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
If you consider athletic ability to be random, there is no reason that I see why we can’t keep having people who are randomly more talented.
The first man born with “100” talent may have looked incredible because of all of the lower players, but one day when a 110 is born? Now the “100” person looks like a chump.
Rinse and repeat
Everyone is saying nutrition and training, but it’s mostly equipment. Track surfaces, shoes, poles.. I remember reading an article with modern athletes using older equipment not doing much better.
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.
A lot of it comes down to nutrition science. If you read about track athletes in the 1930s, 1940s for example, their diets were awful sometimes. Even if they were trying to have a good diet, I don’t think anybody knew enough about the science of it to do it optimally.
There has also been huge advancements in recovery techniques and the science of that. Also more knowledge of safe training and ergometrics.
One other thing I haven’t seen mentioned, there are simply more people on earth year by year. Thus there is a larger pool of talent.
Also don’t underestimate technological innovation.
Better bikes, better shoes, better track surfaces etc.
We’re not getting weaker than our ancestors as individuals. It’s a common myth. We’re only getting weaker on an average. It’s a lifestyle issue not a biological issue.
There are plenty of records in baseball which will never be broken. Ricky’s steal record, Barry Bonds intentional walks or pretty much any other stat from 2004 lol, Cal Ripkens games in a row played… There’s plenty more I could list.
Latest Answers