Is the Fastest Human Ever Already Alive?
Allow me to spare you the exaggeration: Usain Bolt is fast.
He is, as far as we can see, the fastest person to ever live - in 2009 he ran the 100-meter mark in a race in Berlin with 9.58 seconds. This corresponds to an average speed of slightly more than 37 km / h (with a top speed of almost 48 km / h). His appearance in Germany in the year 09 was .11 faster than the 9:69 run at the 2008 Beijing Olympics, the thickest lump ever to set a world record at this distance. Given the genuine simplicity of his vocation and the historical scale of his dominance, it is easy to argue that Bolt has been the world's best athlete for the past five years. And yet, there is an even simpler argument than this: within the next 10 years Bolts success as a sprinter will be completely destroyed.
Of course, this is not guaranteed, but it's certainly more plausible than speculative - over the last 30 years, the men's record in the 100-meter run has been attacked so often that many of its former record holders have not even been rated as difficult. This was not always the case: Jim Hines passed the 10.0 mark at the 1968 Olympics (high altitude) at 9.95. This brand lasted fifteen years before Calvin Smith ran a 9.93 (also in height) in Colorado Springs. But since 1983, the record has been broken more than a dozen times. Ben Johnson's steroid filled 9.83 in 1987 was the first massive hit, but eight others broke the record with increasing regularity (Bolt accidentally used a sledgehammer).
The overall picture of this measured subtraction is simple: over the past 40 years, humans have improved their ability to walk 100 meters by 0.37 seconds. That's an approximate average of 0.01 a year, but this type of math is deceptively understated - though the improvement is not exponential year by year, it's not gradual. The rate of change continues to increase. By June of this year, 17 men were already running 100-meter jumps below 10.0, more than ever in a year (with six months left on the calendar). If he was in the same shape as 2009, most track experts would concede that 25-year-old Bolt has the potential to break the 9.50 limit anytime. And that raises the key question that athletics fans have always wanted to know: Is there an upper limit to how fast a man can run? Will there be a day - maybe in 50 years or maybe 500 - when somebody runs the 100 meter dashboard in 8.99 seconds?
"To answer that question, you have to think like a sprinter. And sprinters believe that someday somebody will walk the 100 meters and the clock will display 0.00. "Ato Boldon tells me that on the phone. Boldon is now known as a track analyst for NBC and CBS, but he's also a four-time Olympic gold medalist and the fastest man Trinidad ever made (in 1998, he ran the 100 in 9.86). "And if a sprinter thinks that way, he does not try to fool himself, so you have to think, this notion of human limitation is exactly what we're competing for." It's been thought to run an 8.99, you down to 9.58 That's how it works. "
It is obviously impossible to talk about records and human potential without mentioning steroids. It's more than the rhino in the room. This may be the reason why WR did not move in the '100s for fifteen years and then started to fall, like an air-conditioner being pushed out an open window. However, PEDs are not really important for this particular discussion. It is not a moral (or even competitive) question. The question is not how fast a man should run; The question is how fast a man can run by any means. Steroids are usually a secondary problem for track fans, mainly for two reasons:
1. Although nobody on the record will ever talk about it, PEDs have become an integral part of the sprint. It's pretty similar to cycling: there's only one unspoken concession that everyone makes. There are sanctioned rules and athletes are punished if they get caught breaking. But no one really cares, simply because ...
2. People who love the track want the guys to run fast. That's the whole game. There is nothing else. The sport is not based on personal rivalries or constructed purity or nationalism or the importation of tradition; the sport is driven solely by the excitement of people doing what no one has done yet. In this one particular case, the goals really justify the means. And unlike other sports, there is no rhetoric or concern about steroid warping statistics because it only matters who is the fastest. Once a record has been broken, it becomes meaningless immediately. Not even track historians use comparison times to establish size. A simple example: Which of these men was the biggest sprinter - Jesse Owens (who won the 1936 Olympic Games with a time of 10.3), Carl Lewis (whose career top score was 9.86 for the 100) or Leroy Burrell (the one 9.85 ran)? Athletics today is about running fast. The bottom line is it's an endeavor.
This is not to say steroids are not debating the human complex of speed because they do. Around the time when Ben Johnson ran aground with his (then unthinkable) 9.83, Florence Griffith-Joyner destroyed the women's 100-yard mark with a 10.49, and this record has not been seriously in the 23 years since Asked a question. Did something happen with PEDs in the late 1980s, which has since been discontinued? Why do men get faster and faster, women do not? These are questions that science does not seem to answer (or even seems to guess).
"Bolts 9.58 is so low that maybe nobody will come close for a long time, just like Flo-Jos's record," says Boldon. "But scientists are always mistaken about this stuff. Scientists once believed his lungs would explode if a man walked a four-minute mile. "
The scientific understanding of the Sprinter is quite immature, "admits Peter Weyand and - since Weyand is the de facto American Springer science expert - it shows you how mysterious this phenomenon is. The physiologist and biomechanist at Southern Methodist University in Weyand specializes in terrestrial locomotion. While at Harvard in the 1990s, he led experiments at the Concord Field Station, a facility where researchers routinely placed animals such as cheetahs, wolverines, and kangaroos on treadmills to understand the mechanics of the movement. At age 50, Weyand was also a pretty runner at a young age, after completing the 100-yard 10.8-yard run as a student. "The only sprint thing we all understand is that speed depends on how hard the runner's foot hits the ground, someone like Bolt hits the ground with 1,000 pounds, and we just do not know how he does that For example, we know very well how much weight someone can lift - we can take a person's body and muscle mass and accurately estimate how much weight they can put on the bench, but world-class sprinters deliver twice as much power our estimates suggest, and we do not know why. "
Bolt also has a second component: the height. While most world-class sprinters are short, Bolt is 6-foot-5 and his stride is a crazy 2.44 meters long. When Bolt ran 9.58 in Berlin, he only needed 41 steps to cross the 100 meters. The man who placed Tyson Gay in second place (who still managed an unbelievable 9.71) needed 44 ½ steps. This has led to a popular pet theory about the future of the sprint: Bolt has the proportions and mechanics of a conventional sprinter, but has an unusually long skeleton. So what would happen if an even bigger man were able to move with that kind of fluidity? What if someone with Kevin Garnett's 7-foot frame moved as naturally as Bolt did on 6-foot-5? Would this hypothetical supersprinter be able to cover 100 meters in just 33 steps? Could sprinting be dominated by slender, sprawling giants?
Maybe. But probably not.
"Being big is really a disadvantage," says Weyand. "Bolt is just a freak. The smaller you are, the stronger you are relative to your weight. Bolt defies the laws of biology in terms of its launch. He is good at the blocks and should not be. It's so strange, because Tyson Gay is basically as fast as Bolt when they're in full swing. "
The idea that Bolts size is his not so secret weapon is geometrically meaningful, but not practical - he seems to be the only one who somehow benefits from this "disadvantage". Francis Obikwelu (the 2004 Olympic silver medalist for Portugal) is almost 6-5 himself and he once ran an impressive 9.86 - but he just can not turn his legs around2 as fast as Bolt. His length bothers. For whatever reason, Bolt is superior in every aspect of high-speed motion - stride, pace, and the time it takes to reach its top speed. It's almost as if it was created by a lunatic God for it.
Joe Strummer argued that the future is unwritten and he will be forever right. That does not mean that we can not try it. Is there an irrefutable dead end at the 100 meter line? Is there a speed at which a human body simply breaks down and disintegrates, not unlike a machine that is pushed beyond the capacity of its individual components? Some have been arguing "yes" for years. Reza Noubary, a professor of mathematics, computer science and statistics at Bloomsburg University in Pennsylvania, estimates that "with 95 percent confidence," the final time for the 100-meter line is 9.44. This number seems to be just about everything else. But if Noubary is right, it would force us to accept a depressing, unreliable notion - it would essentially mean that we are about 25 years from the peak of human achievement. It would mean that most of us will see the fastest man who could ever exist in our own lives. And something about it just seems unlikely. Apart from the (fairly clear) evidence that people are growing bigger, faster and stronger at the same time, cultural motivation has increased massively: never before has it been so worthwhile to be the fastest man in the world3 money (especially in the 100 meters where the difference in prominence between the number 1 and the number 2 is particularly large).
"I would not take 9.0 off the table," says Weyand. "Scientists do not like such predictions, and for good reason, a world record is the most extreme performance edge, and weird things happen on those edges, I have to take off my scientist's hat to make that statement and simply speak as Average Joe is, however, that it is likely to happen in our lives and that this feeling is driven by the incentives of modern sport. "
Boldon is less familiar than Weyand; He said he would bet against a man with 9.0 over the next 40 years, based on the assumption that "a pen is harder to refine than a tractor." The race is short and the moving parts are minimal - at some point, they are just missing the details to make improvements. From a personal point of view, I e-mailed Tyson Gay (who was nice enough to return my e-mail on the day he underwent surgery for a torn hip labrum). Gay is the fastest American of all time, with a 9.69 in the 100 (he is also the first man to break all three magic barriers in the sprints - he runs in the 100 under 10 seconds, in the 200 under 20 seconds and under 45 seconds in the 400). I asked him two simple questions: (1) If you have done a perfect race under perfect conditions, at what time would you probably run, and (2) if you are an old man, how low in your opinion is the world record in which will be 100 meters? His answer was pretty curious:
I think with everything that's perfect, I could possibly run 9.4, hahahaha. I know, that sounds crazy, but it's honest. I think the record will be in the range of 9.4 to 9.3. Maybe 9.2 range, and that's only possible if people can understand and believe that this is possible. Everything about the mind.
What is so interesting about this answer is the dissonance between Gay's self-perception and his perception of the world in general. He believes that he could run almost 0.3 seconds faster than ever before - and he also believes that a certain time is almost the tip of the mountain, even in 50 years. When I read this email to Boldon, he immediately laughed with a sense of appreciation. "Typical sprinter narcissism," Boldon said. "I could run a 9.4, but nobody could do a 9.2." Even sprinters do not understand what they do (or how they do it). At a time when science can explain and predict almost everything, it's amazing how little we know about the potential of rudimentary movement. Sprinting has represented half of the "fight or flight" instinct for the totality of human existence, but we still have no idea of our true limitations. This explains why athletics will always play a role, even if it does not seem to interest anyone in America.
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