12 ms·

We Are Nowhere Close to the Limits of Athletic Performance

104 points by marban 9y ago

lifeisstillgood 9y ago
So we are getting better at finding those genetic outliers who continue to outperform at their given sport. But this is becoming more and more detached from reality of the majority of us sitting inside the genetic bell curve. Finding time in lives dominated by commutes, education and young families, finding sport that can be integrated into our lives, and building a society that encourages moderate athleticism should be a priority - shaving another second off a sprint does not it seems encourage millions to get off the couch - so we should invest in what does. Otherwise sport is just another branch of the entertainment industry.
- cm2012 9y ago
  This isn't the whole story. High school track times are faster now than world champions 40 years ago.
  - yorwba 9y ago
    Average high school track times? That would surprise me. Do you have a source?
    - CreateChange 9y ago
      He definitely wasn't saying average, though I would be sure that those have gotten better as well, but simply due to better training practices.
      - goatlover 9y ago
        Also, better shoes and track surfaces.
  - nradov 9y ago
    Same for swimming. Champion high school girls now routinely break the men's world records set decades ago.
  - prh8 9y ago
    I wouldn't quite go that far. In 1936, Jesse Owens won the Olympics with a 10.3. Athletic.net[1] (which is not perfectly complete but close enough for reference) shows 33 high schoolers who ran 10.39 or better in 2017. So yes some are faster, but that's almost zero and 80 years later. None of these high schoolers have matched the 9.55 at the 1968 Olympics. [1]: https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/Division/Event.aspx?DivID=79871&Event=1 https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/Division/Event.aspx?D...
    - cm2012 9y ago
      Records for the 1 minute mile are closer. Especially since records aren't broken every Olympics.
      - prh8 9y ago
        Do you mean the 4 minute mile? The mile record has been consistently dropping from the 50s until 1999. However, only 10 high schoolers have broken 4 minutes, although 4 have been in the last 3 years. The closest high schoolers have been to it would be Jim Ryun in 1965, only 2 seconds off.
        goatlover 9y ago
        4 in 3 years is impressive. There were 3 in the 60s including Ryun, between 1965-1967.
    - cm2012 9y ago
      Records for the 1 minute mile are closer. Especially since records aren't broken every Olympics.
    - icelancer 9y ago
      >Jesse Owens won the Olympics with a 10.3 Jesse Owens also ran in terrible spikes on an ash cinder track. Jesse would threaten to break 10 flat if they used today's equipment with the very hard tracks in use today.
  - goatlover 9y ago
    Jim Ryun ran a 3:55 mile in the 1960s. The world record for the mile 40 years ago in 1977 was 3:49. The high school mile record is 3:53 set in 2001. The HS 800 record of 1:46.45 was set in 1996, which is just slight faster than the world record in 1939.
- cm2012 9y ago
  This isn't the whole story. High school track times are faster now than world champions 40 years ago.
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  > shaving another second off a sprint does not it seems encourage millions to get off the couch I'm not disagreeing, though something has caused millions to get off the couch. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported in December 2012 the number of Australians jogging or running as a sport or recreation has almost doubled since 2005–06.[1] In the US, in 2015 there were a total of 30,300 races, up 8% from 28,000 in 2014 with 17.1 million finishers reported across all road race distances.[2] 1. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/4177.0Media%20Release12011-12 http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/4177.0Media%2... 2. https://www.eventbrite.com/blog/running-industry-trends-running-usa-ds00/ https://www.eventbrite.com/blog/running-industry-trends-runn...
  - lifeisstillgood 9y ago
    I have a sneaking suspicion that the overall exercise in society has dipped or at best stayed level (recent research indicates dipped afaik) That is the nice and easily measurable 17million racers in marathons are most likely office workers who train in off hours as opposed to farmers walking hundreds of miles across fields or builders carrying bricks. Our work has become so much less demanding that taking up racketball does not compensate and marathons barely.
eesmith 9y ago
We seem to be at the limit of the fastest fastball. http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a6063/how-the-105-mph-fastball-tests-the-limits-of-the-human-body/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a6063/how-t... "However, even if the radar gun used last Friday gave Chapman 5 mph, his pitch still flirted with the maximum speed a human can throw a baseball, which Fleisig says is about 100 mph. Fleisig has found that adjustments to a pitcher's biomechanics, as well as better conditioning of the entire kinetic chain from the legs to the core to the arm, can improve a pitcher's velocity on his fastball. But he's discovered that as the pitcher approaches 100 mph, these tweaks and strengthening have diminishing returns. "Another cause of the 100-mph ceiling owes to this: the amount of torque needed to throw in excess of the century mark is greater than the amount of force the ulnar collateral ligament (the elbow ligament Strasburg tore) can withstand before giving out, according to tests Fleisig has done on cadavers. An addition quote from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/sports/baseball/harveys-injury-shows-pitchers-have-a-speed-limit.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/sports/baseball/harveys-in... . "Fleisig, a biomedical engineer, knows what an arm can handle, and years of research give him the confidence to answer one of baseball’s more intriguing questions: Is there a limit to how fast a human being can throw? "His answer: Yes, there is. "And, he adds: That limit already has been reached. "“Oh, there may be an outlier, one exception here or there,” he said. “But for major league baseball pitchers as a group of elites, the top isn’t going to go up anymore. With better conditioning and nutrition and mechanics, more pitchers will be toward that top, throwing at 95 or 100. But the top has topped out.”"
- TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
  Hybrid designer babies, splice in the ligament and fast-twitch muscle genes from a Cheetah. This will work until DNA testing becomes part of the standard anti-doping screening.
  - eesmith 9y ago
    Sure. And Cordwainer Smith mentions (in The Ballad of Lost C'Mell) that the cat underperson "C'mackintosh had been the first Earth-being to manage a fifty-meter broad-jump under normal gravity." At present what you mention is equally as science fiction as the nanotech predictions of the 1990s. In any case, the author argues that "Athletic performance follows a normal distribution" and "The normal distribution we see in athletic capabilities is a telltale signature of many small additive effects that are all independent from each other." I wanted to give a counter-example. Normal distributions don't have the hard cutoff that we've seen in pitching speeds. Edit: "No other primate throws with anything comparable to human force. Chimpanzees, who are much, much stronger, pound for pound, than human beings, can throw, as any zoo visitor knows. But the best an adult male can do is about 20 miles per hour. A 12-year-old human pitcher can easily throw three times that fast." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/science/evolution-on-the-mound-why-humans-throw-so-well.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/science/evolution-on-the-m... The hypothesis is that early humans, "around 1.8 million years ago ... [began] to hunt big game and needed to throw sharp objects hard and fast", or perhaps it was only "hundreds of thousands of years". In either case, it appear that humans have specifically evolved for throwing, with most of the energy coming from the shoulders, not from long or cord-like tendons. Our genetics may already be near the optimal, with respect to single point mutations. Not only might cheetah ligaments and muscles make little difference, they might actually be worse.
will_brown 9y ago
Anyone who hasn't seen the Netflix documentary on Ben Johnson should watch it, yes he took steroids and got popped for it, come to find out he had been taking steroids all the time and the tests were easy to beat, the story goes he only popped positive because Karl Lewis snuck a contact into the testing room to spike Ben Johnsons water before giving a sample. Have any doubts watch the documentary and watch Karl Lewis when asked about it and his response, he doesn't deny it at all and suggests that if that did occur it was fair play. As to Lewis himself being clean, again watch the documentary there were only about 2 runners in that era (regularly making the finals) who were clean, the athletes know better than anyone. Objectively Lewis was a full grown man and out of no where his jaw grew, displacing his teeth and he got braces to fix it as an adult. Jaw growth and braces were indicative of the steroids used at the time in the 80's and was common place with the track stars, who prior to jaw growth had perfect teeth. Even in modern times in track what gave Russia's state sponsored doping program away was the simple fact that non doped athletes would be doubled over from fatigue at the end of events and the Russians would be smiling not even out of breath, like the article suggests world class is world class and so like I suggest the athletes will simply be in the best position to know when something is out of the norm. As to Bolt, what makes him special as a sprinter is his size, once thought to be a detriment (like the article says), but he wasn't/isn't a freak, it is more along the lines of self fulfilling prophecy. Take Russia and China for example where they just pluck kids from school who are identified based on certain physical traits and go into state sponsored athletic training camps. Moreover, When you were a certain size you were just over looked by everyone including the coaches and put into different events, now that Bolt has broken the mold, tons of kids more inline with Bolt's body size are/have been identified and given the proper support and coaching, so in the near future we will see more and more sprinters similar to Bolt's measurements. This will inevitably lead to new world records in the short term without the need for genetic modification or peds.
- mingabunga 9y ago
  Just to point out, the jaw size increase is from human growth hormone rather than steroids. I recall seeing photos of members of the Santa Monica track club athletes (Carl Lewis's club) and 7 out of 9 of their top sprinters had braces.
0xcde4c3db 9y ago
> By comparison, the potential improvements achievable by doping effort are relatively modest. In weightlifting, for example, Mike Israetel, a professor of exercise science at Temple University, has estimated that doping increases weightlifting scores by about 5 to 10 percent. Based on how blatant the difference is in other contexts (most obviously modern bodybuilding), I'm guessing that's actually the difference between people who got caught and people who didn't get caught, not the difference between doping and no doping.
- Avshalom 9y ago
  We'll part of it is that what doping really let's you do is recover fast and thus train more. So in a lot of contexts it just reveals the limits of training more than the physical limits.
  - 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
    Yes, but I'm not sure how the effects are really separable unless someone figures out how to get the PED-enabled training regimen without the PED.
    - z3t4 9y ago
      Or get the PED-enabled results without training LOL.
  - jackmott 9y ago
    No, that is what people who make excuses for dopers, say about doping. But the 1st order thing steroids will do is just make you stronger, immediately, by themselves, even if you don't train differently (or at all!) The 1st order thing taking EPO or doing blood doping will do is just give you more aerobic endurance, immediately, by itself. No doubt some 2nd order benefit may result from also being able to train harder / recover faster while using these drugs.
    - lern_too_spel 9y ago
Havoc 9y ago
Well I'm sure there will be continuous improvement, but it'll be a case of shaving off miliseconds I think. The current crop of athletes have already essentially devoted their entire lives to eating/training etc just right so I think any further advances will be marginal. These aren't enthusiasts doing stuff on weekends anymore - they've got state level backing and large scale selection from a young age (see China). (Above excludes possibility of genetic engineering obv).
prh8 9y ago
> Even the combination of an elite runner and anabolic steroids, though, was not enough to outcompete a genetic outlier. This ignores the (very likely) possibility that Bolt is also doping, albeit with today's designer drugs and not anabolic steroids. When testing catches up to today's drugs, we will look back at Bolt differently. He is definitely a "genetic freak" as they say, but there's more to it than that.
- ethan_g 9y ago
  Indeed, Jamaica doesn't have strong anti-doping organizations and Bolt has teammates caught doping. I'd love to believe Bolt is clean, but I find it hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.
  - paganel 9y ago
    Same here. I really tried to believe that Carl Lewis was not doping, as he was one of my heroes as I grew up, but as the time passes I realize that he was most certainly doping. The same will probably happen to today's kids who grow up with Usain Bolt being their idol.
notadoc 9y ago
No probably not, but the overwhelming majority of developed world populations (USA leading in particular) are getting far less athletic and far more obese, which is certainly a limit on athletic performance.
- 123456112 9y ago
  Not really. More and more people know how to avoid getting fat, thanks to the internet. I'm 21 years old in a western European country and barely anyone my age is overweight, and a sizable minority even has a professional athletes body from working out.
  - notadoc 9y ago
    > I'm 21 years old in a western European country and barely anyone my age is overweight That explains it. Come to the USA, it is the exact opposite.
  - eesmith 9y ago
    Which country is this? France or one of the Scandinavian countries? "New WHO analysis shows alarming rates of overweight children ... According to a new report published by the WHO Regional Office for Europe, being overweight is so common that it risks becoming a new norm in the WHO European Region. For example, up to 27% of 13-year-olds and 33% of 11-year olds are overweight. ... Some countries have managed to contain the epidemic; France and some Scandinavian countries at least keep it at a stable level" - http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/243400/New-WHO-analysis-shows-alarming-rates-of-overweight-children.pdf?ua=1 http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/243400/N... "Obesity rates in France are among the lowest in the OECD, but have been increasing steadily ... Obesity rates are relatively low among children too, and have not been growing over the past 20 years" - http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/obesityandtheeconomicsofpreventionfitnotfat-francekeyfacts.htm http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/obesityandtheeconomic... Perhaps you don't know what overweight looks like because you are used to the "new norm"? "More than a third of overweight teenagers do not regard themselves as too heavy and think they are about the right weight, a study in England shows. ... Over the last few decades, studies in adults have hinted that fewer people are able to spot when they are overweight. And scientists speculate that the rising levels of obesity across the population might have "normalised" the idea of being overweight or obese, making it harder to recognise the extra pounds." - http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33453456 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33453456
virtualwhys 9y ago
The fastest pitch is likely closer to 110 MPH given what Chapman has done. Take a clone of Chapman, but with gigantic hands, taller, and stronger. And if the UCL is indeed the limiting factor, it's not hard to imagine a future where the ligament will be surgically enhanced via some kind of synthetic graft.
- semi-extrinsic 9y ago
  > it's not hard to imagine a future where the ligament will be surgically enhanced via some kind of synthetic graft I'm not convinced - biocompatibility is a bitch. Whenever someone tears e.g. an UCL or an ACL, there are no options other than transplanting in a human graft, either taken from the patient (often parts of the hamstring) or from a corpse.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    > there are no options other than transplanting in a human graft This isn't true anymore. Internal brace method is the most common advancement. There are other less ethical ones being done by select surgeons, too.
    - quickrandom 9y ago
      Less ethical?
- icelancer 9y ago
  >And if the UCL is indeed the limiting factor, it's not hard to imagine a future where the ligament will be surgically enhanced via some kind of synthetic graft. The UCL is not the limiting factor; it just gets torn from use. The tissue itself does not stop people from throwing harder than 105+ MPH. There are videos of people throwing baseballs 109 MPH from running starts and their arms don't explode; they also throw 3 oz balls 115+ MPH and their UCL doesn't tear. The UCL is not a governor. As for the synthetic graft, it already exists. We call it internal brace method, designed by Dr. Jeffrey Dugas. One surgeon even weaves fibers into the UCL to strengthen it and he calls it the Superband surgery. There is almost no information on that surgery, probably because the person who does it has been sanctioned twice by the AMA.
Chiba-City 9y ago
I loved playing soccer and tennis. Heroes for little kids are nice. I grew up with some Baltimore Oriole playing families in Baltimore. But why would anyone care? we suffer fools dumping taxpayer dollars into ludicrous athletic programs for lesser colleges and mostly empty new stadium sky boxes for corporate lobbyists. Passive viewing of sports and entertainment is dull. Attentions and dollars are better devoted to efficient live musical performance. So many of my fellow DC software engineers turned out to be talented instrumental musicians. I presume that early ambidextrous and symbolic training cultivating skilled code slinging applied mathematicians is not coincidental. My consulting firm did some work in drug discovery. We were already tapped out on brute force discovery by the 1990's. Elective medicine seems indefensible feeding kids synthetic food and leaded water. Encouraging kids to suffer supersized heroes on drugs beating dogs and women is unwise. My own mathlete kid watches ZERO TV And loves Aikido. Has demographic crisis, boredom and research attentions wasted on militaries driven good people mad?
- bigleagueposter 9y ago
  Is Aikido better than sports? A lot of it seems to be based on a ton of bullshit. Imaginary feats of mystical founders and delusions that you can actually use it in a fight.
Nomentatus 9y ago
Re Freeman Dyson's prediction - actually we already directly convert energy from sunlight, using the chlorophyll we eat, believe it or don't. We just don't make that chlorophyll. Amazing Discovery: Plant Blood Enables Your Cells To Capture Sunlight Energy Posted on: Tuesday, May 12th 2015 http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/chlorophyll-enables-your-cells-captureuse-sunlight-energy-copernican-revolution http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/chlorophyll-enables-your-ce...
- hossbeast 9y ago
  That article gives off a vibe of complete nonsense.
  - eesmith 9y ago
    I'll add to that. Even if humans could convert sunlight into energy as well as plants (they can't), we would only be able to generate about 15 kCal/hour. https://hplusbiopolitics.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/photosyntheti-people/ https://hplusbiopolitics.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/photosynth... . That's well less than 1/10th of what we need just for basic metabolism. Of course, we aren't covered with chloroplasts, not even close. So we're talking at best a teeny-tiny amount of what we need to live. There's very little reason for evolution to conserve these pathways[0]. Especially since we know that people can survive and be healthy on a meat-only diet in the arctic, where they are covered in clothes. This includes western Europeans who have not had any genetic adaptations for that climate or diet. [0] The photosynthetic systems must not be digested, must be transported through the blood to the whole body, make it through the cell walls to get to the mitochondria, be maintained at the right concentration, with some way to excrete the waste products.
    - gus_massa 9y ago
      Relevant [what if] xkcd: "Green Cows" https://what-if.xkcd.com/17/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/17/ It's a similar analysis, but it uses cows instead of humans.
- Nomentatus 9y ago
deepnotderp 9y ago
I'm very excited to see genetic engineering allow amateur athletes who work very hard (often harder than professionals!) to to become good.
vacri 9y ago
When you have to rely on a one-in-a-billion genetic freak to make new records, we are 'close to the limits'. When you have to have teams of scientists and coaches working to improve one individual just a tiny bit, we are 'close to the limits'. It's not like you can pop a pill and run 100m in 5s, blowing away current records.
projektir 9y ago
> We’re just scratching the surface of what genetic outliers can do. That seems to be the crux of it. Genetic outliers, yes. When I hear a phrase like "limits of athletic performance", though, I don't expect to read about genetic outliers, which, to me, are wholly uninteresting. The real limits of athletic performance if we mean genetic don't even end with humans. Was hoping that this was going to be about people not fulfilling their athletic potential overall. This seems to be getting worse for the average person. I think we pay too much attention to genetic freakishness instead of the average, on many accounts.
philwelch 9y ago
> We find a similar story in the NBA with Shaquille O’Neal. O’Neal was the first 7-footer in the league who retained the power and agility of a much smaller man. Neither a beanpole nor a plodding hulk, he would have been an athletic 200-pounder if scaled down to 6 feet in height. That's not really true. Wilt Chamberlain was taller than Shaq, was a highly competitive track and field athlete in high school and college, was often the fastest player on his NBA team, had the strength to pick up or throw around other NBA players sometimes with just one hand, and had an incredible vertical leap as well. And, unlike Shaq, he did all this playing every single minute of every single game. Like Shaq, however, Wilt Chamberlain's dominance led to rule changes, including widening the key. Shaquille O'Neal was undoubtedly more powerful than any other center of his era, and almost any center of all time with the possible exception of Chamberlain. He was also relatively lean early in his career, but especially after he went to the Lakers, he increased his strength and body mass at the expense of his speed and agility.
- goatlover 9y ago
  Also, Wilt & Shaq are generational outliers that are not in any indicative of your typical pro athlete. Shaq is a really bad example for the article to use as indicating any short of progress in sports performance. The current NBA isn't filled with Shaq-like players. It's guard dominated with a heavy emphasis on 3 point shooting.
  - philwelch 9y ago
    That's a fair point. The current NBA is also incredibly weird and positionless; the current champions have a shooting guard who is slightly taller than their power forward and occasional center and a small forward who is even taller, and there's a generation of young players who are seven feet tall but have the skill set of point guards and wing players. If anyone is the predecessor of this style of player, it would be Kevin Durant, who is the style of lanky seven-footer who has been pushed out of the center position but developed wing skills to compensate. The decline of the center position is really weird, though. The emphasis on three point shooting is driven by analytics--it turns out almost every player is more efficient shooting threes over midrange shots--so I wonder if a similar conclusion has been reached about the post game.
kisstheblade 9y ago
Are they implying that Bolt isn't doping? Everyone at that level dopes. Everyone. So they are on an equal standing there. (source: there have been documentaries about this)
- z3t4 9y ago
  That's what everyone taking drugs say "every one is using", yet they are the only ones using.
- kisstheblade 9y ago
  Nice job down voting. Just watch the documentaries. It's ridiculously easy to not get caught. Even if the whole government isn't aiding you (as is the case with russia). And the level at the top is just so tough that you have to dope. Every percent matters.
  - jwilk 9y ago
    From the HN guidelines: Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.
z3t4 9y ago
I think most advances will come from better materials. Faster balls, tracks, spikes, stronger shirts, etc.
- querulous 9y ago
  the record book in swimming was obliterated by the LZR 'fastskin' swimsuit. 98% of medals won in swimming in the beijing olympics were won by athletes wearing the suit. 93 world records were set by athletes wearing the suit before it was banned. many of those records still stand
velobro 9y ago
This may be an unpopular opinion but I really want there to be leagues with no rules on performance enhancing substances just to see what the human body is ultimately capable of. Michele Ferrari is pretty despised in the cycling scene but the research he was doing really highlighted what's possible with sports science
- clort 9y ago
  Every time this comes up, I need to ask.. who decides to use this performance enhancement when the enhancement is applied to young children for maximal effect? That suddenly turns morally dubious, and we can't suppose that nobody would do that, because we know for sure that somebody would.

104 points by marban 9y ago

So we are getting better at finding those genetic outliers who continue to outperform at their given sport. But this is becoming more and more detached from reality of the majority of us sitting inside the genetic bell curve. Finding time in lives dominated by commutes, education and young families, finding sport that can be integrated into our lives, and building a society that encourages moderate athleticism should be a priority - shaving another second off a sprint does not it seems encourage millions to get off the couch - so we should invest in what does. Otherwise sport is just another branch of the entertainment industry.

cm2012 9y ago
This isn't the whole story. High school track times are faster now than world champions 40 years ago.
- yorwba 9y ago
  Average high school track times? That would surprise me. Do you have a source?
  - CreateChange 9y ago
    He definitely wasn't saying average, though I would be sure that those have gotten better as well, but simply due to better training practices.
    - goatlover 9y ago
      Also, better shoes and track surfaces.
- nradov 9y ago
  Same for swimming. Champion high school girls now routinely break the men's world records set decades ago.
- prh8 9y ago
  I wouldn't quite go that far. In 1936, Jesse Owens won the Olympics with a 10.3. Athletic.net[1] (which is not perfectly complete but close enough for reference) shows 33 high schoolers who ran 10.39 or better in 2017. So yes some are faster, but that's almost zero and 80 years later. None of these high schoolers have matched the 9.55 at the 1968 Olympics. [1]: https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/Division/Event.aspx?DivID=79871&Event=1 https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/Division/Event.aspx?D...
  - cm2012 9y ago
    Records for the 1 minute mile are closer. Especially since records aren't broken every Olympics.
    - prh8 9y ago
      Do you mean the 4 minute mile? The mile record has been consistently dropping from the 50s until 1999. However, only 10 high schoolers have broken 4 minutes, although 4 have been in the last 3 years. The closest high schoolers have been to it would be Jim Ryun in 1965, only 2 seconds off.
      - goatlover 9y ago
        4 in 3 years is impressive. There were 3 in the 60s including Ryun, between 1965-1967.
  - cm2012 9y ago
    Records for the 1 minute mile are closer. Especially since records aren't broken every Olympics.
  - icelancer 9y ago
    >Jesse Owens won the Olympics with a 10.3 Jesse Owens also ran in terrible spikes on an ash cinder track. Jesse would threaten to break 10 flat if they used today's equipment with the very hard tracks in use today.
- goatlover 9y ago
  Jim Ryun ran a 3:55 mile in the 1960s. The world record for the mile 40 years ago in 1977 was 3:49. The high school mile record is 3:53 set in 2001. The HS 800 record of 1:46.45 was set in 1996, which is just slight faster than the world record in 1939.
cm2012 9y ago
This isn't the whole story. High school track times are faster now than world champions 40 years ago.
TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
> shaving another second off a sprint does not it seems encourage millions to get off the couch I'm not disagreeing, though something has caused millions to get off the couch. The Australian Bureau of Statistics reported in December 2012 the number of Australians jogging or running as a sport or recreation has almost doubled since 2005–06.[1] In the US, in 2015 there were a total of 30,300 races, up 8% from 28,000 in 2014 with 17.1 million finishers reported across all road race distances.[2] 1. http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/4177.0Media%20Release12011-12 http://www.abs.gov.au/ausstats/abs@.nsf/lookup/4177.0Media%2... 2. https://www.eventbrite.com/blog/running-industry-trends-running-usa-ds00/ https://www.eventbrite.com/blog/running-industry-trends-runn...
- lifeisstillgood 9y ago
  I have a sneaking suspicion that the overall exercise in society has dipped or at best stayed level (recent research indicates dipped afaik) That is the nice and easily measurable 17million racers in marathons are most likely office workers who train in off hours as opposed to farmers walking hundreds of miles across fields or builders carrying bricks. Our work has become so much less demanding that taking up racketball does not compensate and marathons barely.

eesmith 9y ago

We seem to be at the limit of the fastest fastball. http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a6063/how-the-105-mph-fastball-tests-the-limits-of-the-human-body/ http://www.popularmechanics.com/adventure/sports/a6063/how-t... "However, even if the radar gun used last Friday gave Chapman 5 mph, his pitch still flirted with the maximum speed a human can throw a baseball, which Fleisig says is about 100 mph. Fleisig has found that adjustments to a pitcher's biomechanics, as well as better conditioning of the entire kinetic chain from the legs to the core to the arm, can improve a pitcher's velocity on his fastball. But he's discovered that as the pitcher approaches 100 mph, these tweaks and strengthening have diminishing returns. "Another cause of the 100-mph ceiling owes to this: the amount of torque needed to throw in excess of the century mark is greater than the amount of force the ulnar collateral ligament (the elbow ligament Strasburg tore) can withstand before giving out, according to tests Fleisig has done on cadavers. An addition quote from http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/sports/baseball/harveys-injury-shows-pitchers-have-a-speed-limit.html?pagewanted=all http://www.nytimes.com/2013/09/17/sports/baseball/harveys-in... . "Fleisig, a biomedical engineer, knows what an arm can handle, and years of research give him the confidence to answer one of baseball’s more intriguing questions: Is there a limit to how fast a human being can throw? "His answer: Yes, there is. "And, he adds: That limit already has been reached. "“Oh, there may be an outlier, one exception here or there,” he said. “But for major league baseball pitchers as a group of elites, the top isn’t going to go up anymore. With better conditioning and nutrition and mechanics, more pitchers will be toward that top, throwing at 95 or 100. But the top has topped out.”"

TheSpiceIsLife 9y ago
Hybrid designer babies, splice in the ligament and fast-twitch muscle genes from a Cheetah. This will work until DNA testing becomes part of the standard anti-doping screening.
- eesmith 9y ago
  Sure. And Cordwainer Smith mentions (in The Ballad of Lost C'Mell) that the cat underperson "C'mackintosh had been the first Earth-being to manage a fifty-meter broad-jump under normal gravity." At present what you mention is equally as science fiction as the nanotech predictions of the 1990s. In any case, the author argues that "Athletic performance follows a normal distribution" and "The normal distribution we see in athletic capabilities is a telltale signature of many small additive effects that are all independent from each other." I wanted to give a counter-example. Normal distributions don't have the hard cutoff that we've seen in pitching speeds. Edit: "No other primate throws with anything comparable to human force. Chimpanzees, who are much, much stronger, pound for pound, than human beings, can throw, as any zoo visitor knows. But the best an adult male can do is about 20 miles per hour. A 12-year-old human pitcher can easily throw three times that fast." http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/science/evolution-on-the-mound-why-humans-throw-so-well.html http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/27/science/evolution-on-the-m... The hypothesis is that early humans, "around 1.8 million years ago ... [began] to hunt big game and needed to throw sharp objects hard and fast", or perhaps it was only "hundreds of thousands of years". In either case, it appear that humans have specifically evolved for throwing, with most of the energy coming from the shoulders, not from long or cord-like tendons. Our genetics may already be near the optimal, with respect to single point mutations. Not only might cheetah ligaments and muscles make little difference, they might actually be worse.

will_brown 9y ago

Anyone who hasn't seen the Netflix documentary on Ben Johnson should watch it, yes he took steroids and got popped for it, come to find out he had been taking steroids all the time and the tests were easy to beat, the story goes he only popped positive because Karl Lewis snuck a contact into the testing room to spike Ben Johnsons water before giving a sample. Have any doubts watch the documentary and watch Karl Lewis when asked about it and his response, he doesn't deny it at all and suggests that if that did occur it was fair play. As to Lewis himself being clean, again watch the documentary there were only about 2 runners in that era (regularly making the finals) who were clean, the athletes know better than anyone. Objectively Lewis was a full grown man and out of no where his jaw grew, displacing his teeth and he got braces to fix it as an adult. Jaw growth and braces were indicative of the steroids used at the time in the 80's and was common place with the track stars, who prior to jaw growth had perfect teeth. Even in modern times in track what gave Russia's state sponsored doping program away was the simple fact that non doped athletes would be doubled over from fatigue at the end of events and the Russians would be smiling not even out of breath, like the article suggests world class is world class and so like I suggest the athletes will simply be in the best position to know when something is out of the norm. As to Bolt, what makes him special as a sprinter is his size, once thought to be a detriment (like the article says), but he wasn't/isn't a freak, it is more along the lines of self fulfilling prophecy. Take Russia and China for example where they just pluck kids from school who are identified based on certain physical traits and go into state sponsored athletic training camps. Moreover, When you were a certain size you were just over looked by everyone including the coaches and put into different events, now that Bolt has broken the mold, tons of kids more inline with Bolt's body size are/have been identified and given the proper support and coaching, so in the near future we will see more and more sprinters similar to Bolt's measurements. This will inevitably lead to new world records in the short term without the need for genetic modification or peds.

mingabunga 9y ago
Just to point out, the jaw size increase is from human growth hormone rather than steroids. I recall seeing photos of members of the Santa Monica track club athletes (Carl Lewis's club) and 7 out of 9 of their top sprinters had braces.

0xcde4c3db 9y ago

> By comparison, the potential improvements achievable by doping effort are relatively modest. In weightlifting, for example, Mike Israetel, a professor of exercise science at Temple University, has estimated that doping increases weightlifting scores by about 5 to 10 percent. Based on how blatant the difference is in other contexts (most obviously modern bodybuilding), I'm guessing that's actually the difference between people who got caught and people who didn't get caught, not the difference between doping and no doping.

Avshalom 9y ago
We'll part of it is that what doping really let's you do is recover fast and thus train more. So in a lot of contexts it just reveals the limits of training more than the physical limits.
- 0xcde4c3db 9y ago
  Yes, but I'm not sure how the effects are really separable unless someone figures out how to get the PED-enabled training regimen without the PED.
  - z3t4 9y ago
    Or get the PED-enabled results without training LOL.
- jackmott 9y ago
  No, that is what people who make excuses for dopers, say about doping. But the 1st order thing steroids will do is just make you stronger, immediately, by themselves, even if you don't train differently (or at all!) The 1st order thing taking EPO or doing blood doping will do is just give you more aerobic endurance, immediately, by itself. No doubt some 2nd order benefit may result from also being able to train harder / recover faster while using these drugs.
  - lern_too_spel 9y ago

Havoc 9y ago

Well I'm sure there will be continuous improvement, but it'll be a case of shaving off miliseconds I think. The current crop of athletes have already essentially devoted their entire lives to eating/training etc just right so I think any further advances will be marginal. These aren't enthusiasts doing stuff on weekends anymore - they've got state level backing and large scale selection from a young age (see China). (Above excludes possibility of genetic engineering obv).

prh8 9y ago

> Even the combination of an elite runner and anabolic steroids, though, was not enough to outcompete a genetic outlier. This ignores the (very likely) possibility that Bolt is also doping, albeit with today's designer drugs and not anabolic steroids. When testing catches up to today's drugs, we will look back at Bolt differently. He is definitely a "genetic freak" as they say, but there's more to it than that.

ethan_g 9y ago
Indeed, Jamaica doesn't have strong anti-doping organizations and Bolt has teammates caught doping. I'd love to believe Bolt is clean, but I find it hard to give him the benefit of the doubt.
- paganel 9y ago
  Same here. I really tried to believe that Carl Lewis was not doping, as he was one of my heroes as I grew up, but as the time passes I realize that he was most certainly doping. The same will probably happen to today's kids who grow up with Usain Bolt being their idol.

notadoc 9y ago

No probably not, but the overwhelming majority of developed world populations (USA leading in particular) are getting far less athletic and far more obese, which is certainly a limit on athletic performance.

123456112 9y ago
Not really. More and more people know how to avoid getting fat, thanks to the internet. I'm 21 years old in a western European country and barely anyone my age is overweight, and a sizable minority even has a professional athletes body from working out.
- notadoc 9y ago
  > I'm 21 years old in a western European country and barely anyone my age is overweight That explains it. Come to the USA, it is the exact opposite.
- eesmith 9y ago
  Which country is this? France or one of the Scandinavian countries? "New WHO analysis shows alarming rates of overweight children ... According to a new report published by the WHO Regional Office for Europe, being overweight is so common that it risks becoming a new norm in the WHO European Region. For example, up to 27% of 13-year-olds and 33% of 11-year olds are overweight. ... Some countries have managed to contain the epidemic; France and some Scandinavian countries at least keep it at a stable level" - http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/243400/New-WHO-analysis-shows-alarming-rates-of-overweight-children.pdf?ua=1 http://www.euro.who.int/__data/assets/pdf_file/0013/243400/N... "Obesity rates in France are among the lowest in the OECD, but have been increasing steadily ... Obesity rates are relatively low among children too, and have not been growing over the past 20 years" - http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/obesityandtheeconomicsofpreventionfitnotfat-francekeyfacts.htm http://www.oecd.org/els/health-systems/obesityandtheeconomic... Perhaps you don't know what overweight looks like because you are used to the "new norm"? "More than a third of overweight teenagers do not regard themselves as too heavy and think they are about the right weight, a study in England shows. ... Over the last few decades, studies in adults have hinted that fewer people are able to spot when they are overweight. And scientists speculate that the rising levels of obesity across the population might have "normalised" the idea of being overweight or obese, making it harder to recognise the extra pounds." - http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33453456 http://www.bbc.com/news/health-33453456

virtualwhys 9y ago

The fastest pitch is likely closer to 110 MPH given what Chapman has done. Take a clone of Chapman, but with gigantic hands, taller, and stronger. And if the UCL is indeed the limiting factor, it's not hard to imagine a future where the ligament will be surgically enhanced via some kind of synthetic graft.

semi-extrinsic 9y ago
> it's not hard to imagine a future where the ligament will be surgically enhanced via some kind of synthetic graft I'm not convinced - biocompatibility is a bitch. Whenever someone tears e.g. an UCL or an ACL, there are no options other than transplanting in a human graft, either taken from the patient (often parts of the hamstring) or from a corpse.
- icelancer 9y ago
  > there are no options other than transplanting in a human graft This isn't true anymore. Internal brace method is the most common advancement. There are other less ethical ones being done by select surgeons, too.
  - quickrandom 9y ago
    Less ethical?
icelancer 9y ago
>And if the UCL is indeed the limiting factor, it's not hard to imagine a future where the ligament will be surgically enhanced via some kind of synthetic graft. The UCL is not the limiting factor; it just gets torn from use. The tissue itself does not stop people from throwing harder than 105+ MPH. There are videos of people throwing baseballs 109 MPH from running starts and their arms don't explode; they also throw 3 oz balls 115+ MPH and their UCL doesn't tear. The UCL is not a governor. As for the synthetic graft, it already exists. We call it internal brace method, designed by Dr. Jeffrey Dugas. One surgeon even weaves fibers into the UCL to strengthen it and he calls it the Superband surgery. There is almost no information on that surgery, probably because the person who does it has been sanctioned twice by the AMA.

Chiba-City 9y ago

I loved playing soccer and tennis. Heroes for little kids are nice. I grew up with some Baltimore Oriole playing families in Baltimore. But why would anyone care? we suffer fools dumping taxpayer dollars into ludicrous athletic programs for lesser colleges and mostly empty new stadium sky boxes for corporate lobbyists. Passive viewing of sports and entertainment is dull. Attentions and dollars are better devoted to efficient live musical performance. So many of my fellow DC software engineers turned out to be talented instrumental musicians. I presume that early ambidextrous and symbolic training cultivating skilled code slinging applied mathematicians is not coincidental. My consulting firm did some work in drug discovery. We were already tapped out on brute force discovery by the 1990's. Elective medicine seems indefensible feeding kids synthetic food and leaded water. Encouraging kids to suffer supersized heroes on drugs beating dogs and women is unwise. My own mathlete kid watches ZERO TV And loves Aikido. Has demographic crisis, boredom and research attentions wasted on militaries driven good people mad?

bigleagueposter 9y ago
Is Aikido better than sports? A lot of it seems to be based on a ton of bullshit. Imaginary feats of mystical founders and delusions that you can actually use it in a fight.

Nomentatus 9y ago

Re Freeman Dyson's prediction - actually we already directly convert energy from sunlight, using the chlorophyll we eat, believe it or don't. We just don't make that chlorophyll. Amazing Discovery: Plant Blood Enables Your Cells To Capture Sunlight Energy Posted on: Tuesday, May 12th 2015 http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/chlorophyll-enables-your-cells-captureuse-sunlight-energy-copernican-revolution http://www.greenmedinfo.com/blog/chlorophyll-enables-your-ce...

hossbeast 9y ago
That article gives off a vibe of complete nonsense.
- eesmith 9y ago
  I'll add to that. Even if humans could convert sunlight into energy as well as plants (they can't), we would only be able to generate about 15 kCal/hour. https://hplusbiopolitics.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/photosyntheti-people/ https://hplusbiopolitics.wordpress.com/2008/08/12/photosynth... . That's well less than 1/10th of what we need just for basic metabolism. Of course, we aren't covered with chloroplasts, not even close. So we're talking at best a teeny-tiny amount of what we need to live. There's very little reason for evolution to conserve these pathways[0]. Especially since we know that people can survive and be healthy on a meat-only diet in the arctic, where they are covered in clothes. This includes western Europeans who have not had any genetic adaptations for that climate or diet. [0] The photosynthetic systems must not be digested, must be transported through the blood to the whole body, make it through the cell walls to get to the mitochondria, be maintained at the right concentration, with some way to excrete the waste products.
  - gus_massa 9y ago
    Relevant [what if] xkcd: "Green Cows" https://what-if.xkcd.com/17/ https://what-if.xkcd.com/17/ It's a similar analysis, but it uses cows instead of humans.
Nomentatus 9y ago

deepnotderp 9y ago

I'm very excited to see genetic engineering allow amateur athletes who work very hard (often harder than professionals!) to to become good.

vacri 9y ago

When you have to rely on a one-in-a-billion genetic freak to make new records, we are 'close to the limits'. When you have to have teams of scientists and coaches working to improve one individual just a tiny bit, we are 'close to the limits'. It's not like you can pop a pill and run 100m in 5s, blowing away current records.

projektir 9y ago

> We’re just scratching the surface of what genetic outliers can do. That seems to be the crux of it. Genetic outliers, yes. When I hear a phrase like "limits of athletic performance", though, I don't expect to read about genetic outliers, which, to me, are wholly uninteresting. The real limits of athletic performance if we mean genetic don't even end with humans. Was hoping that this was going to be about people not fulfilling their athletic potential overall. This seems to be getting worse for the average person. I think we pay too much attention to genetic freakishness instead of the average, on many accounts.

philwelch 9y ago

> We find a similar story in the NBA with Shaquille O’Neal. O’Neal was the first 7-footer in the league who retained the power and agility of a much smaller man. Neither a beanpole nor a plodding hulk, he would have been an athletic 200-pounder if scaled down to 6 feet in height. That's not really true. Wilt Chamberlain was taller than Shaq, was a highly competitive track and field athlete in high school and college, was often the fastest player on his NBA team, had the strength to pick up or throw around other NBA players sometimes with just one hand, and had an incredible vertical leap as well. And, unlike Shaq, he did all this playing every single minute of every single game. Like Shaq, however, Wilt Chamberlain's dominance led to rule changes, including widening the key. Shaquille O'Neal was undoubtedly more powerful than any other center of his era, and almost any center of all time with the possible exception of Chamberlain. He was also relatively lean early in his career, but especially after he went to the Lakers, he increased his strength and body mass at the expense of his speed and agility.

goatlover 9y ago
Also, Wilt & Shaq are generational outliers that are not in any indicative of your typical pro athlete. Shaq is a really bad example for the article to use as indicating any short of progress in sports performance. The current NBA isn't filled with Shaq-like players. It's guard dominated with a heavy emphasis on 3 point shooting.
- philwelch 9y ago
  That's a fair point. The current NBA is also incredibly weird and positionless; the current champions have a shooting guard who is slightly taller than their power forward and occasional center and a small forward who is even taller, and there's a generation of young players who are seven feet tall but have the skill set of point guards and wing players. If anyone is the predecessor of this style of player, it would be Kevin Durant, who is the style of lanky seven-footer who has been pushed out of the center position but developed wing skills to compensate. The decline of the center position is really weird, though. The emphasis on three point shooting is driven by analytics--it turns out almost every player is more efficient shooting threes over midrange shots--so I wonder if a similar conclusion has been reached about the post game.

kisstheblade 9y ago

Are they implying that Bolt isn't doping? Everyone at that level dopes. Everyone. So they are on an equal standing there. (source: there have been documentaries about this)

z3t4 9y ago
That's what everyone taking drugs say "every one is using", yet they are the only ones using.
kisstheblade 9y ago
Nice job down voting. Just watch the documentaries. It's ridiculously easy to not get caught. Even if the whole government isn't aiding you (as is the case with russia). And the level at the top is just so tough that you have to dope. Every percent matters.
- jwilk 9y ago
  From the HN guidelines: Please resist commenting about being downvoted. It never does any good, and it makes boring reading.

z3t4 9y ago

I think most advances will come from better materials. Faster balls, tracks, spikes, stronger shirts, etc.

querulous 9y ago
the record book in swimming was obliterated by the LZR 'fastskin' swimsuit. 98% of medals won in swimming in the beijing olympics were won by athletes wearing the suit. 93 world records were set by athletes wearing the suit before it was banned. many of those records still stand

velobro 9y ago

This may be an unpopular opinion but I really want there to be leagues with no rules on performance enhancing substances just to see what the human body is ultimately capable of. Michele Ferrari is pretty despised in the cycling scene but the research he was doing really highlighted what's possible with sports science

clort 9y ago
Every time this comes up, I need to ask.. who decides to use this performance enhancement when the enhancement is applied to young children for maximal effect? That suddenly turns morally dubious, and we can't suppose that nobody would do that, because we know for sure that somebody would.