Why does my hurdler drift sideways over the hurdle?
A lead leg cutting across the body is usually the cause, and it is also the one hurdles fault a side-on camera cannot actually show you.
The times look fine, the clearance looks clean on the replay, and the hurdler still finishes three lanes over from where they started. Sideways drift like that almost always comes from the lead leg swinging across the midline instead of straight down the direction of travel, or from a trail leg that opens out wide to the side instead of folding tight and coming through close to the body.
What to look for
- Does the lead foot cross an imaginary line straight down the lane from the takeoff foot, rather than landing in front of it?
- Does the trail knee swing out to the side at the hurdle instead of folding forward and tucking?
- Is the takeoff foot planted square to the hurdle, or angled off to one side before the athlete even leaves the ground?
Any one of those turns a hurdle clearance into a small rotation, and a small rotation repeated ten times in a race is how a hurdler ends up running a diagonal line down the track.
Where the Film Room can and cannot help
The hurdles setting measures trunk dip over the barrier, lead-leg extension, how far the hips rise at the hurdle, and overstride between barriers. All four of those are honest, useful numbers, and none of them is a drift number, because drift is a side-to-side fault and every one of those measures comes from a side-on clip filmed along the direction of travel.
A camera set up the normal way for hurdles, level with the barrier and looking across the lane, is looking straight down the athlete's line of travel. Side-to-side movement toward or away from that camera does not turn into a clean measurement the way forward motion does. It has to be judged by eye, and only from a camera that is actually looking down the lane from behind or in front, not across it.
So treat drift as a separate filming job. Once a season, put a phone at the finish line pointed straight back down the lane and watch the hurdler come towards it. That single clip will show you the drift in about four seconds, in a way no side-on number ever will.
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Related
Why your hurdler's lead arm collapses across their body
The lead arm is meant to punch straight at the lead foot, and when it swings across instead the next stride pays for it.
Read →Should the lead leg be straight over a hurdle?
Nearly, for an instant, but how the leg gets there matters far more than how straight it ends up.
Read →Why your trail leg keeps clipping the hurdle
The knee that catches the barrier is usually paying for a mistake the lead leg made a tenth of a second earlier.
Read →Try it: Hurdle technique analysis from video: trunk dip, lead leg, hip rise