The Olympic Games Paris 2024 athletics events were memorable for so many reasons.
Athletics aficionados will point to the plethora stunning performance on the Mondotrack with Ellipse Impulse Technology athletics track in the Stade de France.
What many people don’t know – and maybe will be amazed to realise – is that, for the first time ever at an Olympic Games, one event got special singular attention from Mondo: the javelin.
The javelin runways were still Mondotrack™ with Ellipse Impulse Technology but were specially adapted to meet the needs of the world’s top exponents of this event.
Spazio Mondo caught up with Mondo Sport & Flooring Research and Development Director Andrea Marenghi to explain all about the specialised javelin runway that made its debut in the French capital.
During and after the previous Olympic Games in Tokyo – where Mondo once again provided the athletics track - some javelin throwers were a little bit unsatisfied about their performance.
Of course, the material we used at the time on the javelin runways was exactly the same as we used for the rest of the track and previously we had never considered developing a specific material for the javelin or any other event for the simple reason that the World Athletics regulations stated that the material has to be the same in every area of the stadium.
However, we started to evaluate in the laboratory what can we do to improve the performance of the track that the javelin throwers use –This all started in 2022 once the competitors in Tokyo had made their feelings known.
However, I want to emphasise that the focus for the development was on the safety of the athletes and definitely not primarily on the performance of the surface.
Many of the javelin throwers were finding their feet were moved several centimetres when they blocked at the end of the throw, and we were asked if we are able to design a material able to reduce this movement to less than one centimetre.
In December 2023, World Athletics introduced an amendment to the composition of the stress areas, admitting materials with different tensile strengths. We had a green light to use the new material in official athletics competitions.
Germany’s Johannes Vetter coach Boris Obergföll inspired most of our work, . Johannes was perhaps the most unhappy with his performance in Tokyo having been among the favourites for the title, but he finished ninth. (Athletics International commented: “There was no hotter favourite at the Games than Johannes Vetter. Super-athlete though he is, Vetter is still a human being, not a machine, and in Tokyo everything unravelled.”)
We got him in and then sent him some of the athletics track prototypes to try out.
Thomas Röhler, Germany’s 2016 Olympic and 2018 European champion, was another athlete we consulted a lot. Mondo have had a relationship over several years with him and we sent him various materials to test. We did the work in the laboratory between September 2021 and March 2022 and then we sent the first prototypes to be tested by these two guys in April 2022.
We then sent the materials to Kuortane in Finland to be tested by athletes and after a successful trial and some further small modifications, we were ready to install the track in the National Stadium in Budapest ahead of the 2023 World Athletics Championships.
In general, we improved all the main mechanical properties.
What do I mean? The three key properties of the athletics track we improved upon for the javelin throwers was the abrasion resistance, which is how much wear from the throwers the track is able to withstand; the elongation to break, which represent its elasticity; and we increase the elastic modulus, the property that represent how much the material is able to resist to specific stresses.
Additionally, at Mondo we have introduced another parameter which is not required by World Athletics regulations: the resistance to tearing, that help us to evaluate the interaction between the athletics surface and athlete’s spikes.
Mondo athletics tracks are installed with two layers. The top layer is the mechanical resistance part, and the bottom layer is the ‘elastic part’. We introduced an optimal compound for both layers to keep a minimum level of the elasticity but to maximize the mechanical resistance because in the javelin the people use very long – often 12 millimetres – spikes but the mechanical resistant layer was less than that length.
we were quite satisfied with how the athletics track performed in Budapest with the exception of the fact that that there was a bit of difference in colour between the javelin runways and the rest of the track.
We then tried to have a more homogeneous colour; it was better in Paris, but it is still not perfect.
A little bit of improvement was achieved in the embossing of the surface, and I think what we have now is very good.
Pakistan’s Arshad Nadeem improved the Olympic record by more than two meters with his winning throw of 92.97m. It was an Asian record and earned his country’s first athletics gold medal.
It was the first Olympic Games where four men threw over 88 metres or better. Czechia's Jakub Vadlejch threw 88.50m and still missed out on a medal in fourth place.
For the first time in any competition, seven men threw over 86 metres and it was the first javelin competition ever where eight men threw over 84 metres. The Paris javelin competition saw the best results ever for places 5-8.
I’m just a chemical engineer passionate about athletics, so I may only guess an answer. The technological development of Mondo’s athletics tracks aims to minimize energy loss in the interaction between the athlete and the surface. The performance gap in javelin throw between men and women comes down to a mix of factors and physiological differences, things like strength, speed, and biomechanics play a big role.
The properties of the specialised Mondotrack™ with Ellipse Impulse Technology javelin runway and its ability to reduce the movement during the block seems at this moment more advantageous for mens than womens.
I think we can now look at applying similar methods to the development of materials to improve the safety of various jumping event runways. This is something to be discussed with World Athletics.