Three years in a row isn’t it now at No. 18? That’s more than coincidence. SF is his own man and doesn’t acknowledge much but his earliest ever start to a season, coming to Australia to race (bloody long way for virtually zero pay) also seems more than a coincidence. Not sure SF has ever said so to the press, but he certainly takes everything on board in making his deliberations. The Aussie trip was supposedly to test where they were at in training. Asafa ran only once and ran 10-flat or something like that (after getting stitches out of his knee a few days earlier, from memory). I would say the Aussie trip was more than just to run a time trial, because there was certainly no opposition for Asafa. It was a break from the same old training environment, but it was also a little insurance policy against interruptions to his preparation later in the year. SF says he doesn’t do indoors, refusing to get people ready in January. But there he has Asafa go a full 100m outdoors in January. It wasn’t for the money that’s for sure because Aussie Federation has not much of that, nothing sufficient on its own to entice the world recordholder to travel halfway around the world to find some real races and lace up for them. He had been due to compete in two indvidual and possibly one relay. So three races would have started his 18-race time-line pretty nicely.
I would think race 19 and 20 are also as good as 18?
Fair enough I wasn’t questioning the race 18
factor just the way it was phrased.
We know they had our charts.
I have heard someone say that every race after the Olympic final has been #18 now…
I see Gold in Asafa’s future…at the World Athletics Final