Given that it is still unclear whether active recovery can improve recovery of sprint performance following a bout of intense exercise, it was our primary goal to address this issue by adopting the following precautions to avoid the aforementioned limitations. Firstly, the duration and intensity of the sprint should result in a marked fall in power output, and secondly, active and passive recovery should be compared at a time when recovery of exercise performance is incomplete. To this end, we aimed to determine the temporal pattern of recovery of power-output post-sprint to identify the most suitable time to compare recovery protocols, and special care was taken to minimise the possibility that a placebo effect might explain different responses to active and passive recoveries. We hyphothesised that active recovery performed when recovery of sprint performance capacity is incomplete will result in a better restoration of sprint power than passive recovery, even when the possibility of a placebo effect is minimised, but not if both protocols are compared when recovery is almost complete.