Records get broken. That’s almost a truism in the world of athletics, but is the pace of record-setting slowing? Are athletes reaching the natural limits of human achievement?
But for almost a decade, the Summer Olympics have offered a mysterious exception. In some of the most basic ways imaginable – how fast people can run, how high they can jump, how far they can throw – the march of progress has stopped. The track and field athletes competing in Athens Olympic Stadium over the next week and a half may well struggle to match the performances of their predecessors.
Four years ago, no relay team was able to cover 400 meters as quickly as four United States runners had in 1988 in Seoul, South Korea. Carl Lewis jumped farther in Seoul than any man would 12 years later in Sydney, Australia, and Jackie Joyner-Kersee did the same among women.
In more than two-thirds of track and field events, in fact, the gold-medal performances in 1988 would have been good enough to win again in 2000. Just one result from 1976, by contrast, would have won in 1988, among the 32 events in which comparisons are possible, said Raymond Stefani, a professor of electrical engineering at California State University at Long Beach who studies the Olympics.
In more than a century of Olympic history, only world wars, by killing millions of people in their athletic prime, had previously caused this kind of stagnation.
On the one hand, there’s the basic axiom that human performance improvement is not unlimited. Nobody expects the one-minute mile is possible. But two things argue against our having reached the peak.
First, positing that we’ve reached limits is an old trap to fall into. Nobody thought the four minute mile was physically possible — until it was achieved. In the 60s and 70s, it was widely believed once again that we’d reached the ultimate levels of achievement. Folks were wrong then, so they may be wrong now.
The same is true for the limits of (legal) technological advantages — better tracks, better pools, better clothing, better other equipment. All of these items have assisted in improvements in the past. Have we reached the end of that sort of development? It seems unlikely — though the most recent improvement, full-body swim suits — turned out to not really have any effect (and, as these games show, have been dropped or modified by many of the swimmers).
More importantly, though, the last decade or two has seen a dramatic increase in anti-doping efforts, meaning that comparing unassisted achievement today with drugged performance of yesteryear is probably not fair. The recent slump may just be athletes “catching up” with their performance-enhanced predecessors.
But, eventually, achievements will plateau — again, we won’t see the one-minute mile, it seems safe to say. Which leads to the question of what it will mean to athletics in general. More stable sports (and athletic events) seem to be able to maintain excitement with the competition of the moment, rather than ever-improving records. Will the same be true for swimming and track? It should be interesting to see.