THE SCRAPE FOUL - Unbanned Triple Jump Technique

what's did you know that before the 1980s there was a rule that prevented athletes from scraping their swing leg on the ground during triple jump now I know you're thinking well physics tell us that if you scrape your foot on the ground as you're pulling it through it's going to interrupt your Force production timing Rhythm and balance and basically it's going to make you perform worse so I'm not 100 sure why the rule exists in the first place but something happened at the 1980 Moscow Olympics that was so controversial that they had to go back look at this Rule and eventually they unbanned it because of this one action all right so first let me just tell you the end result of the 1980 triple jump finals the Soviet Union ended up with two people on the podium in first and second place you had Jack udomaine first and Victor senyev in second and they were both ahead of the then world record holder Brazil's Yao Carlos De Oliveira and Australians Ian Campbell now I know at first glance there doesn't really seem to indicate anything's out of order here these were all extremely top Elite athletes all capable of winning and a matter of fact the person who ended up getting silver Soviet Union's Victor senyev he had won three consecutive gold medals and was going for his fourth in the same individual event so he was definitely one of the favorites to win this event but something unusual started to unfold as this competition went on because both the Brazilian de oliveiro and the Australian Ian Campbell started producing some massive jumps capable of winning the event but they kept getting called fouls in addition to that they weren't measured you see eight of the 12 jumps were foul and no legal jumps recorded after the third round now really quickly let me give you some context as to what's considered a valid illegal jump and what is a foul so a triple jumper they run down the runway and they must take off before the end of a board for it to be deemed valid if any part of their foot crosses this line then the jump doesn't count and it's considered a foul now I know nowadays we've got these super high speed slow motion ultra high definition cameras that can tell us exactly if the foot crosses the line or not but back then it was up to a person called a line judge and they would sit there right at the foul line and they would make a call in real time whether or not the foot passes the line and so because humans are fallible to assist this at the end of the takeoff board there is a second thinner board or sometimes a little overlay or strip of this substance called plasticine and it in a very general sense it's kind of like Play-Doh or molding clay and so you can imagine an athlete running down and their foot crosses the line and they'll step on that plasticine so if they do they'll be a little Mark in that plasticine which can help assist the judge in declaring whether or not the jump is good or not right so if the plasticine has a severe Mark they'll actually pull the board and put a new one in but if the Mark's just a little my minor Mark they'll actually repair it right there in place and they'll just take a little small pieces of plasticine they'll put them right in there in the holes and then they'll smooth it over with a putty knife or sponge and so when we look back at the competition and look what happened at the end of round three you had the Soviet udama Brazil's de Oliveira and then third place the other Soviet senev so you can see right here you've got both Soviets now in metal position what becomes interesting is that for the remainder of the competition both day Oliveira and Australia's Ian Campbell failed to get any of their jumps measured even though some of these jumps were really long jumps capable of winning matter of fact later in the competition Ian Campbell had another massive jump well past the Olympic record Mark will won the competition but the officials ruled it a foul again now this time there was no Mark so the officials then declared he committed something called a scrape foul which was an interpretation of the rules at the time which stated that the trailing leg the swing leg the the sleeping leg that pulls through it could not touch the track during the jump so when he went to appeal the officials told him he had dragged his foot on the step phase so I'm going to show you the video here it's a little grainy but I'll let you make your own judgment on this now regardless they raked the sandpit as soon as he jumped and the Mark didn't count but it's thought to have been right around 17.50 meters or about 57 feet 7 inches so in the last round saying you have improved to a 17.24 meter jump or 56 feet six and three quarter inches which allowed him to move in the second place and that bumped de Oliveira down into third now during the event and after both De La Vera and Campbell had insisted that they hadn't scraped and that these foul calls were complete bogus and then allegations quickly started to arise that the officials were intentionally throwing out the best jumps to favor the Soviets because they were already in position to meddle now for this next part I haven't been able to completely verify this information but I'm gonna summarize some of the allegations in their relation to getting this rule changed you see according to reports from Australian journalists Roy Masters the Japanese Athletic Company Mizuno had paid to be the official torch relay sponsor of the games and so at the end of the relay when the flame gets lit by the Soviet athletes they were supposed to be wearing Mizuno shoes you see 1980 was the first year Mizuno began selling shoes in the United States but the US ended up boycotting this game so what ended up happening is that they were both wearing Adidas shoes and so Masters claims that the head of track and Field's World governing body aaf which is now World Athletics they attempted to make up for this by fixing an event in which the Soviets were favored to win because that way they could ensure that athletes would be standing on the podium wearing Mizuno shoes and so then what happened was the iaf president then allegedly pooled all of their inspectors the iaf officials who wear red jackets from the field and left only Soviet officials to judge all the events without outside supervision now the allegations that the Soviets were favoring their own athletes started at that triple jump event but they also reported at many of the other events and they were reported so much so that the governing body had to end up returning their officials for the final part of the week so Masters suggest that because Victor senyev who had won three consecutive gold medals and was definitely one of the favorites to win the event the Soviet jumpers who were amazing athletes in their own right had unknowingly found themselves at the center of a triple jump competition that was specifically rigged so that the athletes wearing Mizuno shoes would win and be on the podium now there are a few issues with Masters theory for starters if you look at both Sylvia jumpers they appear to be wearing Asics shoes and not Mizuno shoes now Asics is also a Japanese brand so there could be confusion there but Japan along with the United States and many other countries boycotted this Olympics as well now one thing we do know for certain is that the red-coded officials from iaf were not present during the early part of the week and they did return during the later part of the week now regardless if whether it was rigged or not numerous rule violations occurred you see the athletes should have been allowed to protest their jumps and the plasticine board should not have been moved before the athletes had a chance to follow through with their dispute and additionally if the athlete was adamant about protesting their jump the jump should have been measured as a precaution instead of quickly raked away so either the iaf officials were incompetent or the alleged Soviet officials were incompetent or they intentionally were colluding to favor the Soviet athletes now remember the U.S was boycotting this event so because of the publicity that all this got the iaf was forced to re-evaluate the rules that ended up playing into these events and so some of the things they looked at is first place why would an athlete even be in a position to scrape their foot when we look at the biomechanics of the triple jump what the athletes trying to do is they're trying to keep postural Integrity in pelvic alignment basically they're trying to make sure that they're in the right position so that when their foot makes ground contact their swing leg or the leg that's coming through is going to come through at the right time so that they're not out of balance and so in order to preserve their horizontal velocity they need high amplitudes of movements which means they need long longer arms and legs as they swing through so if the whole point is to get your body in the right position to conserve momentum then if your foot comes through and scrapes or hits the ground you're gonna not only decelerate but you're gonna kind of fall out fumble and you're gonna put your body out of alignment and that's significantly going to reduce your ability to control the jump so after iaf reevaluated the rules they likely concluded that kind of what you and I are already thinking that even if an athlete May scrape or drag their foot on the ground either by accident or maybe as a stylistic nature it's only going to impede that athlete's performance it's not going to affect the Integrity of the sport or provide some kind of unfair Advantage so now if we look at the current rules rule 32.2 States it shall not be considered a failure if an athlete while jumping touches the ground with a sleeping leg and that's their swing leg so as they pull it through like this I have a whole series on band techniques and track and field that you can go check out thanks for watching now physics tells us that if you scrape your foot on the ground when you're bringing your swimming like through I always it's going to take me four tries foreign now physics alone tell us that if you scrape your foot on the ground as you're coming through football it's hard

Channel: Jumpers Junction

Views: 1,258,622

Keywords: Ling jump, Long jump, Triple jump, Tripple jump, Scrap foul, Baned technique, Banned Technique, track&field, history

Id: hPgn3jftiNM

Length: 9min 43sec (583 seconds)

Published: Sun Jul 30 2023