Older sprinters got a raw deal in Budapest

EVEN AS the spellbinding nine days of the Budapest World Championships fade into history, there is one aspect of the Worlds that still makes me scratch my head.

For some reason, the time between the women’s 100-metre semi-finals and final was drastically reduced, and it’s hard to understand why.

In 2022, there were two hours and 17 minutes between the start of the first semi and the final. The corresponding period at the 2019 World Championships was exactly two hours. In the 2015 and 2017 Worlds, the interval was two hours and 40 minutes. That compares to the two-hour, 15-minute space in 2011 and 2013.

If you look back at World Championships held from 1993 onwards, that period has been as long as three hours and five minutes in 1997, and as short as one hour and 40 minutes.

Remarkably, in Budapest, the interval was 75 minutes, with just one hour between the last of the three semis and the final.

I haven’t heard any complaints from the athletes. Presumably, they train to repeat hard efforts with limited rest time. Even so, it seems to me that 60 minutes is hardly enough time to return to the warm-up area, recover from the semi-final, and then to check in again at the call room before racing for the medals.

By the way, the interval between next year’s women’s 100 Olympic semis and the final is 90 minutes.

Here’s another piece of armchair logic. The short recovery time favours the youngest sprinters and, in the women’s 100, the medal winners followed their order by age – gold for 23-year-old Sha’Carri Richardson, silver for 29-year-old Shericka Jackson, and bronze for 36-year-old Shelly-Ann Fraser-Pryce.

I hear you shouting that the schedule was the same for all the women’s 100-metre contestants but the space between the first men’s semi and the final was two hours and 45 minutes, and the schedules for men’s and women’s events are usually very similar. In Budapest, things were very different.

Even though it’s the same for everyone, I still don’t get it.

Hubert Lawrence has made notes at trackside since 1980.