byLarry Eder
Yohan Diniz, en route to his 50,000m WR RW, photo by PhotoRun.net
Yohan Diniz, en route to his 50,000m WR RW, photo by PhotoRun.net
On a cold, rainy day, Yohan Diniz stayed in his own little bubble and race walked to a world record and a gold medal!
Our RW expert, Elliott Denman, himself a veteran of the 1956 Olympic Games at the 50k, writes about why Yohan Diniz should get more respect!
YOHAN DINIZ: WORLD 50K RECORD-BREAKER;
GIVE THE MAN THE RECOGNITION HE DESERVES.
By ELLIOTT DENMAN
Way back in 1932, the moguls of the International Olympic Committee reached a point of true enlightenment.
They added the 50K race-walk to the Games program, thereby signaling to the universe that they realized the world’s most universal physical activity – and that, of course, is walking – was a distanceman’s game and not a sprint event.
Other than the 10-mile walk that was on the program of the 1908 Games, the longest prior Olympic walks had been 10Ks.
So, after the 1928 Games were held walks-less, racewalking rejoined the Olympic fray at LA in ’32 as a distance man’s dandy, a 31.1-mile jaunt around LA that established the 50K as the longest, toughest event in all of Olympic-dom.
Yes, it was 7.805 kilometers/ or just under 4.8 miles, longer than the marathon run.
Yes, too, it was surely tougher than the marathon, with its demands for explicit technique, and with judges out there ready to DQ those whose mode of progression was not in compliance.
Yohan Diniz, FRA, sets 50k WR of 3:32:33! photo by PhotoRun.net
Well, it was Great Briton Tommy Green winning that very first Olympic 50K and he’s been followed by 17 of the toughest-minded athletes you’d ever want to meet.
Yes, blokes like Norm Read, who emigrated from England (where he’d never made a national team) to New Zealand just two years before the 1956 Games and wound up winning it all in steamy Melbourne; Don Thompson, another truly Great Brit, a man so disappointed by his failure to finish in ’56 that he trained in a self-constructed steam chamber and wound up taking the 1960 gold in Rome: Hartwig Gauder, who trained so hyperbarically chambered-hard under his brutal East German coaches’ edict, that his 50K win in 1980 wound up costing him his heart, yet he came back to the sport to run the NYC Marathon with a transplant.
And, of course, Robert Korzeniowski, the magnificent main man of Poland, who wound up winning three straight Olympic 50Ks (1996-2000-2004),a three-peat never matched by an Olympic marathoner.
And that brings us to the latest king of the 50k,the merveilleux, c’est-si-bon, Yohann Diniz,of France. At the just-concluded European Championships in Zurich, the headlines were gobbled up by a bunch of others – that’s the way it always goes – but it was Yohann Diniz standing head and shoulders over all of them as the lone Euro-champ to do it with a world-record performance.
The man is a true thoroughbred. He even shares the same birthday as every real thoroughbred – and that’s the first of January.
His birthyear is 1978, so that makes him the fittest 36-year-old on the planet.
He walked his 31.1 miles in three hours, 32 minutes and 33 seconds, winning decisively over Slovakia’s Matej Toth (3:36.21), and Russia’s Ivan Noskov (3:37.41) and Mikhail Rzyhov (3:39.07.)
The previous world record had been Russian Denis Nizhegorodov’s 3:34.14 in 2008.
How fast is 3:32:33?
Well, consider all this:
He was walking each mile at 6:50 pace, each K just over 4:06.
If this had been a marathon run, he’d have crossed the line in a computed2:59.22 (or quicker than 95 percent of the finishers in the big-city 26.2-milers these days.)
Then he maintained that pace for 4.7 more miles to finish his 50K, or 31.1 miles- legally and properly with the full approval of the judging panel under IAAF governance.
For sure, it’s agreed that racewalkers at this level are at times caught – by high-speed camera technology – “off the ground” and that would seem to be a violation of the contact-with-the-ground-at-all-times stipulation of the rules book.
But read on – until you get to the nuances of this rule that clearly states a judge’s decision can only be based on what’s seen by “the human eye” – and not some techno-gizmo.
And now hear this from Dr. Jonathan Matthews, a professor of education at Carroll College, who has long been one of the USA’s elite race walkers and continues to maintain a wicked pace training away at his Helena, Montana home base.
“Looking at racewalking, it is one of athletics’ most impressive events; 20K racewalkers maintain the cadence/turnover rate of the finest 800-meter runners, but instead of maintaining this for only 1 minute and 43 seconds
(or so), they maintain this cadence for an hour and 20 minutes,” he writes.
“Racewalkers have the highest V02 max among all track athletes. Yes, the best racewalkers are fitter than the best runners, due to the demands imposed by the contact and straight(ened) knee rules. The only athletes who have ever tested with higher V02 max than racewalkers are cross country skiers.”
Then there’s the psychological part of it all.
To much of the rest of track and field, racewalkers are their Rodney Dangerfields.
Have you heard of the New York Times? “All the news that’s fit to print” they once boasted. Well, Yohann Diniz and his world 50K record didn’t merit a single line.
“Because racewalkers are often ridiculed by the ignorant,” Dr. Matthews continues, racewalking demands a person with self-confidence and independence.
“In my country, at the Masters level, a large percentage of racewalkers are PhDs, engineers, professors – smart people who are attracted to an athletic event that enables them to achieve peak fitness while embracing the additional challenge of achieving technical mastery.”
Darn right and very-very well said, Dr. M (who owns a 50K PR of 4:01:36.)
The American record remains the 3:48.04 achieved by Curt Clausen in 1999. The two bronze medals won by Larry Young (Mexico City 1968, Munich 1972) remain the top American performances in Olympic 50K racewalking.
These days, we have nobody even remotely close to Yohann Diniz.
Diniz’s Olympic 50K record is spotty – but let’s not hold that against him.
On a brutally hot day at Beijing in 2008, he bailed out at the 30K mark with stomach pain and an aching thigh. At London in 2012, he finished eighth but still wound up on the DQ list; not for the usual reason of technique problems but because he’s gulped out of a water bottle beyond the designated replenishment zone.
But the European Championships – a meet first staged in 1934 – have seen Diniz at his absolute best.
He took the 50K gold at Goteborg in 2006 in 3:41.39, at Barcelona is 2010 in 3:40.37, and now he’s in the books for that WR 3:32.33 at Zurich.
Yohan Diniz, en route to his 50k WR,
photo by PhotoRun.net
On the European level, it matched him with Korzeniowski’s three straight at the Olympic Games.
(Note, Diniz is in the WR books for the 50,000-meter racewalk, too, for his 3:35.27 in 2011. What’s the difference between 50K and 50,000 meters, you ask? In the 50K, you’re doing your loops on a road course. In 50,000 meters, you’re circling a 400-meter track a mind-sapping 125 times.)
Back home, they were saying, “En 3h32:33, Yohann Diniz a pulvérisé le record du monde, et donc d’Europe.”
Well, that’s giving you the drift of all this.
Oui-oui-oui, he’d pulverized the world record. And those who call themselves real fans of this sport – and were otherwise occupied as he crossed the finish line – merit the pulverization treatment for not
giving this man his due.
FULL DISCLOSURE: Elliott Denman is a 50K man, too, 11th placer in the 1956 Olympic Games and USA national champion in 1959.
