As promised, today I'm posting some pretty cool photos and videos from the LSU Alumni Gold meet from mid-April of this year. The pictures are of Lolo Jones, an american 100m hurdler, and the video is of Lawrence Willis, an american triple jumper. Both of these athletes are accomplished professional Track & Field athletes that have represented their country, former university's, and fans extremely well over the years. I was lucky enough to be able to capture this media where I was in attendance as both a researcher and coach. As a coach, both the men's and women's teams from Northwestern State were competing, but mostly I was trying to collect some data on triple jumpers for an ongoing study I'm working on. If you're interested in finding out more about the study, there is an abbreviated version here which served as my masters thesis. I'm hoping to have the rest of the data I've collected (another 35 jumpers or so) analyzed and written up in the next couple weeks, at which point, I'll be working on getting it published.
Anyways, back to the point at hand. When I got to the meet, I wasn't intending on filming Lolo's race, but I happened to be up in the filming station waiting for the collegiate triple jump finals to start. Since the opportunity presented itself, I just switched my camera over to rapid shot and recorded the race using still shots. I recorded the start of the race at 40 fps (frames per second) which isn't considered overly fast, though still faster than a traditional camera, hence the large amount of movement between frames. Because I really wanted to get some close up shots, I decided to just focus in on the start, and based on my zoom level, was able to get the first four full steps or so (depending on the lane). In case you don't recognize her, Lolo is in all black in lane 5. Finally, she blew the field away winning the race at 12.71 seconds, a full six-tenths of a second faster than second place (Tamika Robinson of Illinois), breaking her own stadium record (set in 2008) by one-hundredth of a second.
Next up is the video of Lawrence Willis. His triple jump form is almost textbook and is a beautiful display of athleticism, strength, and power. This was actually his first jump of the day, and thought he got close, he wasn't able to better it on any of the remaining five attempts. The official distance was 16.84m, or 55'3". I haven't yet digitized the recording in order to measure everything, so I don't know the actual distance or true phase ratios, but the jump appears to be hop-dominate (third phase) by a considerable margin. In fact, you'll notice that he almost jumps out of the lens view which was kind of a mess-up on my part. Based on how the athletes were looking during warm-up, I wasn't sure if we were going to see a 55' jump, but after Lawrence's first jump I adjusted the camera some just in case he happened to have a high 55' or low 56' jump. For the recording, I filmed at 210 fps (7 times faster than a traditional camera) which is why there is so little room between frames. In order to help make the video easier to watch, its played back at 30 fps. What this means is that the video below is actually playing back at one-seventh the speed of the real time rate. All-in-all, this was a great jump and I hope ya'll enjoy it!
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