From Chapter 2: A Tale of Two High Jumpers

Sports Gene by David Epstein was published in 2013.

(Or: 10,000 Hours Plus or Minus 10,000 Hours)

On January 19, 2006, [Donald] Thomas was sitting in the cafeteria at Lindenwood University in Saint Charles, Missouri, boasting about his slam dunking prowess with a few guys from the track team. Carlos Mattis, Lindenwood’s top high jumper, had enough of Thomas’ lip and bet him that he could not clear 6’6” in a high jump competition.

 Thomas decided to put his hops where his mouth was. He went home and grabbed a pair of sneakers and returned to the Lindenwood field house where a smirking Mattis had already set the bar at 6’6”. Mattis stepped back and waited for the big talker to fall to earth. And Thomas did, but the bar did not come with him. To Mattis’ amazement, Thomas cleared it easily. So Mattis pushed the bar up to 6’8”. Thomas cleared it. Seven feet. Without a semblance of graceful high-jump technique –Thomas hardly arched his back and his legs flailed in the air like the streamers trailing a kite –he cleared it.

 Mattis rushed Thomas over to the office where head track coach Lane Lohr was organizing his roster for the upcoming Eastern Illinois University Mega Meet and told the coach he had a seven-foot high jumper. “The coach said there’s no way I could do that. He didn’t believe it,” Thomas recalls. “But Carlos was like, ‘Yeah, he really did it.’ So he asked if I wanted to go to track meet on Saturday.” Lohr picked up the phone and pleaded with the meet organizer to permit a late entry.

 Two days later, in a black tank top and white Nike sneakers and shorts so baggy they blanketed the bar as he passed over it, Thomas cleared 6’8.25” on his first attempt, qualifying for the national championships. Then he cleared 7’0.25” for a new Lindenwood University record. And then, on the seventh high jump attempt of his life, with rigid form akin to a man riding an invisible deck chair backward through the air, Thomas cleared 7’3.25”, a Lantz Indoor Fieldhouse record. That’s when Coach Lohr forced him to stop out of concern that he might hurt himself.

 It would get better. Two months later, Thomas competed at the Commonwealth Games in Australia against some of the best professional jumpers in the world, wearing tennis shoes. He placed fourth in a

world-class field, a result that actually confused him because he did not yet understand how tiebreakers work in high jump and thought he was in third place until the results were announced.

In August 2007, with a total of eight months of legitimate high-jump training to his name, Thomas donned his pole vault shoes and the gold and aquamarine of his native Bahamas and traveled to Osaka for the World Championships. In non-Olympic years, the World Championships are the Super Bowl of track and field.

 Thomas advanced easily to the final, as did Stefan Holm [the reigning Olympic champion]. When the men’s high jump finalists were introduced, broadcasters announced a laser-focused Holm as the favorite. Thomas, looking cool in sunglasses beneath the bright lights illuminating the stadium, was described as “very much an unknown quantity.”

 Early in the competition, it appeared that Thomas would fold in his first world spotlight. While the rest of the jumpers took such lengthy approaches that they had to start on the running track, Thomas began on the infield, as if he were using the high jump equivalent of the short tees at a golf course. He stutter-stepped his way to a miss at 7’3” –each jumper gets three attempts at every height –lower than he jumped in that first meet at Eastern Illinois. Meanwhile, Holm was cruising, passing over 7’3”, 7’5”, 7’6.5, and 7’7.73” without a single miss, as his father watched through a video camera and pumped his fist in the stands.

 But Thomas began to hit his form, managing to alternate makes and misses. He arrived at 7’8.5” along with a handful of other jumpers, including Holm.

For his first attempt, Holm stood with his eyes closed, envisioning himself floating over the bar. He approached, leapt, and barely grazed the bar. As it fell to the ground, he executed a frustrated backflip on the mat. Next, Yaroslav Rybakov, a 6’6” Russian, nudged the bar off the stand. Then came Thomas. He slowed down so drastically as he approached the bar that it seemed impossible that he could clear it. And yet, flailing his legs and with his back nearly straight, he passed 7’8.5 on his first attempt, putting his hand down behind him as if to break his fall because he was still uncomfortable with the sensation of falling backward. He rolled off the mat and gamboled across the track in celebration. But Holm was up again.

Another miss, just barely. Holm shook his palms in front of him as if beseeching the high jump gods. They didn’t listen. On his final attempt, Holm clipped the bar with the back of his legs and fell to the mat with his head in his palms.

The guy in pole vault shoes who thinks high jump is “kind of boring” was crowned the 2007 world champion. On his winning jump, Thomas raised his center of mass to 8’2”. Had he any semblance of the back arch that every other pro jumper does, he would have shattered the world record.

In 2008, the Japanese television station NHK asked Masaki Ishikawa, then a scientist at the Neuromuscular Research Center at the University of Jyvåskylå in Finland, to examine Thomas. Ishikawa noted both Thomas’s long legs relative to his height and also that he was gifted with a giant’s Achilles tendon. Whereas Holm’s Achilles was a more normal-sized, incredibly stiff spring, Thomas’s, at ten and a quarter inches, was uncharacteristically long for an athlete his height. The longer (and stiffer) the Achilles tendon, the more elastic energy it can store when compressed. All the better to rocket the owner into the air.

“The Achilles tendon is very important in jumping, and not just in humans,” says Gary Hunter, exercise physiologist at the University of Alabama-Birmingham, and an author of studies on Achilles tendon lengths. “For example, the tendon in the kangaroo is very, very long. That’s why they can bounce around more economically than they can walk.”

 Hunter has found that a longer Achilles tendon allows an athlete to get more power from what’s called the “stretch shortening cycle,” basically compression and subsequent decompression of the springlike tendon. The more power that is stored in the spring when it is compressed, the more you get when it is released. (A typical example is a standing vertical jump, in which the jumper bends down quickly, shortening the tendons and muscles, before jumping skyward.) When Hunter puts subjects on a leg-press machine and drops weights down on them, the longer the person’s Achilles tendon the faster and harder he was able to fling the weights back in the opposite direction. “That’s not exactly the same as a jump,” Hunter says, “but it has a lot of similarities. And that’s why people jump higher when they have a drop step or a few steps: they use the velocity of the descent toward the ground to compress the tendon, just like a spring.”

Tendon length is not significantly impacted by training, but rather is a function of the distance between the calf muscle and the heel bone, which are connected by the tendon. And while it appears that an individual can increase tendon stiffness by training, there is also evidence that stiffness is partly influenced by an individual’s versions of genes involved in making collagen, a protein in the body that builds ligaments and tendons.

 Neither Ishikawa nor Hunter would suggest that the sole secret to the jumping success of Holm and Thomas is in their Achilles tendons. But the tendons are one puzzle piece that helps explain how two athletes could arrive at essentially the same place, one after a twenty-year love affair with his craft, and the other with less than a year of serious practice after stumbling into it on a friendly bet. Interestingly, Thomas has not improved one centimeter in the six years since he entered the professional circuit. Thomas debuted on top and has not progressed. He seems to contradict the deliberate practice framework in all directions.

Excerpted from The Sports Gene by David Epstein, published by the Penguin Group.