The Indoor Tour is more packed than the outdoor season, usually held in January and February with shorter one-to-three day duration competitions . There are four categories of events — Challenger, Bronze, Silver and Gold. The World Athletics Indoor Championships begins in Torun in Poland on Friday. The Berlin ISTAF Indoor, a one-day meet, is the oldest track and field competition in the world with the first edition held in 1921. A one-day pole-vault competition called the Mondo Classic is hosted in Uppsala, the home town of world record holder Mondo Duplantis.
The events
Commonality between indoor and outdoor events are limited. The 100 metres, the blue ribbon event, is not part of indoor competitions because the straight track in the middle of the stadium is 60 metres. The oval track is just 200 metres in indoor events instead of 400 metres in outdoor events. The track events at the World Championships also include the 1,000 metres and the 3,000 metres, not typical outdoor events, and excludes in 200 metres. High jump, long jump, triple jump, shot put and pole vault are in the schedule.
Banked bends
The indoor 200 metres was dropped after the 2004 world championships in Budapest. World Athletics held that the 200 metres had become ‘unfair’ and ‘predictable’.
On the tighter bends, a result of the smaller radius of the 200 metre track, athletes struggled to stay in their respective lanes when they hit top speed. On the banked curves (an incline angle of 10 degrees), athletes in outermost lane 6, had the biggest advantage.
James Hillier, the Athletics Director of the Reliance Foundation, who worked closely with the Odisha department of sports for establishing the Kalinga Indoor Stadium, says lane 6 is the fastest because of the relatively ‘shallow radius’ and being higher up on the banks results in an athlete ‘running downhill’ at the end of the bend.
“Unlike outdoor athletics where lane four, five, six (total of eight or nine lanes) would be considered the most favorable lanes, in indoor athletics, lane six is the most favorable lane. It’s very hard to run fast in lane one and two. The 200 meters is not an international event, because effectively the only two athletes that could be competitive were in five and six. The radius is more shallow and also you use the bank, off the bend, to effectively run downhill. So you gain momentum as you come off the bend,” Hillier told The Indian Express.
Less space
As per rules of World Athletics, the width of a lane of an outdoor track is 1.22 metres while an indoor lane can be between 0.90 metres and 1.10 metres. The track at the Kalinga Indoor Stadium is one-metre. Runners have less space on an indoor track. For example, in the indoor 400 metres race, athletes stay in their lanes till the breakline at the end of the second curve and then move towards the inside lane.
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Since the lanes are narrower, jostling and fighting for places are commonplace after the breakline. “Some of the taller rhythmic athletes would struggle indoors because your rhythm is constantly getting broken with the bends and in middle distance races you’re getting jostled a bit more than you would in the outdoors. It can suit the smaller athletes as a general concept,” Hillier said.
No wind
Since an indoor stadium is a closed arena, the wind is not a factor, unlike outdoor events where athletes experience headwind as well as tailwind. Manikanta Hoblidhar, one of India’s fastest sprinters, said the ‘neutral’ conditions was a new experience for him. He listed takeaways from training at the Reliance High Performance Centre at the Kalinga Indoor Stadium.
“In outdoor events, the tailwind helps us and the headwind slows us down. In indoor, wind is not a factor. But the Mondo track is much faster,” Hoblidhar said.
In the shorter 60 metre sprint, Hoblidhar said the athlete with the best start/reaction time tends to win the race 90 percent of the time.
Basically, the 60m suits shorter athletes who get up to speed quicker, ‘the good accelerators’ as Hillier calls them.
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Long jumper Ancy Sojan also struggled for hang time. “There is no wind indoors. Tailwind supports outdoors. I felt I was going up (in the air) but coming down very fast and not going forward. Maybe my runway speed was less,” Ancy, a bronze medallist at the Asian Indoor Championships, said.
Harder, faster
The ‘speed’ which sprinters like Hoblidhar experience is down to the prefabricated Mondo track, Hillier said. “So they roll it out and then sort of glue it to a concrete floor. It’s quite thin, something like nine mill (millimetres).So it’s pretty hard. So the harder the surface, the faster the track is. Works certainly for the sprinters, but the endurance guys may want something a little bit softer.”
