fold at the waist and grind, which feeds the problem rather than fixing it. What you want is an upright chest and the hips turning to follow the lane, staying smooth and long while the track tries to drag you round.

And train it on purpose.

It is easy to do all your fast running on the straight and then meet the bend cold on race day. The ones who are good at the curve are the ones who practise it, again and again, including the awkward moment where it unwinds into the straight.

If you want the single picture that holds it together, think of a driver taking a corner. You can lift off and coast round, losing speed you then have to claw back on the next straight, or you can carry as much as you dare through the corner itself.

The corner charges you either way. The quick ones are simply the ones who decided to pay as little as possible, and who have driven it enough times to trust it.

The bend was never somewhere to rest. It is a hundred metres of real sprinting that happens to curve, and it taxes every runner the same.

Nobody gets round that. The quick ones just stopped looking for a way and learned to run it.