I'm glad to hear of your success but you're one of the only coaches I know who has their top guy lead off. Furthermore a running start gets you to top speed faster than a down start, why waste him out of the blocks. I understand the reasoning for your slowest guy going last which is what teams do when they realize they probably wont win, but there's a reason the fastest teams place their killers 2nd and 4th. Carl Lewis always anchored (5 world records) and when Carl wasn't the fastest Leroy Burrell who was ran the second leg. The American's order was fine.
why the hell was Brommel on the anchor?!!
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Coach wrote:
Furthermore a running start gets you to top speed faster than a down start, why waste him out of the blocks. I understand the reasoning for your slowest guy going last which is what teams do when they realize they probably wont win, but there's a reason the fastest teams place their killers 2nd and 4th. Carl Lewis always anchored (5 world records) and when Carl wasn't the fastest Leroy Burrell who was ran the second leg. The American's order was fine.
If I had guys who were (at the time) four of the ten fastest humans on the planet, I could readily afford to accommodate all of their individual abilities.
I never actually had that. I had to figure a way to maximize my runners' abilities, and--all else being equal--I wanted my fastest guy carrying the baton the longest, and my slowest guy carrying it the shortest.
As long as he was a decent starter/curve runner, my fastest guy was not "wasted" out of the blocks--he generally left the other teams playing catch-up the whole race, and we beat a lot of teams we "shouldn't" have, as a result.
Carl Lewis *would* have been wasted out of the blocks, because there were other Americans who were much better starters--and because he had a habit of switching hands when he got the baton, which he just couldn't seem to break. That's not too bad for the anchor (costs a tiny bit of time), but would destroy the passes if your second or third leg did it.
[Now, if you want real controversy: I also had my teams do an "up" pass, like the French teams, rather than the downsweep pass that most American teams do. Some good research was done on the different kinds of passes (thirty years ago, now?), and it established that the up pass is just as fast, but results in fewer missed passes and dropped batons. Ah, but most coaches don't follow the research, right? They just keep doing it the way *they* did it as athletes...]
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DsqWUkp_iD4Check 0:15 et seq.
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