Interesting though. It suggests the event has not progressed, despite no shortage of quality at the medals end of this spectrum.
More relevant would be figures for the last time needed to enter an Olympic or World Championship 400m final (as distinct from time of the eighth-placed finisher in finals). I suspect often the time of the last guy to qualify (out of the semis) will be faster than the eighth-placed time in the subsequent final.
But the observation is more relevant now since the Tournament structure has changed in recent years, within this decade for certain: World and Olympic Championships have been reduced to three rounds, instead of the traditional four rounds.
In Commonwealth Games, the rounds (not sure about the 2006 Games, sorry) have stayed at four, but since Vancouver Island 1994 finalists have been given a full day’s rest before racing for the medals.
They used to run four rounds over a roughly 28hrs period (across two successive days) with the semis only four hours or so before the final. That’s why the Com Games record set in 1970 at 45.0 lasted 20 years until the Aussie Darren Clark led two Kenyans into the 44s in Auckland.
Clark’s time of 44.60 then lasted only until the next Games in Canada because the Welsh winner may have been better prepared or more talented, but certainly the day’s rest before the final helped him to shave 0.02 off the record which still stands coming into India 2010.
The transformed competition format has created the potential for faster times in the preliminary rounds at all of the above tournaments.
One assumes the high performance managers for every national federation would have the figures to hand.
But the big question is, what are they going to do about it? These stats are all after the fact. How athletes and coaches should prepare to face the challenge remains paramount.