Sprinters do not get slow, they get light on the ground

Ageing takes force before it takes anything else, which is why a veteran can look identical on video and still lose a tenth.

A sprinter at 34 often looks exactly like the sprinter he was at 26. Same posture, same arm carriage, same step pattern to the eye. The clock disagrees, and the reason is not visible from the stands.

Top speed comes from how much force the foot applies to the track during a very short contact. As athletes age, the capacity to generate that force quickly declines earlier and faster than endurance qualities do, and the large fast motor units are the ones that go first. The result is a slightly softer contact. Slightly longer time on the ground. A stride that is a few centimetres shorter, repeated forty times.

Nothing about that is dramatic enough to see. It is a percentage, spread across a race, and it shows up as a tenth of a second that the athlete cannot explain and that the training log cannot locate.

The usual response is to train harder in exactly the way that makes it worse. More volume, more repeats, more of the running that feels like work. But the quality that is disappearing is a maximal one, and maximal qualities respond to freshness, not accumulation. An older athlete needs more recovery between hard efforts and fewer of them, which is uncomfortable advice for someone who believes his career is ending because he is not working hard enough.

The strength room becomes more important, not less, and specifically the fast end of it. Jumps, throws, plyometric contacts, heavy lifts done with intent to move the bar quickly. The point is not muscle size. The point is keeping access to the units that are drifting out of reach.

Here is the part I would defend against most coaches. Veteran sprinters should probably run less and jump more. The running maintains the pattern, and the pattern is not what is failing. The force is failing, and force is trained more efficiently against a barbell and a landing than against a stopwatch.

None of it stops the decline. It slows the slope, and in a sport where a career ends over the third decimal place, slowing the slope is the whole business.

The cruel part is that the athlete feels fine. Nothing hurts. He just cannot get off the ground the way he used to, and no amount of wanting it changes the contact time.