Question for discussion: Is a good big man always better than a good small man?
when your top speed is better than everyone else it doesnt really matter if your big or small:)
That’s only part of the story surely: Depends how long it takes for you to reach top speed and how long you can hold it, how severely you decelerate etc.
And shorter guys tend to reach top speed sooner while taller guys tend to hold top speed better. Perhaps when these guys get so fast that it takes 80m or 90m to accelerate fully, then short guys will have an advantage (in the 100m)? Just thinking aloud…
And, while this doesn’t necessarily discount the notion of max velocity will always win out, there are some coaches - eg John Smith (and perhaps Bobby Kersee when he was working with Flojo) - who espoused the idea that he didn’t want his guy (ie, Mo Greene) to ever hit max velocity due to suspicion he would “bounce” down rapidly off the ceiling. INstead, he preferred Greene and others to get close to top speed and hold that sub-max rating for as many 10m segments as possible - thereby reducing the deceleration zone.
The question of Big v Small is also bound up in the issue of lever length, lever strength and probably elevation (ie stride length).
Another issue is that of Mass + Momentum
Been too big IS bad and would limit a lot of things.
Relative strength + reactive strength + technique = AWESOME SPEED
A lot of big guy are fast 0-30m even 0-60m, but It’s getting less easy to maintain higher hips when you are more heavy.
Are we only talking about size here (how big you are) or how tall you are…or both?
Precisely, and to what extent does the novel classical mechanics principle of inertia play a role with respect to the Mass + Momentum of the sprinter…
Does the taller (ergo more massive) sprinter decelerate more slowly at a lesser bioenergetic expenditure later in the race; albeit, at the greater bioenergetic expenditure that is required to get there earlier in the race (hence the longer acceleration)
I suppose this is the same concept as the (I think it was termed as such) “refractory response” where an incredibly fast segment would cause a blow-up/collapse, relatively speaking, to the following segments?
I’ve heard top female club coach Tony Wells speak of this or at least it sounds like the same thing.
Sounds like the same thing. First time I speculated on that notion was in 88 after reading Frank Dick’s evaluation of the segments in Flojo’s 100m gold medal race in Seoul, in which he summised she never actually did reach her maximum velocity because the drop-off in the closing segments was so slight.
Then John Smith talked about the idea of skimming just beneath the “ceiling” velocity and all of that… others may have beaten them both to it, and now maybe it’s been thrown out the window by what Bolt achieved but I haven’t looked at his splits for ages. IN any event, Bolt would seem to represent the classic “Big Man” model.
Didnt CF mention that the role of the 20E 20F 20E, or more so, 40E 20F 20E is to achieve Max speeds? Speeds that in a 100m race your unlikely to replicate.
I think he gave the story of before the 88 100m race we all know, of a race leading into it, Some grand prix event, where, even though Ben ran a slower time than the 9.79 - he had hit a higher Max top speed than the 9.79 race. Which was due to the pick up drills they had been practicing. Ben i believe, had a slower start than normal (0-30m), then picked up to some crazy speed…
I believe he said it along them lines? Hope im not wrong and look like a goose…
Yes in Zurich he had a submaximal accel and hit a higher top speed. So you’re not a goose 
A good “big man” but perhaps not quite this BIG: Yao and Liu