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Since the early years of the
twentieth century, when the International Athletic Federation began keeping
records, there has been a steady improvement in how fast athletes run, how
high they jump and how far they are bale to hurl massive objects, themselves
included, through space. For the so-called power events –that require a
relatively brief, explosive release of energy, like the 100-metre sprint
and the long jump-times and distances have improved ten to twenty percent.
In the endurance events the results have been more dramatic. At the 1908
Olympics, John Hayes of the U.S. team ran to marathon in a time of 2:55:18.
In 1999, Morocco’s Khalid Khannouchi set a new world record of 2:05:42,
almost thirty percent faster.
No one theory can explain
improvements in performance, but the most important factor has been
genetics. ‘The athlete must choose his parents carefully,’ says Jesus
Dapena, a sports scientist at Indiana University, invoking an oftcited
adage. Over the past century, the composition of the human gene pool has
not changed appreciably, but with increasing global participation in
athletics-and greater rewards to tempt athletes-it is more likely that
individuals possessing the unique complement of genes for athletic
performance can be identified early. ‘Was there someone like [sprinter]
Michael Johnson in the 1920s?’ Dapena asks. ‘I’m sure there was, but his
talent was probably never realized.’
Identifying genetically
talented individuals is only the first step. Michael Yessis, an emeritus
professor of Sports Science at California State University at Fullerton,
maintains that ‘genetics only determines about one third of what an athlete
can do. But with the right training we can go much further with that one
third than we’ve been going.’ Yesis believes that U.S. runners, despite
their impressive achievements, are ‘running on their genetics’. By applying
more scientific methods, ‘they’re going to go much faster’. These methods
include strength training that duplicates what they are doing in their
running events as well as plyometrics, a technique pioneered in the former
Soviet Union.
Whereas most exercises are
designed to build up strength or endurance, plyometrics focuses on
increasing power-the rate at which an athlete can expend energy. When a
sprinter runs, Yesis explains, her foot stays in contact with the ground
for just under a tenth of a second, half of which is devoted to landing and
the other half to pushing off. Plyometric exercises help athletes make the
best use of this brief interval.
Nutrition is another area that
sports trainers have failed to address adequately. ‘Many athletes are not
getting the best nutrition, even through supplements,’ Yessis insists. Each
activity has its own nutritional needs. Few coaches, for instance,
understand how deficiencies in trace minerals can lead to injuries.
Focused training will also
play a role in enabling records to be broken. ‘If we applied the Russian
training model to some of the outstanding runners we have in this country,’
Yessis asserts, ‘they would be breaking records left and right.’ He will
not predict by how much, however: ‘Exactly what the limits are it’s hard to
say, but there will be increases even if only by hundredths of a second, as
long as our training continues to improve.’
One of the most important new
methodologies is biomechanics, the study of the body in motion. A
biomechanic films an athlete in action and then digitizes her performance,
recording the motion of every joint and limb in three dimensions. By
applying Newton’s law to these motions, ‘we can say that this athlete’s run
is not fast enough; that this one is not using his arms strongly enough
during take-off,’ says Dapena, who uses these methods to help high jumpers.
To date, however, biomechanics has made only a small difference to athletic
performance.
Revolutionary ideas still come
from the athletes themselves. For example, during the 1968 Olympics in
Mexico City, a relatively unknown high jumper named Dick Fosbury won the
gold by going over the bar backwards, in complete contradiction of all the
received high-jumping wisdom, a move instantly dubbed the Fosbury flop.
Fosbury himself did not know what he was doing. That understanding took the
later analysis of biomechanics specialists. who put their minds to
comprehending something that was too complex and unorthodox ever to have
been invented through their own mathematical simulations. Fosbury also
required another element that lies behind many improvements in athletic
performance: an innovation in athletic equipment. In Fosbury’s case, it was
the cushions that jumpers land on. Traditionally, high jumpers would land
in pits filled with sawdust. But by Fosbury’s time, sawdust pits had been
replaced by soft foam cushions, ideal for flopping.
In the end, most people who
examine human performance are humbled by the resourcefulness of athletes
and the powers of the human body. ‘Once you study athletics, you learn that
it’s a vexingly complex issue,’ says John S.Raglin, a sports psychologist
at Indiana University. ‘Core performance is not a simple or mundane thing
of higher, faster, longer. So many variables enter into the equation, and
our understanding in many cases is fundamental. We’re got a long way to
go.’ For the foreseeable future, records will be made to be broken.
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