Both Tyson Gay and Derrick Atkins have ended their season. The 9 lanes for 200m in Bruxelles are full, unless someone pulls out there’s no place for Powell. At this point of the season, i’m not sure he wants to line up against Bolt or Carter and take the risk to get beaten.
Regarding Powell in Athens OG’04 : he ran easy 9.99 and 9.95 in qf and sf before his 5th place with 9.94 in final, he was unbeaten all season including wins over the top 4 guys in Athens, his very next competition was Bruxelles in 9.87. While that top 4 (Gatlin Obikwelu Greene and Crawford) were able to raise their game and set PBs or SBs in Athens, Powell only did his 5the time of the season.
IMO it has to do with psyche as well as mistakes in tapering, because confidence comes from preparation.
In 2004, he set PB 12 days after Olympic final.
In 2007, he set WR 14 days after World final.
In 2003, he was dq for false start at World, but he did PB 12 days after, once again.
Please refer to the charts to see what we’ve been talking about;
Points to discuss:
1: The longer the prep period in a long-to-short program, the longer the competition period is likely to need to be to bring the performance up to a peak. asafa was on number 18 (heats and finals) before his first WR last year and 18 this year, BUT, unfortunately, 6 of the prepe comps ended up being at the WCs in Osaka.
The original plan may have had the full complement of comps in the plan but injury (always a greater risk in the LONG-to-SHORT approach because of the long time in the prep period at a lower speed) occured and there was insufficient time in the plan to make allowances.
If there had been either an indoor period (as with Tyson) of a short period in March outdoors (as with the commonwealth Games last year for Asafa), he would have had enough time to recover and still get in the necessary number of races.
2: A shorter prep period with this approach allows a peak with less races as you aren’t so far away from the last speed period.
Have a look at the numbers over the last four years along the bottom of the last chart and see what you think. i’d be very interested to hear your comments and your thoughts on the approach for next year about an indoor or short outdoor Australian campaign.
I suggested a 200 because it doesn’t matter if he wins there at all. The 2003 DQ was bogus and he should not have been called.
The pattern is what I’m showing in my graphs so the answer is to turn the comp period back a bit to get the peaks to allign.
Asafa needs to fix competition schedule and taper if not, in 2008, we will see his best race 2 weeks after Olympics. Like Charlie says, Asafa did 6 race in one week in Osaka vs 11 in 6 months! Asafa didn’t looked more stressed than Tyson during the warm-up before Osaka final, i would actually say it was quite the opposite!
Someone with a weak mental would not come back in his first competition after humiliation with a WR. Asafa has everything to run a WR in Beijing, but he won’t be the only one to do so i hope!
As I said before, Tyson looked very nervous and glanced over at Asafa several times when he should have been focusing on himself. Of course, Tyson didn’t have his coach with him then and is likely to have him there next year to settle him down.
His coach wasn’t there but Jon Drummond was everywhere. Just before the last call for call room, i went to get a water bottle and Jon was doing the key drill with Tyson to test his reaction. Out of 15 trials, Tyson catched the key 3 times and several persons were looking at him. I told myself Oh my god he has now 30min to overcome this failure and get his head back if not he is over for the fight.
Like I said- his coach- not someone with “coachitis” trying to prove how smart he is. You can do the clap drill, which is specific and can have no possible issue or you can do something like that with the potential to mess up
At least, with beginners, it was with a coin- and you got to keep it if you caught it! Of course, if it was the key to the right girl’s room… well, that’s another story!
Since he has a fondness for certain European locales, perhaps a 3-5 week training/competition period could be fitted in mid winter. Doesn’t Fasuba do something along that line?
I suppose the front and back end would need to be structured to support prep and I guess some off-loading.
The advantage of European indoor comp is that you can run more meets (less CNS stress per race at 60m vs 100m) to perfect your competitive approach. the advantage outdoors is to work on the finish as well, but with less runs and more spread out, requiring more time in a winter competitive period.
When I look at the charts, I would think that a S-L plan beginning in late fall and including a Euro indoor campaign would well. Again I’m probably favoring multiple SPPs during this period.
Also, I’m curious about Powell’s health history. With respect to occurrences during the early part of a season, I’m not too comfortable with an extensive winter competitive period. Or perhaps these are in his head - not particularly up for the work or a phase of just being lazy (winter is for chilling out).
