Rowing and Track Athletics (extract)

CHAPTER V SPRINTING AND AMERICAN SPRINTERS SPRINTERS are born and not made. The making helps, and is necessary, but the gift of speed must be born into them. Almost any youth with a presentable pair of legs, a sound heart and lungs, sand, and a bit of fighting edge can, by faithful training, make himself into a respectable distance runner. Men whom one remembers in college as apparently hopeless duffers one sees a year or two later at Mott Haven-members of the team now, perhaps even winning the mile or the two– mile run, and at last carrying home the varsity initial to be cherished forever after and handed down to their children's children. In the sprints things are ordered differently. Your sprinter may be long or short legged, it is true; he may be as slim as a match or he may have to hurl his thirteen stone like a catapult down the hundred yards to the tape; but to be really a fast man, as we reckon speed in these days of better than even time, he must have a certain combination of strength and spring and nervous energy, a dynamic je ne sa£s quo£, which can no more be 296