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mesquita-dewolf-2024-fair-advantage-the-effect-of-drag-and-effective-drafting-in-elite-sport.pdf
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TO THEEDITOR: Wewouldlike tothank Muniz-Pardos etal. (1) for their viewpoint on the technological advancements in elite sport. Although “traditional” methods of elite pacing, i.e., running behind pacers, have demonstrated partial effectiveness, they often rely on pacers who, generally, withdraw halfway through the race. Therefore, pacing is strongly dependent on the pacers’ experience and has a higher kilometer-to-kilometer coefficient of variation compared with pacing bymeans of technologies suchasWaveLight lighting (1). However, a drawback of relying on the latter’s technological innovations is that they diminish the benefits of drafting that traditional pacing provides, a technique integral to traditional pacing and commonplace in sports like cycling or skating. Although pacers are a common part of elite racing, their drafting benefit to an athlete has possibly been less explored because the effect of drag accounts for less than 10% of the total mechanical work while running at high speeds (2). This research was reinvigorated with Eliud Kipchoge’s Breaking2 project and has led to various computational fluid dynamics simulations studies. For example, Fernandes et al. (3)explored different pacing formations via simulations and determined what the optimum drafting strategy is based on the number of pacers present. Recently, we conducted experiments in a wind tunnel to analyze the drag exerted on the body when subjected to headwinds or tailwinds of various speeds (between 0 and 15 m·s 1) while running on a treadmill at 4 m·s 1 (4). Drag increases with the square of wind speed and at 15 m·s 1,a headwind generates a drag of 50% of the external mechanical work. Extrapolating our findings for overground running, the apparent drag experienced by an elite marathon runner at 5.83 m·s 1 without any additional wind added to the system is about equal to 8.1 N. In the case of Kenenisa Bekele (56 kg), the apparent drag would be 1.4% of his bodyweight.
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Da Rosa Macedo Mesquita, R., & Dewolf, A. (2024). Fair advantage: the effect of drag and effective drafting in elite sport. Journal of Applied Physiology, 137(3), 668. https://doi.org/10.1152/japplphysiol.00417.2024 (Original work published 2024)