18 ms·

Why are so many athletics records falling?

44 points by prostoalex 6y ago

jnord 6y ago
https://archive.is/HZdMr https://archive.is/HZdMr
taksintikk 6y ago
Optimized from birth
meowzero 6y ago
Also style of play is a factor. In basketball, thanks to various analytics, 3 pointers are becoming more important. 3-point shooting records have been breaking all over the place these days in the NBA. OTOH, because of the playing style changes, certain records might never be broken such as John Stockton's assists record. It was already a ridiculous record, but it would be much harder to break with the current style of play.
- tburmeister 6y ago
  The article is specifically about the sport of athletics, better known as track and field in the US; it has nothing to do with basketball.
DrBazza 6y ago
The Valencia Half Marathon in Dec. 2020 Kibiwott Kandie reduced the HM WR by 30 seconds, and 4 men in total beat the old record in the same race. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/55206158 https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/55206158 In the words of Jen Barber "the shoes!" > There is a ban on any shoes that have a sole thicker than 40mm. > Kandie was using Adidas shoes that have 39mm of foam. There's also the fact that African runners train differently, and even their gait/pose is slightly different with their chests thrust out slightly.
- tburmeister 6y ago
  Ethiopians and Kenyans have been dominant in track and field since the 90s, that's not exactly a recent change; both countries, btw, train fairly differently from each other, and I would contend that "gaits" differ far more between individual athletes than they do between continents. The ascendance of Uganda in the past few years has been interesting.
- ricardobayes 6y ago
  It's interesting because most athletes will deny records being beat due to equipment - they are afraid the result being taken away due to some regulation.
NotSammyHagar 6y ago
Because of slowly but steadily improving equipment, training, nutrition, medical treatment. Why didn't I get a heart attack in my 50s like both grandfathers and my dad? Sure, I exercise a little (but I should do more, lose some more weight etc). But I also have magic statins and also take daily coated aspirin and some other things that weren't available in 1980 for my ancestors. Why didn't I get lung cancer like some family members? Because I never freaking smoked. The same ideas should apply to athletes.
- justinator 6y ago
  Diseases of Affluence don't regularly affect elite athletes in their 20's. I would say that because of affluence in our culture, we actually have elite athletes. I come from a long line of artichoke farmers, but hell if I've ever grown one myself. Taking a few months off to climbs mountains as fast as I can to set some record is something I can do because I've broken free from my generational toiling.
- jacques_chester 6y ago
  > Because of slowly but steadily improving equipment, training, nutrition, medical treatment. The simplest predictor is "how many people practice a sport?" Insofar as fitness for a particular athletic trial follows the central limit theorem, larger samples will open the door to more spectacular outliers. The relationship between total participants and the time it takes for a record to fall shows up in sport after sport. The other factor is: new PEDs that are forbidden but difficult to detect at a given point in time. These affect some sports more than others. Periodically records in these sports are "reset" through administrative twiddling. For example, every 20 years or so Olympic Weightlifting weight classes get changed, meaning all the old records are essentially obsoleted.
  - majormajor 6y ago
    Even if the number of new entrants to a sport per year stay constant, I think you'd expect records to continually fall as the cumulative sample over time gets larger and larger. That said, yeah, them falling more rapidly is also helped by the training/equipment/nutrition/drugs/etc improvements.
statstutor 6y ago
> What do all of these athletes have in common? They were wearing next-generation running shoes. Related but not mentioned: Elite sportspeople are getting paid orders of magnitude more than they have ever been in history, to promote next-generation running shoes.
- hinkley 6y ago
  So it might not be the shoes, but it's still the shoes, because they don't have a day job where they can get sick or injured.
ldbooth 6y ago
Just the shoes eh? Mass communication/information and the ease at which we access it, and how it influences my belief systems is a huge shift for me. I've never been to an ultra, but I love listening to ultra athletes and they set a bar beyond what I would otherwise have thought possible in my amateur/pleasure exercise.
- hluska 6y ago
  It's interesting that you bring up an ultra. I'm training for one in five months and while I'm unlikely to run the event itself (covid), I'm still training. Listening to elites talk about how they prepare has taught me a lot while reminding me that I'm still firmly in the camp of hobbyist. :)
analog31 6y ago
Interestingly, I think we'd see the same thing in music if there were "records." I'm a musician, as are my kids, so I've observed youth music over the past half century. I think the technical ability of young classical musicians has increased over that time span, rather noticeably. I've brought this up with teachers, and they agree with me. Kids are expected to play a difficult movement from a major concerto for their college audition -- pieces that were considered to be the domain of a handful of rare prodigies in my generation. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the Tchaikovsky in violin recitals. Granted, whether this corresponds to an advance in the artistic dimension of music is an open question, one that probably has no objective answer.
- meowzero 6y ago
  I've noticed this too in other fields. I wonder if it's because of the internet? There's so many information out there. Not to mention there are so many sources you can look up to study. You can go to YouTube now and look up Tchaikovsky violin concerto and find a ton of videos that one might be able to study. I only played the violin casually when I was young. But I would've loved if I had vast libraries of music, videos, etc. available to me in the 90's. I think I would've been much better. A recent example for me is photography. When I started to learn photography about 5-6 years ago, I was able to find so many resources on the net to improve quickly. You can find so many examples of good photos of every genre these days. It would've been harder 15+ years ago if I had to scour magazines or photo books to find inspirations, or if I wanted to study a certain technique.
  - analog31 6y ago
    Some people have cited the Suzuki method, which became widespread after my time as a student. Naturally the people who mentioned that to me are teachers.
    - meowzero 6y ago
      I was taught using the Suzuki book, but not the method. My teacher never told me listen to the record it came with. Of course, it wouldn't have done me any good since I didn't have a record player. One piece my teacher wanted me to learn was Autumn by Vivaldi. I remember listening to my CD of Vivaldi's Four Seasons constantly to hear how a certain part should sound. Now only if I had a video, then I can see how they would've played it. :)
LanceH 6y ago
I only saw the top of the article, but a major factor in track right now is the use of an electronic pacer. There will be a ring of lights on the inside line of the track. Stay ahead of the light and you're on record pace. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/10/14/lights-track-running-world-records/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/10/14/lights-trac...
- lovedswain 6y ago
  One of my favourite (and simultaneously most depressing) documentaries, Icarus, leaves no doubt professional sport is riddled with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(2017_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(2017_film)
  - chrisseaton 6y ago
    Did you reply to the right comment? Professional sport is riddled with... pacing lights?
    - rybosworld 6y ago
      It's the epidemic no one is talking about
  - mikestew 6y ago
    "Riddled with" what, exactly? The scourge that is pacing lights? Or did you post to the wrong thread?
    - travisjungroth 6y ago
      Yeah, they replied wrong. Icarus is about PEDs. But I do like the idea of some diehard track enthusiast being enthralled and depressed by a tell-all documentary about pacing lights.
    - lovedswain 6y ago
      Hilarious, I seem to have randomly pattern matched the wrong comment to reply to after logging in
fiftyfifty 6y ago
On track and field and running websites there is a lot more cynicism towards the rush of records that's taken place over the last year or so. Yes the new shoes probably help, but Covid has also made it difficult for drug testers to access athletes for random drug tests, many athletes have been able to take performance enhancing drugs with impunity over the last year.
- rybosworld 6y ago
  Interesting - that is the first I am hearing this. Why does covid affect the drug testing?
  - baryphonic 6y ago
    My guess is the close quarters nature of drug testing (most protocols involve physical observation of the person giving the sample during the process) is a concern during COVID.
  - sandworm101 6y ago
    >> Why does covid affect the drug testing? Because they cannot visit the athletes randomly. Because the athletes aren't training every day at a center, instead are training solo at lots of different places. Because much testing is tied to specific events (eg olympics) that have been cancelled. Cancel enough events and multi-month windows open where athletes know they will not be subject to testing. And with fewer events, those that are still happening become much more important. If there is only one qualifying event on the calendar then there is all the more pressure to perform on that day. There is no point in saving anything for the rest of the season. So athletes will risk injury if that means doing a little better that one day. If they are hurt they know they will have have a long while to recover.
    - sorenjan 6y ago
      But the testing doesn't just take place at competitions. Athletes have to report where they are every day, and failure to do so leads to warnings and eventually sanctions. They can be tested at any time, but maybe various agencies have cut back on that during the pandemic. https://www.wada-ama.org/en/what-we-do/adams https://www.wada-ama.org/en/what-we-do/adams
elteto 6y ago
A combination of advances in nutrition, training programs, technology and, unfortunately, performance enhancing drugs. This last point is contentious but make no mistake: PEDs are ahead of detection capabilities. I think that at this point any elite athlete _not_ on PEDs is doomed to fall behind.
- tolbish 6y ago
  You seem very certain. Any links for further reading?
  - hellbannedguy 6y ago
    90’s baseball. I worked at Pac Bell park from beginning to opening day. When they all arrived in black SUV’s, I as shocked at the size of most of those guys, especially Bonds, and McGuire. Their heads were huge too? I had know idea about HGH, or steroids. I just thought they were fit, and strong. Bonds hit a practice ball over right field durning out work hours. It was so effortless. It was actually the first ball hit into the bay, and an electrician jumped into the water to fetch it. He wasn’t a good swimmer, so someone threw him a extension cord. It was a hot cord, and lucky blew the GFCI. (I still recall Dr. Dean Edell stating all the studies steroids/hgh show no correlation to athletic performance. Later he revised his statement, but didn’t point to new studies? I’m still not convinced. I still think Lance Armstrong won on the Placebo Effect.)
    - deleted 6y ago
      [deleted]
  - spaetzleesser 6y ago
    Just read accounts of people who used PEDs first time and how effective they were. Tyler Hamilton's book is an example. When I did more weightlifting me and some other guys got stuck at around 75 kg and couldn't put on more weight no matter how hard we trained. A few months later two guys jumped to 90 kg in a very short time. I asked what's going on and they told me they got some stuff from Poland. I assume either steroids or HGH. PEDs are way too effective for somebody to be able to compete against people who take them. It's simply not possible. In the 100m a lot of top 10 guys got caught or evaded tests in the last years. There is no way that Bolt is beating them without taking something.
dirtyid 6y ago
Designer PEDs. Probably importantly, increased global prosperity, more genetic variations are competing now. Last 10 years has been crazy for powerlifting records due to broader particapation.
neonate 6y ago
https://archive.is/HZdMr https://archive.is/HZdMr
smm11 6y ago
It's almost entirely the shoes.
48snickers 6y ago
This is article is pretty light on details. There may be many reasons for the recent spat of records (most of the ones mentioned, btw, are regional), but the shoes are definitely a big contributor. It's worth noting that 9(!) world records in track and field were set in 2020 (https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/mens-world-records/ https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/mens-world-records/). Two of those were not on the track (pole vault, shot), and thee were set by a single individual (Cheptegei). I'm too lazy to try to dig up and chart the historical record progressions, but that does seem like a fair blip. Myself, and virtually every competitive runner that I know at the amateur level, has invested in so called "super shoes" from one of the various manufacturers, with impressive (relative) results- generally, everyone has PR'd since the switch. Aside from that small sample set, numerous other studies have shown that the shoes deliver: - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/13/upshot/nike-vaporfly-next-percent-shoe-estimates.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/13/upshot/nike-v... - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-018-1024-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-018-1024-z At the end of the day, none of these shoes is actually giving you any energy for free- they're just much less lossy than the previous generation of shoes. This feels like the right direction of progress to me.
qndreoi 6y ago
I think the Greeks had it right when the original Olympians competed naked. Running and swimming require no equipment at all, skaters need nothing more than boots, throwing sports need no clothing. Let us see who is best without technology.
- ultrarunner 6y ago
  I wonder if the question has shifted some from, "who is best" to "what can humanity do?" PEDs have some effects too macabre to make acceptable (i.e. mandatory) but there are plenty of other ways to squeeze a bit more performance out of the right human. Whether you support these strategies (shoes, training, pacer lights, etc) depends in part on what question you perceive them an answer to.
- Der_Einzige 6y ago
  So much this. Also, they are the exact kind of people one would want to see naked.
aparsons 6y ago
Having watched four generations of American professional sports, it’s really obvious to me that athletes should be judged by “dominance” which is implicitly based on the other athletes of the same era as a reference. There might he a better hockey player one day than Wayne Gretzky, but I’m fairly confident in saying there will never be anyone as dominant There is some sport-specific subtlety there too, which I’m too tired to map out right now, but it roughly goes like this: Michael Jordan was not as good at basketball as Gretzky was at hockey from a statistical perspective, but anyone who watched them knows he was just as, if not more dominant. This may be explainable through some sort of modal analysis of the sports’ talent pools - Gretzky was a ridiculous outlier. In a weird way, MJ can be greater than WG in relation to his peers, but Gretzky was better at his sport - relative to peers - than Jordan! There’s this weird aspect of sports that you can’t quantify, and is a large part of the allure.
- jobigoud 6y ago
  This is entirely dependent on the general level of performance of all the other athletes... So it's largely arbitrary. Everyone else happening to be bad doesn't make the top athlete of that generation better than another athlete from another time. I don't think there's anything better than to have them compete in a virtual competition based on absolute numbers, the hard part is correcting for differences in equipment, individual like shoes or collective like a track.
  - aparsons 6y ago
    Generation X has the benefit of learning from X-1. The “better” part is a given. Zero signal. What’s more impressive is pushing the boundaries of a sport - ie, being good while others suck.
jcoq 6y ago
45 is a perfectly healthy resting heart rate. An amateur lifelong athlete might easily be well below that.

44 points by prostoalex 6y ago

jnord 6y ago

https://archive.is/HZdMr https://archive.is/HZdMr

taksintikk 6y ago

Optimized from birth

meowzero 6y ago

Also style of play is a factor. In basketball, thanks to various analytics, 3 pointers are becoming more important. 3-point shooting records have been breaking all over the place these days in the NBA. OTOH, because of the playing style changes, certain records might never be broken such as John Stockton's assists record. It was already a ridiculous record, but it would be much harder to break with the current style of play.

tburmeister 6y ago
The article is specifically about the sport of athletics, better known as track and field in the US; it has nothing to do with basketball.

DrBazza 6y ago

The Valencia Half Marathon in Dec. 2020 Kibiwott Kandie reduced the HM WR by 30 seconds, and 4 men in total beat the old record in the same race. https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/55206158 https://www.bbc.co.uk/sport/athletics/55206158 In the words of Jen Barber "the shoes!" > There is a ban on any shoes that have a sole thicker than 40mm. > Kandie was using Adidas shoes that have 39mm of foam. There's also the fact that African runners train differently, and even their gait/pose is slightly different with their chests thrust out slightly.

tburmeister 6y ago
Ethiopians and Kenyans have been dominant in track and field since the 90s, that's not exactly a recent change; both countries, btw, train fairly differently from each other, and I would contend that "gaits" differ far more between individual athletes than they do between continents. The ascendance of Uganda in the past few years has been interesting.
ricardobayes 6y ago
It's interesting because most athletes will deny records being beat due to equipment - they are afraid the result being taken away due to some regulation.

NotSammyHagar 6y ago

Because of slowly but steadily improving equipment, training, nutrition, medical treatment. Why didn't I get a heart attack in my 50s like both grandfathers and my dad? Sure, I exercise a little (but I should do more, lose some more weight etc). But I also have magic statins and also take daily coated aspirin and some other things that weren't available in 1980 for my ancestors. Why didn't I get lung cancer like some family members? Because I never freaking smoked. The same ideas should apply to athletes.

justinator 6y ago
Diseases of Affluence don't regularly affect elite athletes in their 20's. I would say that because of affluence in our culture, we actually have elite athletes. I come from a long line of artichoke farmers, but hell if I've ever grown one myself. Taking a few months off to climbs mountains as fast as I can to set some record is something I can do because I've broken free from my generational toiling.
jacques_chester 6y ago
> Because of slowly but steadily improving equipment, training, nutrition, medical treatment. The simplest predictor is "how many people practice a sport?" Insofar as fitness for a particular athletic trial follows the central limit theorem, larger samples will open the door to more spectacular outliers. The relationship between total participants and the time it takes for a record to fall shows up in sport after sport. The other factor is: new PEDs that are forbidden but difficult to detect at a given point in time. These affect some sports more than others. Periodically records in these sports are "reset" through administrative twiddling. For example, every 20 years or so Olympic Weightlifting weight classes get changed, meaning all the old records are essentially obsoleted.
- majormajor 6y ago
  Even if the number of new entrants to a sport per year stay constant, I think you'd expect records to continually fall as the cumulative sample over time gets larger and larger. That said, yeah, them falling more rapidly is also helped by the training/equipment/nutrition/drugs/etc improvements.

statstutor 6y ago

> What do all of these athletes have in common? They were wearing next-generation running shoes. Related but not mentioned: Elite sportspeople are getting paid orders of magnitude more than they have ever been in history, to promote next-generation running shoes.

hinkley 6y ago
So it might not be the shoes, but it's still the shoes, because they don't have a day job where they can get sick or injured.

ldbooth 6y ago

Just the shoes eh? Mass communication/information and the ease at which we access it, and how it influences my belief systems is a huge shift for me. I've never been to an ultra, but I love listening to ultra athletes and they set a bar beyond what I would otherwise have thought possible in my amateur/pleasure exercise.

hluska 6y ago
It's interesting that you bring up an ultra. I'm training for one in five months and while I'm unlikely to run the event itself (covid), I'm still training. Listening to elites talk about how they prepare has taught me a lot while reminding me that I'm still firmly in the camp of hobbyist. :)

analog31 6y ago

Interestingly, I think we'd see the same thing in music if there were "records." I'm a musician, as are my kids, so I've observed youth music over the past half century. I think the technical ability of young classical musicians has increased over that time span, rather noticeably. I've brought this up with teachers, and they agree with me. Kids are expected to play a difficult movement from a major concerto for their college audition -- pieces that were considered to be the domain of a handful of rare prodigies in my generation. I can't tell you how many times I've heard the Tchaikovsky in violin recitals. Granted, whether this corresponds to an advance in the artistic dimension of music is an open question, one that probably has no objective answer.

meowzero 6y ago
I've noticed this too in other fields. I wonder if it's because of the internet? There's so many information out there. Not to mention there are so many sources you can look up to study. You can go to YouTube now and look up Tchaikovsky violin concerto and find a ton of videos that one might be able to study. I only played the violin casually when I was young. But I would've loved if I had vast libraries of music, videos, etc. available to me in the 90's. I think I would've been much better. A recent example for me is photography. When I started to learn photography about 5-6 years ago, I was able to find so many resources on the net to improve quickly. You can find so many examples of good photos of every genre these days. It would've been harder 15+ years ago if I had to scour magazines or photo books to find inspirations, or if I wanted to study a certain technique.
- analog31 6y ago
  Some people have cited the Suzuki method, which became widespread after my time as a student. Naturally the people who mentioned that to me are teachers.
  - meowzero 6y ago
    I was taught using the Suzuki book, but not the method. My teacher never told me listen to the record it came with. Of course, it wouldn't have done me any good since I didn't have a record player. One piece my teacher wanted me to learn was Autumn by Vivaldi. I remember listening to my CD of Vivaldi's Four Seasons constantly to hear how a certain part should sound. Now only if I had a video, then I can see how they would've played it. :)

LanceH 6y ago

I only saw the top of the article, but a major factor in track right now is the use of an electronic pacer. There will be a ring of lights on the inside line of the track. Stay ahead of the light and you're on record pace. https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/10/14/lights-track-running-world-records/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/sports/2020/10/14/lights-trac...

lovedswain 6y ago
One of my favourite (and simultaneously most depressing) documentaries, Icarus, leaves no doubt professional sport is riddled with it. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(2017_film) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Icarus_(2017_film)
- chrisseaton 6y ago
  Did you reply to the right comment? Professional sport is riddled with... pacing lights?
  - rybosworld 6y ago
    It's the epidemic no one is talking about
- mikestew 6y ago
  "Riddled with" what, exactly? The scourge that is pacing lights? Or did you post to the wrong thread?
  - travisjungroth 6y ago
    Yeah, they replied wrong. Icarus is about PEDs. But I do like the idea of some diehard track enthusiast being enthralled and depressed by a tell-all documentary about pacing lights.
  - lovedswain 6y ago
    Hilarious, I seem to have randomly pattern matched the wrong comment to reply to after logging in

fiftyfifty 6y ago

On track and field and running websites there is a lot more cynicism towards the rush of records that's taken place over the last year or so. Yes the new shoes probably help, but Covid has also made it difficult for drug testers to access athletes for random drug tests, many athletes have been able to take performance enhancing drugs with impunity over the last year.

rybosworld 6y ago
Interesting - that is the first I am hearing this. Why does covid affect the drug testing?
- baryphonic 6y ago
  My guess is the close quarters nature of drug testing (most protocols involve physical observation of the person giving the sample during the process) is a concern during COVID.
- sandworm101 6y ago
  >> Why does covid affect the drug testing? Because they cannot visit the athletes randomly. Because the athletes aren't training every day at a center, instead are training solo at lots of different places. Because much testing is tied to specific events (eg olympics) that have been cancelled. Cancel enough events and multi-month windows open where athletes know they will not be subject to testing. And with fewer events, those that are still happening become much more important. If there is only one qualifying event on the calendar then there is all the more pressure to perform on that day. There is no point in saving anything for the rest of the season. So athletes will risk injury if that means doing a little better that one day. If they are hurt they know they will have have a long while to recover.
  - sorenjan 6y ago
    But the testing doesn't just take place at competitions. Athletes have to report where they are every day, and failure to do so leads to warnings and eventually sanctions. They can be tested at any time, but maybe various agencies have cut back on that during the pandemic. https://www.wada-ama.org/en/what-we-do/adams https://www.wada-ama.org/en/what-we-do/adams

elteto 6y ago

A combination of advances in nutrition, training programs, technology and, unfortunately, performance enhancing drugs. This last point is contentious but make no mistake: PEDs are ahead of detection capabilities. I think that at this point any elite athlete _not_ on PEDs is doomed to fall behind.

tolbish 6y ago
You seem very certain. Any links for further reading?
- hellbannedguy 6y ago
  90’s baseball. I worked at Pac Bell park from beginning to opening day. When they all arrived in black SUV’s, I as shocked at the size of most of those guys, especially Bonds, and McGuire. Their heads were huge too? I had know idea about HGH, or steroids. I just thought they were fit, and strong. Bonds hit a practice ball over right field durning out work hours. It was so effortless. It was actually the first ball hit into the bay, and an electrician jumped into the water to fetch it. He wasn’t a good swimmer, so someone threw him a extension cord. It was a hot cord, and lucky blew the GFCI. (I still recall Dr. Dean Edell stating all the studies steroids/hgh show no correlation to athletic performance. Later he revised his statement, but didn’t point to new studies? I’m still not convinced. I still think Lance Armstrong won on the Placebo Effect.)
  - deleted 6y ago
    [deleted]
- spaetzleesser 6y ago
  Just read accounts of people who used PEDs first time and how effective they were. Tyler Hamilton's book is an example. When I did more weightlifting me and some other guys got stuck at around 75 kg and couldn't put on more weight no matter how hard we trained. A few months later two guys jumped to 90 kg in a very short time. I asked what's going on and they told me they got some stuff from Poland. I assume either steroids or HGH. PEDs are way too effective for somebody to be able to compete against people who take them. It's simply not possible. In the 100m a lot of top 10 guys got caught or evaded tests in the last years. There is no way that Bolt is beating them without taking something.

dirtyid 6y ago

Designer PEDs. Probably importantly, increased global prosperity, more genetic variations are competing now. Last 10 years has been crazy for powerlifting records due to broader particapation.

neonate 6y ago

https://archive.is/HZdMr https://archive.is/HZdMr

smm11 6y ago

It's almost entirely the shoes.

48snickers 6y ago

This is article is pretty light on details. There may be many reasons for the recent spat of records (most of the ones mentioned, btw, are regional), but the shoes are definitely a big contributor. It's worth noting that 9(!) world records in track and field were set in 2020 (https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/mens-world-records/ https://trackandfieldnews.com/records/mens-world-records/). Two of those were not on the track (pole vault, shot), and thee were set by a single individual (Cheptegei). I'm too lazy to try to dig up and chart the historical record progressions, but that does seem like a fair blip. Myself, and virtually every competitive runner that I know at the amateur level, has invested in so called "super shoes" from one of the various manufacturers, with impressive (relative) results- generally, everyone has PR'd since the switch. Aside from that small sample set, numerous other studies have shown that the shoes deliver: - https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/13/upshot/nike-vaporfly-next-percent-shoe-estimates.html https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2019/12/13/upshot/nike-v... - https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-018-1024-z https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s40279-018-1024-z At the end of the day, none of these shoes is actually giving you any energy for free- they're just much less lossy than the previous generation of shoes. This feels like the right direction of progress to me.

qndreoi 6y ago

I think the Greeks had it right when the original Olympians competed naked. Running and swimming require no equipment at all, skaters need nothing more than boots, throwing sports need no clothing. Let us see who is best without technology.

ultrarunner 6y ago
I wonder if the question has shifted some from, "who is best" to "what can humanity do?" PEDs have some effects too macabre to make acceptable (i.e. mandatory) but there are plenty of other ways to squeeze a bit more performance out of the right human. Whether you support these strategies (shoes, training, pacer lights, etc) depends in part on what question you perceive them an answer to.
Der_Einzige 6y ago
So much this. Also, they are the exact kind of people one would want to see naked.

aparsons 6y ago

Having watched four generations of American professional sports, it’s really obvious to me that athletes should be judged by “dominance” which is implicitly based on the other athletes of the same era as a reference. There might he a better hockey player one day than Wayne Gretzky, but I’m fairly confident in saying there will never be anyone as dominant There is some sport-specific subtlety there too, which I’m too tired to map out right now, but it roughly goes like this: Michael Jordan was not as good at basketball as Gretzky was at hockey from a statistical perspective, but anyone who watched them knows he was just as, if not more dominant. This may be explainable through some sort of modal analysis of the sports’ talent pools - Gretzky was a ridiculous outlier. In a weird way, MJ can be greater than WG in relation to his peers, but Gretzky was better at his sport - relative to peers - than Jordan! There’s this weird aspect of sports that you can’t quantify, and is a large part of the allure.

jobigoud 6y ago
This is entirely dependent on the general level of performance of all the other athletes... So it's largely arbitrary. Everyone else happening to be bad doesn't make the top athlete of that generation better than another athlete from another time. I don't think there's anything better than to have them compete in a virtual competition based on absolute numbers, the hard part is correcting for differences in equipment, individual like shoes or collective like a track.
- aparsons 6y ago
  Generation X has the benefit of learning from X-1. The “better” part is a given. Zero signal. What’s more impressive is pushing the boundaries of a sport - ie, being good while others suck.

jcoq 6y ago

45 is a perfectly healthy resting heart rate. An amateur lifelong athlete might easily be well below that.