Are they training harder? or are athletes today just physically better?
In: Biology
If you accumulate tiny incremental advantages over your opponents, they add up to big gains. Athletes have support teams of nutritionists, physiotherapists, exercise physiologists, sports psychiatrists. All those fields get better every year. They have technological improvements: bikes, swimsuits, running shoes. Olympic athletes are supported financially by their governments. There’s a wider pool of athletes to choose from and talent scouting is better. People are growing bigger and stronger than ever before because of all the food we have access to now. The baseline level of technical skill in a sport increases over time, too.
Along with the other comments about better training/nutrition, a huge part is actually technology. Shoes that return more energy per footstep, swimsuits that have less hydrodynamic drag, etc. There have been lots of controversies with leaps in technology for certain sports and world records being broken (i.e. the examples I just mentioned). Incremental improvements in technology for a certain sport are less likely to be in the spotlight or get banned, but they have just as much an impact on olympic or world records over the years.
Athletes are much more professional now. We never used to have teams dedicated to training for the Olympics or other competitions. Often participants were gifted or those with enough time and money to do some training.
People are also generally getting bigger, which doesn’t just mean we’re all getting fat, it includes taller and stronger. All thanks to better nutrition and health. When you think about it, we wouldn’t eat such a variety of foods all year around without things like cold chain storage.
And with better research we know how to tweak performance. Somethings like getting less colds over the year may only make a 1-2% improvement, but cumulatively with all the other small improvements, it gives athletes a winning edge.
Sports medicine and training have advanced a lot since the first olympics. In a hundred years time training methods of what works and what doesn’t have changed, even diet has changed. Athletes now have more stamina and strength than ever.
It took a lot of time to get to Roger Bannister who broke the 4 minute mile record running in 1954, now it’s a pretty normal thing for a good athlete to be able to do.
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