Why a Fast First 200m is Critical to 400m Success

Let’s review the 2024 Woman’s 400m Roma European Championships. To me, it was one of the greatest 400m races that year, male or female.

We already know the outcome, but let’s have a deeper dive in analysing the splits & race execution.

Let’s see who has the great 200m speed and speed reserve. On paper, Adeleke has a 0.62 second PR advantage in the 200m over Kaczmarek (now Bukowiecka), showing incredible speed. Adeleke also ran a wind-assisted 10.84-second 100m earlier that year!

But the race is 400m!

There are tons of articles about the importance of Speed Reserve here on this Blog.

The race was close, and look at Adeleke’s near perfect start based on her reaction time! That is being close to a DQ!

We don’t have insight on her training, but I assume the training is in place.

So it all comes down to race execution, where ideally, you run the 1st 200 about 1 second slower than your 200m PB. If you can run faster than 1 second, like Kaczmarek, even better, but the training must be there. You must trust your training, you must trust your coach, and you must trust the process!

The stats & splits above show Adeleke should have (could have) attacked the first 200m faster, say 23.34.

In this great article where they interviewed her coach Edrick Floreal, he makes some interesting comments about the race results:

Floreal wanted Adeleke to utilise that to her advantage, believing that if she went through 200m in 22.9 or 23.0, it would not only be the most efficient way for her to race but also put pressure on her chief rival. But as soon as the gun fired, he was worried. “I knew it from the first step that she just didn’t feel comfortable (attacking the first 200m),” he says. “It was too slow.” 

He wants Adeleke to follow a similar approach to Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone, the Olympic champion and world record holder in the 400m hurdles who Floreal used to coach at the University of Kentucky. “You get out hard in the beginning, use your speed to your advantage and use your strength to maintain the form at the end,” he says.

Adeleke hit halfway in 23.69, with Kazcmarek a yard ahead in 23.59. The Dubliner closed up around the bend, turning for home level. But the home straight is the strongest part of Kazcmarek’s race and the Pole – who’s five years older than Adeleke, with several more years of conditioning – edged Adeleke to victory with a stronger last 50m.