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Why your hurdler stutters before the hurdle

A chopped last stride is almost never a problem at the barrier. It is a problem three strides earlier.

You can see it from the infield without needing a replay. Two strides are fine, then the athlete shortens up, puts in a little half-step, and arrives at the hurdle flat-footed and far too close. They get over it, badly, and by the fourth barrier they are a metre behind somebody they beat on the flat.

The stutter is the correction, not the fault

A hurdler running three steps between barriers is running to a fixed distance with a stride pattern that has to fit it exactly. If they cover the ground faster than the pattern allows, they arrive at the hurdle too close to take off properly, and the only thing left to do is chop the last stride and get up somehow.

So the half-step is not carelessness. It is the athlete solving, in about a tenth of a second, a problem that was created before they got there. Shouting "don't stutter" fixes nothing, because the stutter is the least bad option available at that point.

Three things that actually cause it

• Braking between the barriers. If the foot lands well in front of the hips each step, the athlete is slowing themselves down and then rushing to make the distance back up. The rush is what closes the gap to the hurdle too fast.
• Spacing that no longer fits. A hurdler who grew four inches over the summer is not running the same race they ran in May, and practice at a spacing the meet will not use trains a pattern that breaks on the day.
• A bad first hurdle. Take off half a stride wrong at hurdle one and the whole pattern is off from the start. Every barrier after it is a fresh emergency.

The first is the most common in young hurdlers and the one that gets talked about least, because it happens between the hurdles, where nobody is looking.

What is worth measuring

If the strike point is out in front, the stutter has a cause you can train rather than a habit to shout at. The neighbouring finding is the one about the hips: let them climb more than about 22 per cent of body height at the barrier and the app tells you that is jumping the hurdle rather than running over it, and sends you to close-spacing run-throughs, which make floating impossible. Overstride between the barriers comes back as a number with a cue about stepping down under the hip. Useful, but it is not one the app hangs a hurdles drill on.

If the strike point is clean and the athlete still chops, the technique is not the problem. Move the hurdles.

Worth knowing what it does not do: the Film Room reads one clip at a time and does not count steps between barriers, does not measure how far from the hurdle the takeoff happened, and does not know which spacing you set up. That part is still your eyes and the scrub bar.

Which is fine. Counting three-three-three is the easiest thing on this list. Knowing whether the athlete is braking at 8 metres per second is the part that is genuinely hard to see.

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