Ben Johnson's 1986 Zurich race

Many thanks to Balance for digging into his archives and pulling out the raw tape.

Here is the animated GIF, stripped down to under 1Mb, but I’ll post the better quality WMV file a bit later.

here is the WMV file, 320x240, 30fps, 512Kb bit rate (for all those techies)

Check out imoh’s less than text book form!

Check the vid clip and you’ll see the .81 segment or 12.35mps I was talking about (60 to 70)

Listen to the commentary - äll the myths are present, ie Johnsons start ,Lewis’ finish etc…

Upon second hearing it sounds like the commentator actually understood what was happening. Guess it was just me trying to exorcise a ghost - I bought into that myth big time.

i see whaqt you are talking about Charlie.from the 50m line BJ fairly moved.looked faster than 10.03 though!

Unbelievable!!:clap: It looks like Ben hit the Nitrous button! Hey DCW, how are u coming along with that Modern history tape? Are u going to post any races soon?

FASTTTTTTT, but it looked like there was a lot of back kick from 80-100m… anyone else see this, or am i just nit picking?

If you look closely you’ll see the burst where he takes a breath and explodes, blowing out slowly under pressure (valsalva) extending from about 50 to 80 meters, when he shuts down- hense more back kick after that. Everyone in the world was there and he walked away like they were going backwards.

Charlie,

What if an athlete like myself watched that race over 5k times as I have? Would it leave an imprint in my muscles via my eyes :o so that one day I too can have a .81 10m segment? lol That race was amazing!

-Balance

To put the time in more perspective, the wind in the race was minus 1.3mps. Of the top 24 sprinters of the year, ALL were present in the field. Imoh, who you see trailing FAR behind in second place, ran a legal 10.00 two days later in Berlin. It is helpful to follow the cadence of the race to see when the surge takes place. It was very close at the 50 meter mark.

Ben Johnson at 60m is to Michael Johnson at 300m.

It didn’t look so much like he went faster. It just seemed like he didn’t slow down what so ever? The same way MJ looks like he’s speeding when he hits the 300m mark during the 400m.

Treble
Watch it again. You’ll see the pick up at 50m and at 60 he’s still picking up speed. We’re working on getting a better copy for review.

the 50m mark is outlined great.from here on BJ takes off when CL should have been gaining.

THere’s a great picture of the Seoul final in Speed Trap. Lewis, Christie and Smith are all icompletely synchronised whilst Ben is in the support phase with the opposite foot - he’d obviously already taken an extra stride…

remember, we’re at the mercy of the original analog tape from 1986!

WMV files are 14MB/min, so the clip would be about 2.8MB (at 720x480, 2KB/sec bit rate streaming, 30fps)

raw AVI (or DV) is 216MB/min, so that would be about 48MB!

Charlie, Rupert and No.2,

Could this race be added to the seminar tapes 3 and 4 in any way??

Maybe at the end, you could show some of Ben’s races, to show his progression.

if you look carefully, there are lines on the track where BJ splits at 6.9 sec (using the photo-eye timer on the bottom right) and 9.0 sec.

any idea what these are?

Tha 9 sec mark is 90m. (gives you an idea how much he gave away when he shut down- over 1 sec for the last 10m! I don’t know what the other line is but I do remember seeing other line markers on the film I had before (which disappeared!).