The call room is where sprinters get injured

Championship protocol strands athletes in a cold corridor for half an hour after their warm-up, and then asks for a maximal effort.

An athlete does a long, careful warm-up. Drills, gradual accelerations, a couple of near-maximal efforts, everything designed to raise muscle temperature and prepare tissue for what is coming. Then he is called, taken indoors, checked for kit compliance, and made to sit on a plastic chair for thirty or forty minutes.

By the time he walks out, most of what the warm-up achieved is gone. Muscle temperature falls quickly once the work stops. Tissue compliance falls with it. And the first thing he will do on the track is set his blocks and produce the highest force his body is capable of, from a cold start, in front of a crowd, with a season attached to the outcome.

This is a well known problem and the sport's response has been mostly cosmetic. Some venues provide a small area to move in. Many do not, or provide one so cramped that a full stride is impossible. The rules about equipment and timings are enforced far more consistently than the provision of space to stay warm, which tells you which of the two the organisers consider their responsibility.

Athletes cope by improvising. Long trousers and jackets kept on until the last moment. Isometric holds against a wall. A set of jumps in whatever corner exists. Some coaches now build the warm-up specifically to peak late, deliberately holding back the hardest efforts so that a shortened routine on the track before the gun can finish the job.

I think the deeper mistake is treating the call room as an administrative matter rather than a competition variable. It is part of the event. It affects performance and it affects risk, and it varies enormously between meetings, which means athletes are being asked to perform under conditions that are not standardised in any way while we obsess over standardising the surface and the wind reading.

There is a reasonable objection about security and scheduling, and I do not doubt that keeping a hundred athletes moving through a stadium on time is genuinely difficult.

Then shorten the wait. Twenty minutes on a chair before a maximal hamstring load is a design choice, and every year somebody pays for it in the first thirty metres.