Are they training harder? or are athletes today just physically better?
In: Biology
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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