Back when he was a reporter for Sports Illustrated, David Epstein explains (in Inside the Box), a coach named Mark Wood shared a unique “preclude” story from his time working with the Canadian skeleton team:
(Skeleton is the Winter Olympics sport in which athletes slide face-first down an icy track.) At the time, every skeleton athlete started out with two hands gripping the sled; then they would start sprinting, and after a few seconds flop atop the sled to ride down. The sprint start is make-or-break for athletes in sliding sports, so Canada constructed a refrigerated facility—the Ice House—where athletes could practice starts on short tracks in the offseason. In the summer of 2001, the US team came to train at the Ice House. The Americans arrived stocked with biomechanics equipment and placed sensors all along the track so that they could analyze an athlete’s every move. “I was blown away,” Wood told me. “I’m thinking, ‘Why aren’t we doing something like this?’ But I didn’t have the resources.” Out of desperation, Wood gave his athletes a preclude directive:
Get in the Ice House and start experimenting; whatever you do, just don’t do what we’ve always done, because we’ll never compete with the Americans that way.
Skeleton athletes Pascal Richard and Paul Boehm took up the preclude challenge.
“Pascal and Paul came back to me within the hour,” Wood told me. “They said, ‘Woody, look what we’ve done.’”
With the familiar solution blocked, they had invented the one-handed start: running beside the sled and keeping the other arm free for a natural sprinting motion. They shattered their personal records, and the one-handed start was soon ubiquitous in skeleton.
His one Sports Illustrated story about skeleton doesn’t mention this anecdote, by the way.