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Where your triple jump step went

When the middle phase is the short one, the fault is nearly always in the phase before it.

You watch the jump and the step barely happens. The hop is enormous, the athlete lands hard, something short and apologetic occurs in the middle, and the jump into the pit is whatever is left.

The step is the phase with nothing to spare

Coaches argue about the right phase ratio, and the argument is legitimate; hop-dominant and jump-dominant models have both won championships. What nobody argues for is a step that has collapsed to a quarter of the jump, because that is not a technique choice; it is a symptom.

The step is the only phase entered on the leg that has just absorbed the hop landing. There is no time to build force and nothing to build it with. It lives on whatever horizontal speed survived the landing before it, which is why the fault is almost never in the step itself.

• A hop that goes up rather than out. Height in the first phase is bought with the horizontal speed the other two phases need, and it is paid for at the landing.
• A hop landing with the foot far out in front, which brakes. The higher the hop, the harder that landing, and the more speed it takes away.
• No free-leg drive into the step. If the swing leg does not go, the athlete has to reach, and a reach is another brake.
• An overstriding runway. The braking starts before the board and there is less to spend on all three phases.

What StatLap measures

The triple jump analysis reports the first takeoff angle, a phase count taken from the hip trace, hip rise per phase, and overstride on the runway. Hip rise per phase is the one that shows this fault directly: a hop that rises a long way and a step that barely rises at all is exactly the pattern described above, and it is visible in a single clip without anybody having to measure the sand.

What it does not do is measure the distance of each phase. It works from the hip trace, so it can tell you the hop rose far more than the step did; it cannot tell you the hop was 4.1 metres and the step 2.8. For the actual distances you still need marks on the runway, a tape, and somebody willing to use both.

The drills it sends you to

Hop-hop-step ladders, kept flat and even, which force the phases to even out because an uneven one will not fit. Standing triple from a walk-in, slow enough to feel a flat hop and short enough to do twenty times. And A-march into A-skip for the runway itself, because the approach is still sprinting, and a braking step out there costs the whole attempt before the board is reached.

Film square to the runway, from far enough back that all three phases stay in the frame, and do not pan. A hip trace from a moving camera is measuring the camera as well as the athlete, and the phase count is the first thing to go wrong when it does.

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