Akani Simbine could have been mapping out his 2022 season from the vantage point of king of the world, the Olympic champion, but instead he’s doing it from the all too familiar position of the nearly man.
Fourth at the Tokyo showpiece last year, fourth at the 2019 world championships, fifth at the Diamond League final in 2018, fifth at the 2017 world championships and fifth at Rio 2016.
That might inspire some observers to suggest that 28-year-old Simbine just doesn’t have it, and they could be right, though I’m not talking about what’s in his head. I’m referring to his footwear.
Make no mistake, Simbine has plenty of BMT.
It can’t be coincidence that he was the only one of 11 sprinters to dip under 9.9 sec in 2021 not wearing spikes with carbon fibre plates.
Simbine’s adidas spikes, on the other hand, use the same technology that assisted then world No.1 Maurice Greene two decades ago.
It also cannot be coincidence that 11 is the highest number of sub-9.9 runners in a calendar year.
One would have to go back to 2011 for the next most prolific year, with 10 sub-9.9s, when the stars of the day featured greats like Usain Bolt, Asafa Powell, Tyson Gay and Yohan Blake. More than half of them, including Powell, Gay and Blake, failed drug tests during their careers.
That was a doping era, and now is the time of shoe-doping, where the carbon fibre plate pioneered by Nike and matched by New Balance and Puma seems to have changed the face of sprinting by giving mortals more torque.
Simbine’s adidas spikes, on the other hand, use the same technology that assisted then world No.1 Maurice Greene two decades ago.
When Simbine walked out for the Olympic final in Tokyo he was, in the words of one local athletics aficionado, taking “a knife to a gunfight”.
Italy’s Nike-sponsored European champion Lamont Marcell Jacobs arrived in Japan with a 9.95 best, but in the heats he went 9.94 before dropping to 9.84 in the semifinal and then winning the final in 9.80.
Before 2021 the fastest Jacobs, now 27, had managed was 10.03. By the time Simbine turned 26, he had broken 10 seconds no fewer than 23 times. Jacobs hadn’t done it once.
Simbine was still on the outer edges of the radar in 2014 when multiple Olympic medallist Ato Boldon addressed a conference in Durban, explaining that the most crucial technological advances to improve speed had been in track development.
Jesse Owens won the 100m on a cinder track at the 1936 Berlin Olympics in 10.3 sec, while Jim Hines, Charlie Greene and Ronnie Ray all broke 10 seconds for the first time on a synthetic surface in Sacramento, California.
Developments have continued since then, with Mondo now the fastest of all.
Boldon stressed that technology of shoes had made almost no difference to the speed of sprinters.
But that has changed, probably thanks largely to Nike’s attempt to get Eliud Kipchoge to break the two-hour barrier in the marathon. Distance runners have also improved dramatically with new technology. Now the sprints are benefiting.
Combining the carbon fibre plate to Mondo could be the closest mankind has come so far to producing lightning.
That certainly seemed to be the case in Tokyo. The men’s and women’s 400m hurdles there both produced world records.
Eight men dipped under 48 seconds and five women went under 53 seconds, with both being the highest in a calendar year. Three of those eight men went under 47 seconds while two women broke 52 seconds.
Of those 13, 11 were assisted by carbon fibre.
The women’s 200m also showed a pronounced improvement with eight women, all of them powered by carbon fibre, breaking 22 seconds. Six of them went under 21.9.
The previous best in a single year in this event, in 2015, was four going under 22, of whom two went below 21.9.
Sunday Times Daily understands that adidas-sponsored athletes have asked the German manufacturer to try to catch up to their competitors.
The fact that adidas recently signed Ronnie Baker, one of the Nike speedsters from last year, suggests that it is working on a new shoe.
The highlight of Simbine’s 2021 was setting the 9.84 African record last year, but that mark didn’t last long, being pushed down to 9.77 by Kenyan Ferdinand Omanyala, wearing a pair a Nikes. He too has signed with adidas.
One has to wonder how much faster Simbine will go if, or when, he laces on carbon fibre plates. Until he does, the playing field won’t be level.
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