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Usain Bolt Speed Reserve vs. Michael Johnson Speed Endurance?

February 19, 2009 by Jimson Lee

With all the hype about Usain Bolt’s 10 meter splits and speculation on what he could have run, I forgot to analyze the 200 meters! Shame on me!

I touched the topic of Speed Reserve in Part 1 and Part 2.

Usian Bolt’s 200m splits were clocked at 9.98 + 9.32 splits for his 200m. Compared to Michael Johnson’s 19.32 from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, his splits were 10.12 + 9.20, so Johnson actually ran a faster second half.

The USATF supplied this photo taken from the stands and edited using Dartfish. The start of the race was recorded by using the smoke from the starting gun.

beijing-2008-mens-200-final_usain-bolt-100-meter-split.jpg


If you take away 1 full second for acceleration out of the blocks, as referenced in the Valeri Borzov - Training Procedures in Sprinting article, that gives a breakdown of:

Usain Bolt = (1.0 + 8.98) + 9.32
Michael Johnson = (1.0 + 9.12) + 9.20

Usain Bolt’s theoretical 9.0 seconds (rounded up) for 100 meters “on the fly” is pretty accurate considering his 3rd leg 4×100 meter relay split two days later at the same Olympics on the curve was also 8.98 seconds. Lead-off man Nesta Carter ran 10.41 & Michael Frater’s split was 9.01. This is considerably slower than Asafa Powell’s 8.7 “World best” relay leg. Before I get flamed, you can’t compare apples and oranges, or rather, the 3rd leg vs. the 4th leg, curve vs. straight, one hand-off vs. 2 baton exchanges, and so on.

Usain Bolt’s PB is 9.69*, so his speed reserve for the first 100 meters was 9.98 - 9.69 = 0.29*
Michael Johnson’s PB is 10.09, so his speed reserve was 10.12 - 10.09 = 0.03, or pretty close to his best 100.

*One can argue if Usain Bolt ran through the line, he would have run 9.63 or 9.64, making his speed reserve a whopping 0.35

Who is King of the 200 meters? Usain Bolt or Michael Johnson?

Based on numbers and splits, is it fair to say Usain Bolt executed the race with a better Speed Reserve, but Michael Johnson has better Speed Endurance?

Was Usain Bolt’s approach to the 200m better than Michael Johnson’s? I’ll let you decide.

My theoretical calculations for 100m and 200m is doubled your best 100m time +/- 0.2 seconds. This is a good indicator on what you need to improve on the respective events, or to determine which is your “better” event.

Even a 9.65 doubled = 19.30 +/- 0.2 seconds gives you a range of 19.10 to 19.50.

1910… Nineteen-Ten… Geez, that’s not a 200 meter time, that’s the year Mexico celebrated its centennial of the Independence War!
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Written by Jimson Lee · Filed Under Beijing 2008, Featured Story, Most Popular, Track and Field 

Comments

12 Responses to “Usain Bolt Speed Reserve vs. Michael Johnson Speed Endurance?”

  1. Overstreet on February 26th, 2009 5:03 pm

    Usain is insain wit speed man… he’s blazing fast… i’m a sophmore in high school running 4×1, 4×2, 200m… if i can jus work out with him i’ll be nice

  2. Pat Pawlowski on May 5th, 2009 8:46 am

    Excellent analysis.

  3. jet lee on June 26th, 2009 10:57 pm

    that speed reserve number for johnson is clearly incorrect, he ran the atlanta track out of lane 3…overcoming the turn slowed him more than for bolt who ran out of lane 5. For bolt it was 1 stride if I counted correctly…his first 1/2 of the 200 was covered in 42 strides vs 41 for his 100m WR.

    Johnson would run turns better than most due to his naturally short strides (especially when compared to bolt who has naturally long strides).

    but…we’re working with limited information as johnson’s one season of 100’s clearly didn’t give us enough data.

  4. Jimson Lee on June 27th, 2009 2:02 am

    @Jet - yes, MJ 10.09 is a single race on one season. So who knows how fast he could be if he focused on that event?

  5. jks on August 20th, 2009 8:42 am

    johnson doesn’t have the same sort of top end speed in a single 100 as bolt so it would be very difficult for him to have a large speed reserve and still be that far under 20 seconds– the race simply isn’t long enough to run a 10.3 and make up the ground on the back 100

  6. Usain Bolt 19.19 200m World Record Video | SpeedEndurance.com on August 20th, 2009 12:49 pm

    […] training”, Bolt’s greatest asset is his speed reserve. I wrote an in depth article on Usain Bolt’s speed reserve vs. Michael Johnson’s speed endurance where he split the 200m in […]

  7. jet lee on August 20th, 2009 5:54 pm

    iaaf.org published the biomechanical numbers, bolts 50m on a curve was 5.60s, 100m was 9.92s (6/100th faster than the beijing run), 14.44s @ the 150m. The 2nd 100m run in 9.27s vs a beijing run of 9.32s.

    adjusting for reaction time it seems like both races were very consistent.

    Both races were run outta lane 5.

  8. Mike R on August 21st, 2009 4:30 am

    I think from a pure speed standpoint.. Usain is much faster and has the record.

    But for Johnson to showcase “endurance” in a 200m race is basically unheard of.

    Everyone thinks of the 200 as a pure speed, no endurance. You think that if you run the first 100m then you can carry 95% of your speed through the race and run a faster 2nd part. MJ showed this and no one has been able to top it.

    Usain has insane speed and if he can work on his endurance.. then he could potentially break the 19 second barrier. It will not be as easy for him as breaking the current 100/200 were he will have to work twice as hard as he has been working.

    If he is to break the 200m further, I think we will see him running some 400meter runs in the near future, which will be interesting!

  9. jet lee on August 21st, 2009 10:27 am

    Oh yea,

    regarding the speed reserve & endurance figures for comparison. I track down Dr Mureika’s handy webpage for density altitude, elevation & wind correction of various performances. Since I don’t have the barometric Pa, etc I’ll stick to altitude & wind correction page here: http://myweb.lmu.edu/jmureika/track/wind/index.html

    Inputting the figures provided by the IAAF yields the following

    The 2nd half of MJ’s atlanta run equates to a 0m elevation & 0.0m/s wind correction of a 9.227s from the actual 9.20s
    The 2nd half of Bolts Beijing run using (45m elevation) corrects to 9.276s from a 9.32s
    The 2nd half of yesterday nights run in berlin corrects to 9.256s.

    Essentially bolts berlin 2nd half corrected is merely 3/100ths of a second (0.029s) slower than MJ’s atlanta run.

    This analysis is subject to enough error to be caution when extrapolating information. As the straight aways is just over 80m and not 100m, we don’t know what the cross wind was etc.

  10. Mike R on August 21st, 2009 11:25 am

    I think some of these figures are overly analyzed.

    Which place has cleaner air, Bejing, Altanta, Berlin? I mean all that has to do with how much oxygen people get while breathing etc.

    But if your going to correct the 2nd 100meters, then correct the first 100 meters also.

    That means MJ ran a 10.2ish first 100meters. Anyway you look at it.. his second 100meters was a full second faster than his first. Whether he reserved speed.. or he just MAINTAINED speed is 2 different things.

    It looks more like Usain went all out.. and tried to continue but was running out of gas. While MJ looks like he ran 100% and could do it for another 50 meters.

    Either way both are great examples of heart and determination. I remember in HS racing the 400m kids at 800m (I was a natural1/2miler). I was consistently running like 55/56’s in the quarter and wasn’t close to their high 49’s / low 50’s. The 800 was always a great race to challenge each other. Wish there was a 600m race to make things really interesting.

    I would have liked to have seen Donovan Bailey (in his prime)/ Usain Bolt 150 meter race. I hated that the previous MJ / DB race didn’t work out.

  11. jet lee on August 21st, 2009 11:38 am

    can’t really correct for the curve 100m, i got no wind information. Mureika’s page explicitly mentions that limitation.

    you can correct for density altitude, elevation & humidity. Those affect the results but the big wild card is wind; that does more to affect a race time than any other factor.

    On the other page speed reseve/endurance page regarding bolts race I put figures correcting for reaction time. I’ll duplicate that here verbatim:

    Adjust for reaction time and we get to compare the 6/100ths (0.056s) difference between the 1st halves of the beijing & berlin 200m runs. controlling for elevation, temperature beijing & berlin are similar enough.

    Beijing RT 0.182s 1st half of 9.976s
    Berlin RT 0.133s 1st half of 9.92s

    5/100ths (0.049s) of the 6 100ths (0.056s) difference between the 2 runs can be explained by his lousy start in beijing. If you accept the data is accurate to the 1/1000th’s than the difference is only 7/1000ths.

    effort wise ignoring RT his beijing @ berlin runs are extremely consistent they’re virtually indistinguishable.

  12. Usain Bolt 200 meter splits, Speed Reserve and Speed Endurance | SpeedEndurance.com on August 25th, 2009 11:21 pm

    […] Compared to Michael Johnson’s 19.32 from the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, his splits were 10.12 + 9.20, so Johnson still has the fastest second half ever recorded. […]

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