The numbers that show the depth in men’s 100m sprinting – and why that nearly includes Mondo Duplantis

Presumably, once you’ve won Olympic gold and broken your own world record, you get a little bored.

At least, that’s the simplest explanation for Mondo Duplantis and Karsten Warholm racing each other over 100m on a warm, early September evening in Zurich, the night before the Weltklasse Diamond League meet.

Neither athlete is a sprinter and it is less than a month since their respective Olympic finals: Duplantis jumped 6.25m to win in Paris, his ninth world record (he has since cleared 6.26m for world record No 10) and second Olympic crown, which made him the first man to retain an Olympic pole vault title since Bob Richards in 1956.

Warholm achieved the Olympic gold/world record combination three years earlier, in Tokyo, running the 400m hurdles in 45.94. Unlike Duplantis, Warholm did not leave Paris as an Olympic champion, taking silver behind the USA’s Rai Benjamin.

Duplantis, a notoriously humble winner, made it a joke in the pre-race social media build-up. An Instagram poll showed that two-thirds expected Duplantis to win, to which Warholm asked if he was “buying votes” and Duplantis retorted that fans were “just taking gold over silver”.

The favouritism held in the build-up to the race, with fans stretched along the home straight and handed A4 cards with Duplantis’ face on one side and Warholm’s on the other. There were more cheers for Duplantis and more of his face held up when the commentator asked who was going to win.

They really didn’t need to be here — two of the greatest track-and-field athletes wanting to one-up the other in a neutral event. The idea was sparked over a year ago, in Monaco, when the pair were preparing for the Diamond League meet. That didn’t mean it wasn’t compelling.

Similar PBs and different strengths made for, theoretically, a competitive race. Duplantis says he trains “like a sprinter”, only vaulting once a week, and his pole vault run-ups are — essentially — 45-metre sprints.

Warholm benefits from being a better and more frequent block starter and has superior speed endurance, even if his style is to start hard. He says he sent videos of his block starts to Usain Bolt to get some tips, while Duplantis did some blockwork with USA’s Fred Kerley.

Elite athletes were split when asked for their predictions. Botswana’s Olympic 200m champion Letsile Tebogo and USA’s Masai Russell, Olympic 100m hurdles champion, both backed Duplantis because of his top-end speed.

Noah Lyles, 100m world and Olympic champion, and 1500m Olympic silver and bronze medallists Josh Kerr and Yared Nuguse thought Warholm would win because of the block start.

As it transpired, Duplantis’ block work was phenomenal. He reacted more quickly than Warholm and was faster in his first three steps and faster through his acceleration phase. Duplantis led from the gun and crossed in 10.37, one-tenth faster than Warholm, with a big enough winning margin to turn his head at the line and stare the Norwegian down.

Pre-race, Duplantis said his biggest strength “used to be my closing speed, but I’m a lot more explosive now than when I was at high school. I think I still have really good top-end speed and sprint endurance”. He was right.

Neither had raced the distance competitively for years — Duplantis, 24, not since his high-school days, and Warholm, 28, not since 2016. Duplantis stressed how “completely different” and “matured” his body and training regime are now. Eight years is a lifetime in athletics. In 2016, Usain Bolt was still racing.

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Seven years after he retired, the Jamaican is still king. He has the top three 100m times, four of the seven fastest 200m clockings and world records in both distances that have lasted 15 years. Sprinting has seen nothing like those four days in Berlin at the 2009 World Championships when Bolt ran 9.58 and 19.19.

Inadvertently, Bolt might have been too good. The 100m has always been athletics’ blue riband event, but in an era of meticulously designed tracks and enhanced shoe technology, world records have been smashed.

Of the Olympic-distance track events, only the 1500m world record (Hicham El Guerrouj from 1998) has lasted longer than Bolt’s 100m and 200m crowns. For men, the 110m and 400m hurdles, 800m, 1500m and 3,000m steeplechase all have world records that athletes are genuinely threatening to break again.

Meanwhile, few have come close to Bolt’s times. Nobody has run faster than 9.76 since Justin Gatlin in 2015 and the fastest male 100m time in each of the last seven years has been held by a different athlete.

Only look at the world record and you fall into the fallacy that men’s 100m sprinting is getting worse. The reality is the opposite.

The progression of Olympic standard times prove that. It crept down from 10.21 in 2008 (Beijing) to 10.16 in Rio eight years later. Then sprinters had to run 10.05 to qualify for Tokyo in 2021 and 10.00 was the threshold in Paris.

Part of that was because World Athletics wanted to move to a 50-50 split of half the athletes qualifying for global championships through world rankings and the other half through times, though look through the number of sub-10s times (the hallmark of a truly elite male sprinter) and improvements are clear.

From the start of 2008 to the end of 2016 (encapsulating the Bolt era), there was an annual average of 55 100m times under 10 seconds, with a peak of 91 in 2015, a world championship year.

Over that period, around 18 unique athletes per year (a peak of 27, again in 2015) were breaking 10 seconds.

Post-pandemic, those numbers have boomed, way up from Bolt’s heyday — at least 75 sub-10s times each year since 2021, with 102 last year. There were 24 athletes under the threshold in 2021, 30 in 2022, 40 last year and 35 so far in 2024. Even if the sprinting ceiling has stayed still, the floor has risen massively.

The Paris Olympics hosted the most competitive championship 100m ever. The final was the hardest to qualify for, the first time that a sub-10s time did not guarantee a spot, and the final was the closest in Olympic history.

Only five one-hundredths separated Noah Lyles and Kishane Thompson for gold, but there were only 0.12 seconds between first (Lyles) and eighth (Oblique Seville).

Duplantis and Warholm’s times were in a different stratosphere to that final. Neither would have made it out of the heats in Paris — 10.16 was the slowest qualifying time and of the 68 100m heat times, 52 athletes ran faster than Duplantis, and 59 quicker than Warholm.

Admittedly, Duplantis said he only cared about winning, not the time, and Warholm called it a “good, old-fashioned pissing contest”. That showed in the walkouts, boxer-style, with Warholm in a red gown and Duplantis in blue and strobe lights decking the back straight.

The bragging rights were escalated pre-race, as the loser was told they would wear the national vest of the other in the Weltklasse Diamond League the following day. A big deal given the Norway-Sweden rivalry.

In all the spectacle, it was easy to remember how athletes used to move across events. This summer marked 40 years since Carl Lewis won 100m, 200m and long jump gold at the 1984 Los Angeles Games.

That feat is now all but impossible, owing to increased participation rates and professionalisation across the globe and the enhanced specialisation of athletes that David Epstein spoke of in his 2014 Ted Talk.

Neither Duplantis nor Warholm would partake in a second event (barring perhaps Warholm in a 400m relay) because of the risk of injury and the detrimental impact it would likely make to their primary goal.

Wednesday’s 100m race in Zurich also proved the absurdity of a YouGov poll from August 10, 2024, which was conducted during the Paris Olympics. 27 per cent of Britons believed they could be an Olympian in 2028 if they started straight away, with six per cent backing themselves to do so in the 100m (17 per cent when isolated for just 18-24 year-olds).

Perhaps it was misguided belief or they were unserious responses, but it showed the British perspective towards the 100m. Great Britain had Daryll Neita in the women’s 100m final, who finished fourth, but no representation in the men’s final. Maybe the respondees hadn’t watched it.

Even if Bolt’s record shows no signs of going in the immediate future, the depth of men’s sprinting is astounding. Iron sharpens iron, so the saying goes. More sprinters are only getting faster and eventually the 9.76s ceiling will be broken.

(Top photo: Fabrice Coffrini/AFP via Getty Images)