400 metre hurdles

The 400 m Hurdles are an Olympic athletics (track and field) discipline. On a standard outdoor track 400 meters is the length of the inside lane once around the stadium. Runners stay in their lane the entire way after starting out of the blocks and must clear ten hurdles that are evenly, for each lane, spaced around the track. The hurdles are positioned so that they fall forward if bumped into to prevent injury to the runners. Although fallen hurdles don't count against them, runners like to clear them clean, as touching them during the race slows runners down.

The best male athletes can run the 400 m Hurdles in a time of around 47 seconds (WR: 46.78 seconds), which is the equivalent of 8.51 meters per second or 30.63 kilometers per hour. The best female athletes achieve a time of around 53 seconds (WR: 52.34 seconds), or 7.54 meters per second and 27.16 kilometers per hour. Compared to the 400 Meters the hurdles race takes the men about 3 seconds longer and the women 4 seconds longer.

The 400 m Hurdles have been an Olympic discipline since 1900 and 1984 for men and women, respectively.

History

The first awards in a 400 m Hurdles race were given in 1860 when a race was held in Oxford, England, over a course of 440 yards (402.336 m). While running the course, participants had to clear 12 massive (more than 100 cm tall) wooden hurdles that had been spaced in even intervals.

To reduce the risk of injury, somewhat more lightweight constructions were introduced in 1895 that runners could push over. But until 1935 runners were disqualified if they pushed over more than 3 hurdles in a race and records were only officially accepted if the runner in question had cleared all hurdles clean and left them all standing.

At the 1900 Summer Olympics in Paris, France, the 400 m Hurdles became an Olympic event. At the same time, the race was standardized so that virtually identical races could be held and the finish times compared to each other. As a result, the official distance was fixed to 400 meters, or once around the stadium, and the number of hurdles was reduced to 10. The official height of the hurdles was set to 91.4 cm (3 ft) for men and 76.20 cm (2 feet 6 inches) for women. The hurdles were now placed on the course with a run-up to the first hurdle of 45 meters, a distance between the hurdles of 35 meters each, and a home stretch from the last hurdle to the finish line of 40 meters.

Many athletic commentators and officials have often brought up the idea of lifting the height of the women's 400 m hurdles to incorporate a greater requirement of hurdling skill. This is a view held by German Athletic coach Norbert Stein "All this means that the women's hurdles for specialists, who are the target group to be dealt with in this discussion, is considerably depreciated in skill demands when compared to the men's hurdles. It should not be possible in the women's hurdles that the winner is an athlete whose performance in the flat sprint is demonstrably excellent but whose technique of hurdling is only moderate and whose anthropometric characteristics are not optimal. This was the case at the World Championships in Seville and the same problem can often be seen at international and national meetings."

The first documented 400 m Hurdles race for women took place in 1971. The International Association of Athletics Federations (IAAF) introduced the event officially as a discipline in 1974, although it was not run at the World Championships and the first female World Champion was not determined until the 1983 World Championships.

Milestones

*Men
**First official IAAF world record: 55.0 seconds, Charles Bacon (USA), 1908
**First under 54 seconds: 53.8 seconds, Sten Pettersson (SWE), 1925
**First under 53 seconds: 52.6 seconds, John Gibson (USA), 1927
**First under 52 seconds: 51.7 seconds, Bob Tisdall (IRL), 1932
**First under 51 seconds: 50.6 seconds, Glenn Hardin (USA), 1934
**First under 50 seconds: 49.5 seconds, Glenn Davis (USA), 1956
**First under 49 seconds: 48.8 seconds, Geoff Vanderstock (USA), 1968
**First under 48 seconds: 47.82 seconds, John Akii-Bua (UGA), 1972
**First under 47 seconds: 46.78 seconds, Kevin Young (USA), 1992 (this is the only time under 47 seconds)

*Women
**First official world record: 56.51 seconds, Krystyna Kacperczyk (POL), 1974
**First under 56 seconds: 55.74 seconds, Tatjana Storoschewa (USSR), 1977
**First under 55 seconds: 54.89 seconds, Tatjana Selenzowa (USSR), 1978
**First under 54 seconds: 53.58 seconds, Margarita Ponomarjowa (USSR), 1984
**First under 53 seconds: 52.94 seconds, Marina Stepanowa (USSR), 1986

Most successful athletes

*Two Olympic victories:
** Glenn Davis (USA), 1956 and 1960
** Edwin Moses (USA), 1976 and 1984 (also Bronze in 1988)
** Angelo Taylor {USA}, 2000 and 2008

*Two World Championships:
** Edwin Moses (USA), 1983 and 1987
** Félix Sánchez (DOM), 2001 and 2003 (won Silver in 2007)
** Nezha Bidouane (MAR), 1997 and 2001 (won Silver in 1999)
** Jana Rawlinson (AUS), 2003 (as Jana Pittman) and 2007

Most surprising rookie: Glenn Davis (USA) ran his first race in April 1956 in 54.4 seconds. Two months later, he ran a new world record with 49.5 seconds and later that year he won the 400 m Hurdles at the Olympics, and was also the first to repeat that feat in 1960.

The athlete who wrote the book on 400 m Hurdles: The American Edwin Moses won 122 races in a row between 1977 and 1987 plus two gold medals at the 1976 Summer Olympics in Montréal, and the 1984 Summer Olympics in Los Angeles. He was undefeated for exactly nine years nine months and nine days until he finished third in the 1988 Olympic final. A relative unknown, John Vander Kamp from Calvin College, nearly beat him during his lengthy undefeated streak, but came up a few hundreths short. The U.S. boycott of the 1980 Summer Olympics in Moscow prevented him from winning a hat-trick of gold medals, but his career is nonetheless widely regarded as simply astonishing. He held the world record for sixteen years from when he first broke it at the Olympics on July 25, 1976 (twice in one day) until it was finally broken at the 1992 Summer Olympics.

Medalists

Olympic Games

Men

Women

Women

Best Year Performance

Men's Season's Best

Women's Seasons Best

ee also

*Hurdles

References

Much of the content of this article comes from the equivalent German-language Wikipedia article (retrieved February 4, 2006).