THE Athens Olympics are certain to see some incredible sporting performances. World records will fall and commentators will anoint gold medallists as sporting greats – possibly even “the greatest of all time”. In short, the games will fulfil the Olympian ideals of faster, higher, stronger. In four years it will all happen again in Beijing.
Or will it? There has to be an absolute limit to how fast a human body can run 100 metres, or how far it can fling itself into a pit of sand. Just how much faster, higher and stronger can the human body be pushed?
The answer is not much – but that won’t stop the records from falling just yet. Although many Olympic sports are close to the limits of human performance, and some may already have reached them, they are able to keep improving through ingenious use of technology. Some are so reliant on technology and other interventions that they are becoming like Formula One motor racing, where the competition is less about “let the best man win” than “let he who has the best technology win”.
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Taken at face value this is the end of the spirit of pure competition. But speak to sports scientists and most will tell you that there’s nothing to worry about. These sports are “record driven” – if technology can keep the records coming, then bring it on.
In some events, the impact of technology is obvious. Take the pole vault. At the turn of the 20th century, vaulters used bamboo poles, so it is hardly surprising that the best performances were well short of the current world record of 6.14 metres, held by Ukrainian Sergey Bubka. But poles got better – notably the introduction of metal in the 1950s and, soon after, glass-fibre composite. The upshot is that the pole vault record has increased by 53 per cent since the first official record set in 1912 (see Graphic). Compare that with the high jump, where today’s record is only 23 per cent more than in 1912, or long jump, where the difference is just 18 per cent. “I think this illustrates that technology can have a very profound effect on performance,” says Claire Davis, an expert in sports engineering at the University of Birmingham, UK.
The pole vault is not an isolated example. In 1996, speed skating was turned on its head by so-called klap skates. Before klaps, skate blades were attached to the boot all the way along. Klaps have a flexible attachment at the toe end, rather like skis. This means that skaters can keep their skates in contact with the ice for longer and so transfer more power with each push. Speed skating rinks have also seen technological innovations, such as temperature and humidity controls that keep the ice primed for maximum speed. “Developments have been such that the once-in-a-lifetime performances of athletes in the early 80s are exceeded by good juniors today,” says sports scientist Stephen Seiler of Agder University College in Kristiansand, Norway. Tellingly, 8 of the 10 current speed-skating world records were set in the Salt Lake City Winter Olympics in 2002; the other two were set in 2001.
Perhaps the best illustration of the impact of technology comes from cycling. In October 1972, the legendary Belgian cyclist Eddy Merckx set the world hour record at 49 kilometres 431 metres in Mexico City. As the event’s name suggests, competitors cycle as far as they possibly can in an hour.
Merckx’s record was later broken several times by cyclists using improved bikes, but in 2000 the International Cycling Union, cycling’s governing body based in Aigle, Switzerland, decided to strip away the advantage provided by technology and reinstate Merckx’s record. Future challengers had to use essentially the same bike. Under the new rules British cyclist Chris Boardman beat the record later that year in Manchester. But he only beat Merckx’s phenomenal distance by 10 metres – an improvement of 0.02 per cent. Subsequent assaults on Boardman’s record have failed. “I would suggest that we have reached the limits of human performance in one-hour cycling,” says Greg Whyte, head of physiology at the English Institute of Sport in Manchester.
Tellingly, in another event where cyclists can use the latest technology, the record is 56.375 kilometres (also set by Boardman), nearly 7 kilometres farther than Merckx’s distance. So improvements in bicycle technology have given cyclists an extra 14 per cent since the early 70s.
New poles, skates and bikes are easy to copy, but technology has also had a huge impact behind the scenes. Scott Drawer, research and innovation consultant to UK Sport, a government agency charged with developing elite sport, says that this has allowed athletes to significantly increase their training intensity.
It started in the mid 1980s when athletes in endurance sports began using heart monitors. This allowed them to gauge precisely how hard they were working, so that they could step on the gas or ease off at the right times. Monitors prevent you from burning out, both in training and races, says Kim Blair, director of the Center for Sports Innovation at MIT. “Nowadays you would be hard-pressed to find people at the top of their game who aren’t using them.”
Heart monitors are now just one monitoring technology among many. “What we are seeing now is a move towards full instrumentation of the athlete,” says Seiler. “Instead of looking at one variable at a time in the laboratory, new technologies are allowing us to measure multiple variables in real time.” This, he claims, is now the only way to squeeze that extra bit out of elite athletes. “The framework for training is well developed now. I don’t see a lot of room for revolution there.”
Something else that today’s athletes increasingly rely on is the witch doctor’s cabinet of potions, dietary supplements and herbal medicines that are on offer. For the vast majority of substances, both legal and illegal, the evidence that they work is scanty or contradictory. But whether the supplement improves performance is often irrelevant. In the highly charged world of elite athletics, perception can be more important than reality.
Belief is everything
“Athletes believe that the reason performances are improving is better dietary supplements,” says Peter Radford, director of research at the department of sports sciences at Brunel University in Uxbridge, UK. “International sport is a huge gossip house and everybody is neurotic about being one step behind.” Just hearing that a rival is on a new supplement can be enough to prompt an athlete to follow suit.
So amid the technology and pharmacy, is there any room left for pure, unadulterated sporting greatness? Yes, says Radford. He claims that even without artificial intervention we would continue to see improvements. One reason is that participation in sport is becoming ever more globalised. “When the early records were set you were sampling from western European populations only,” says Radford. But as more and more people from around the world take part, the chances of discovering a new superstar who can break records increases. Similarly, Radford says he has unpublished results showing that increases in the aggregate number of competitors can account for improvement in world records. “You are bound to get more extreme scores, the more you sample,” he says.
Even so, might it be time for some sports to take a leaf out of Formula One’s book and rein in the technology for the sake of pure competition? Most insiders think not. “Evolution in equipment is very valuable,” says sports engineer Mont Hubbard of the University of California at Davis. “It draws out the best in the competitor.” Some are even more hard-nosed. “I don’t think the Olympic ideal is realistic in today’s world,” says sports physiologist William Kraemer of the University of Connecticut. “You can go with ideals, but the consumer audience wants to see the freaky far-out performances.”
The golden age
Visit the official website of the Olympic movement and you can download dozens of fact sheets showing how world records have improved over the years (). The history of some athletics records goes back almost a century – the oldest one for a track event, for example, dates back to the London Olympics of 1908 when Charles Bacon of the US ran the 400 metre hurdles in 55.0 seconds. Bacon’s record has since been broken 19 times and now stands at 46.78 seconds.
In every discipline, athletes are running faster, jumping higher and throwing farther than ever before. But take a closer look and the parade of records is not all that it seems. Sports scientist Peter Radford of Brunel University in Uxbridge, UK, has gathered extraordinary evidence showing that for much of the 20th century, athletes were not so much pushing the boundaries as struggling to match levels that had been achieved 200 years previously.
In 18th century Britain, athletics (or foot-racing as it was called) was a professional sport. Racers ran not for medals or records but for money, often considerable sums. They even ran naked to ape the original Olympians. Radford has discovered a foot-racer called Powell who in 1787 attempted a four-minute mile and wagered 1000 guineas on the feat (equivalent to £78,000 in 2004 values). He reportedly ran 4 minutes 3 seconds in a trial race. There is no record of his time in the event proper.
Despite the exotic nature of the data – most of it comes from journals, diaries and newspapers – Radford and his colleague John Ward-Smith managed to verify performances for 94 different runners (Journal of Sports Sciences, vol 21, p 429). These were individuals for whom they could find two or more independent records that could be checked against each other for consistency.
The work has thrown up some impressive times, including the first recorded four-minute mile, set in 1770 by one James Parrott along Old Street in London. From other races over distances close to a marathon, Radford has calculated two “marathon equivalent” performances of 2 hours 11 minutes in 1753 and 2 hours 10 minutes in 1769. These are not too far off the men’s world record of 2 hours 4 minutes and 55 seconds, set by Paul Tergat of Kenya in 2003. Both would have been world bests before 1967. Of course, it is hard to verify the accuracy of distance and time measurements, but Radford contends that with so much money at stake, errors would have been minimal.
So why did athletics slip backwards? Radford blames the imposition of amateurism by the Victorians in 1880, which served to exclude lower-class “undesirables” from the sport and made it an exclusive pursuit of the moneyed elite. In the process they dealt a heavy blow to athletic performances.