THE MYTH OF 40 TIMES
If you ever watch Track and Field or the Olympic games you might wonder how some of these sprinters would fare in the 40-yard dash, the beloved distance of NFL scouts and coaches. You also might question the legitimacy of the 40 times of these football players that we hear about from workouts or the combine. Well I found an article that answers some of those questions.
You hear these insane times throughout the years. Like Deion was supposed to have run a 4.17 in hightops. Hester ran a 4.4, or a 4.27, depending on who you ask. Urlacher was alleged to post a 4.4. But why not just look at the fastest time ever? Canadian Ben Johnson ran a 9.79 in the 100 at the 1988 games in Seoul. Later, he was stripped of his gold medal after failing a drug test. But that race was broken down and here’s what they found:
Timing officials have since broken down that famed race into 10-meter increments, and Johnson was so preposterously fast that he went through 50 meters in 5.52 seconds and 60 meters in 6.37 – both under the current world records at those distances. He went through 40 yards that day in 4.38 seconds.
He was running in spikes . . . on a warm afternoon perfectly suited for sprinting . . . with a slight tailwind . . . with years of training from arguably track’s top coach, Charlie Francis . . . with Carl Lewis and six others of the fastest men on the planet chasing him . . . with 69,000 people roaring at Seoul’s Olympic Stadium . . . with hundreds of millions of people watching on TV . . . with the ultimate prize in sports, an Olympic gold medal, at stake.
And, as we learned later, with muscles built with the assistance of the anabolic steroid stanazolol.
Four-point-three-eight seconds.
Then again, maybe Ben Johnson isn’t the fastest 40-yard man in the world.
Maybe half the NFL is faster.
So the next time you read about some guy running a 4.3? Probably not. Check out the rest of the article. Great stuff, sports fans.
