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Which events should a new athlete try?

Two measurements and a fortnight of letting everybody try everything will place most first-year athletes better than a season of guessing.

Week one, forty new names, and no idea which of them is a hurdler. The default is to watch a lap, put the fast-looking ones in the sprints, the tall ones in the jumps and the big ones in the throws, and sort it out by April. That mostly works, which is the problem. Mostly means a handful of athletes spend a season in the wrong event.

Two measurements, one session

Most of the sorting that numbers can do is done by two tests taken the same afternoon. A short run from a standing start, around 20 metres, which is nearly all acceleration. And a flying segment with a proper run-up, which is nearly all maximum velocity. Both come back in metres per second from the speed gates, and speeds are what make athletes comparable with each other rather than only with themselves.

Read the two together. An athlete who is quick off the line and ordinary at full speed is built for things that are mostly acceleration. One who takes a while to get going but carries a high flying speed has the engine that the jumps and the longer sprints want. And an athlete who is unremarkable in both but turns up every week is telling you something no test will.

What the tests cannot see

• Whether an athlete will go over a barrier. The only way to find out is to put a low hurdle down and watch. The ones who are not frightened of it are your hurdlers, and almost nothing else predicts this.
• Whether they can land. Jumpers take the same impact over and over. Some quick athletes land badly, which is a coaching project rather than a verdict, but you want to know in week two rather than in May.
• Whether they will repeat something dull. The best predictor of a thrower is not size. It is who is content doing thirty standing throws while somebody corrects their feet.
• What they want to do. A fast athlete who wants to hurdle and is refused becomes a slow athlete by the middle of the season.

Let everybody try everything once

In the first fortnight, put every athlete over a low hurdle, into the pit off a short approach, and through a standing throw. It costs about three sessions, and it prevents the most common waste in the sport, which is a good jumper who spent a year in the 200 because nobody ever watched them jump.

Resist narrowing a first-year athlete down to one event. Somebody who only sprints at fourteen trains one quality and meets all the others the hard way in their second season.

Where StatLap fits, and where it does not

The gates give a whole group comparable speeds in a single session, and those runs save into a training section kept separate from meet results. The Film Room covers seven events, which is the useful part in week two: a first long jump, a hurdle clearance and a standing throw each get read against the standards for that event rather than against sprinting. And every athlete ends up with a free public page carrying their bests and their history, so a mark from a first-year experiment is still there a year later when somebody wonders whether to go back to it.

What it does not do is sort your squad. There is no screen that ranks forty athletes by which event suits them, no recommendation, and no talent identification score. That judgement belongs to somebody who has watched them train, and an app that pretended otherwise would be selling you a number it cannot produce.

Whatever you settle on in week three, look again in the spring. Young athletes change shape, height and speed inside a single season, and an event decision made in February is not evidence about the same athlete in May.

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