Are they training harder? or are athletes today just physically better?
In: Biology
Steroids. People who aren’t in the know are going to say “but they’re all drug tested!” until you understand how drug testing and steroids work– you’ll believe that the majority of athletes aren’t doping. They are.
Better drugs and hormone treatments that are harder to detect. This is not just cynicism either. The modern anabolics used in professional sport are very hard to detect and leave the system very quickly. The money for engineering these hormones comes from the world of pro and Olympic athletics.
MY COUNTRY DID AN EXPERIMENT ON THIS. They compared the performance of current and “from the 60s” athletes wearing the same clothes that were in fashion 50 years ago. The current one CRUSHED the athletes from the 70s. Mostly because the later ones had bad hips or were already in wheelchairs
USA certified track coach here. The science of exercise didn’t really take off until the 60s and 70s. We began to learn so much about training and recovery that we could start fine tuning training plans to fit individual athletes. Drugs really helped advance it because what workouts work well for drugged athletes will also benefit non-drug athletes. We also had money injected into sports that allowed athletes to train exclusively and not try to qualify for the Olympic a while holding down a part time job and eating table scraps. Nutrition also took off and our knowledge on that has been monumental in training.
There’s still a lot we don’t know, particularly in area of the nervous system and gene doping that could further unlock performance in ways we haven’t imagined.p
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All these comments about training and equipment? Let’s be real. It wasn’t too long ago that smoking and beers in the dressing room was common.
To make it real short, science has figured out how to better train an athlete. Genetics teamed with science.
There’s a great book called The Sports Gene by David Epstein for anyone interested in this question. It addresses a lot of the reasons mentioned so far for continued advancement in sports records over the past century: improved nutrition, larger pool of athletes, the explosion of lucrative careers in professional athletics, better sports medicine, and better technology. It also shows how, in the past few decades, many of these sources of new generations of record-breaking performances are becoming exhausted. Pools of genetically gifted athletes have stopped growing at an exponential pace, and young athletes are combed over and shunted into their best sport with increasing efficiency. Sports medicine, training, and nutrition are all likewise generating decreasing marginal returns. Advances in technology have hit similar inflection points, and in many cases are being regulated or banned from competitive sports. The end result is that breaking records in sports has become increasingly impossible over the last couple of decades, and breaking a world record now means being born at the far edge of the distribution of human ability, together with consistently pushing one’s body to the edge of what is physically possible for years. The 20th and early 21st century in sports will soon be viewed as a brief, never to be repeated window in human history in which a population explosion, leaps forward in nutrition, medicine, and technology, and the professionalization of sports all led to records being broken by percentage points instead of hundredths of percentage points.
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Here’s a great [Ted Talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/david_epstein_are_athletes_really_getting_faster_better_stronger?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare) that explains your question actually. Technological advancements and sports medicine have made athletes into who are they are today versus a century ago.
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