Oral Tracey | Fastest times not necessarily best performances

There are myriad talking points coming out of the just concluded IAAF World Championships in Doha, Qatar. Chief among them must be the stunning upset in the women’s 400m final, where 21-year-old Nigerian-born Salwa Eid Naser, representing Bahrain, beat pre-race favourite Shaunae Miller-Uibo in what will go down as one of track and field’s classic races. Naser took it out at a blistering pace and held her form beautifully down the stretch to repel the last-gasp challenge of Miller-Uibo, stopping the clock at a jaw-dropping 48.14 seconds, with the Bahamian champion posting a personal best of 48.37 in defeat.

Emanating from that spectacle is another round of discussions as to whether Miller-Uibo executed her best race despite posting a personal best. Miller-Uibo herself has reportedly admitted that she might have left it too late and allowed Naser to get away from her, suggesting that she herself thought it was not her best possible execution of the race.

The theory that an athlete’s fastest time is always his or her best performance depicts simplicity of thought that totally dismisses the dynamic of intangibles, for which statistical analysis offers no explanation.

As far as that theory goes, if a sprinter runs 9.85s over 100m at a meet with very little competition and a 2.00m-per-second tailwind, that is inherently a better performance than him turning up in the Olympic final with all the publicity, prestige, and pressure involved and clocking 9.90s into a negative 2.00m-per-second headwind to earn the Olympic 100m title. That is simplicity of analysis gone mad.

SIMPLISTIC ANALYSIS

The actual fact of the matter is that an athlete’s fastest time is not necessarily his or her best performance. Miller-Uibo, for example, won the 400m Olympic final in Rio in 2016 with that infamous dive across the line in 49.44 seconds in an achievement that she will probably cherish more than any other in her career. According to this flawed theory, Miller-Uibo’s losing effort of 48.37 in Doha was a greater performance than beating Allyson Felix for Olympic glory in Rio, simply because the time was faster.

Another element of naïveté is that outside of the immeasurable intangibles attached to executing on the biggest stage in the biggest moments, that theory ignores the crucial component of conditions. If the fastest time always equals the best performance, then wind reading, climate, weather, and their impact on race execution are thrown out the window. Conditions must always factor into the analysis of execution and performance.

Implicit in that theory, also, is that athletes are more focused and motivated by running ­personal-best times than winning titles. Therefore, if an athlete wins the Olympic title with a slow time, he or she will be bitterly disappointed by that performance, but if that same athlete runs down the track and records a personal best, he or she will be more elated and ecstatic with that supposedly better performance.

The look on Miller-Uibo’s face at the end of that upset defeat says it all. She ran a huge ­personal best but was clearly bewildered and despondent in those moments after crossing the finish line because she failed in her ultimate objective of becoming a World champion. Her delayed ­celebrations were for the ­consolation prizes of the personal best and the silver medal. She knows deep down that she fell short with a performance that was not her best.