I was shocked when I saw the (supposedly official) FAT splits. But post Games it was said the splits could not all be relied upon. I would say that when you took Devers’ fantastic start away, she did come back to the pack a bit and maybe she fades slightly over 100m and the backstraight being the longest leg (potentially)…anyway, the point of the reference was to show that you can still do a good job over 100m and a better job over 200m on the type of concurrent program proposed in our thread here.
I think if I had known she was being considered for the 4x1 I’d have given much greater emphasis to her block work and initial acceleration phase, and given her more rest on the days she did her speed development sessions. In a time trial in Atlanta about 10 days before the meet she shocked some of the team coaches hitting a three-step walk up 200m in 22.4 (my time). The others got her at 22.1 and 22.2. So, she was ready. I think she had also (finally) found her rhythm on the very hard Atlanta track. A couple of weeks earlier in North Carolina she was in a “run-off” for the third 400 individual spot and she ran like a drain - just rubbish. She knew it too. But boy she made up for it in Atlanta.
This was a young woman who was pretty gritty normally, although she never was comfortabvle with the GPP stuff like 5x200 or 9x300. After Atlanta she coped much better and we got through the second cycle of GPP and she was ready to do something special for the coming summer, but then she decided she didn’t like the bitchiness of the scene and wanted to have babies. I was super disappointed she hung up the spikes, but she got the thrill of racing in front of a packed stadium three times at an Olympics and she ran virtual PBs every time she stepped on the track there, so it fulfilled her in the sports career sense. She figured the sacrifice was no longer worth it…