I think he tends to rely on competitions as special endurance during the domestic season a lot more than I ever did.
I saw a clip of his run in that state final and he was still going flat-out at least 120m into the race which I think was about twice as long as he should have gone hard for. I communicated that to his camp and we’ll see what happens. In Beijing he apparently said he went hard for the first 80m. It’s about “cunning running” this event, so he still needs to learn that and put it into practice.
Although the new track was dead from days of cold and rain, and maybe Joel used excess energy trying to warm up, the conditions during the 400 final were good for those guys.
There was a little tailwind going out and not much water on the track at the time because the rain was nothing more than glorified mist.
So Joel perhaps should have run a faster time. He may need to in order to beat Xavier ‘X-Man’ Carter on Feb 28 at Sydney’s big meet of the year.