How do athletes break records even though the sport has been going on for decades. How do individual humans break those records so often even though we’re said to be getting weaker than our ancestors. Is it just pure willpower or what? In some sports it could be chalked off to rule changes and stuff but there are a lot of sports without any rule changes and rely purely on the athlete. Are they juicing and the juices keep getting better? Is a new record just seen as a goal that only needs to be broken and not annihilated?
In: Biology
As others pointed out, even if it looks like the athlete is only factor, hydrodynamic swimsuits, running shoes and training techniques have huge impact when the margins are really tight.
But let’s ignore all of that and look at math. Let’s say the competition is that you pick uniformly randomly number between 0 and 1, and that’s your score. It’s not influenced by nutrition, training, equipment, skill, … It’s the most fair “sport” there is. Yet if you try it, record will always go up. You can try to use some online generator to play with it, just make sure you have enough decimal places.
Now this was very simple example. You’ll get pretty fast pretty close to the 1 and it will be harder and harder to hit higher number than current record (although it’s always possible). Human performance is not constrained as tightly, it’s probably better to model it with normal distribution where more abnormal the result is, it’s less likely.
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