Like, is there going to be a point where someone sets the *final* record for the 100m and no amount of training, sports science, or equipment innovation will help athletes go any faster? If so, how close do you think we are to someone hitting that limit?
In: Biology
By definition if we can set a record, a human can do it. There probably won’t be a “final record.”
We are pretty close to hitting the limits of human capacity, each subsequent record shaves less time off than the last and times for holding records become longer. Genetics is going to play a much more important role from here and we probably will start seeing once in a generation talents shave milliseconds off previous records. But I imagine they will still be beat for centuries to come.
We can’t know at the time that a record is unbeatable, we can only suppose it in retrospect once a record has stood for years or decades. And even then it might be because we’re still waiting for as rare a talent as the current record holder and that takes time.
It may also be that the sport itself changes over time in some small way that puts old records out of reach, like the multiple times they nerfed the javelin to keep the throws safely inside the running track.
I remember reading an article about scientists studying this and concluding that somewhere around 9.4 is probably possible, but anything much beyond that is getting into the realms of being impossible to achieve given the biomechanics of humans.
So, at some point someone will set an unbeatable record. Bolt’s is probably going to stand for some time because it’s such an outlier.
Bolt holds the fastest time ever and the second fastest time ever. He holds the third fastest time ever joint with two other men on 9.69. In 100m sprinting terms, that’s a long way from his record of 9.58. So I’d wager Bolt’s record is going to stand for a long time.
There won’t be such a point, at least theoretically.
A typical mathematical model of record-setting has performance getting closer and closer to some unknown limit of human potential. The improvement of each successive record is – typically – smaller and smaller.
But as long as we can measure such small differences, we can keep detecting improvements.
Mathematically this is called an ‘asymptote’ – a line on a chart that gets closer and closer to some limit but never quite reaches it. So it allows for infinite progression of improvement without ever breaching what is possible.
Now obviously the real world is not a mathematical model. One day humanity will disappear and record attempts with it. There are tiny lengths beneath which we cannot reliably measure as a law of physics. Infinity is not truly available to us.
But to all intents and purposes we can keep record-setting for a long time.
What is more likely to happen imo is a genetic freak comes along that gives him an advantage superior to any person that has lived in history.
Some could argue Bolt was just that. However I believe we’ll see someone far more ‘genetically different’ where their height, muscle strength, flex and twitch speed is off the charts.
They’ll set a time closer to 9.2 and won’t ever be beaten due to the rarity of the difference.
Maybe it will be possible to genetically modify people in the future for certain sports to break human limits. Athletes allready do that with PEDs.
Changing the rules. There are some unbeatable records that exist today which nobody can beat as they were made under a set of rules that is no longer in use.
As for raw power, we are theoreticaly uncaped.
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