First, some background as to how this question came about:
I used to teach at a small (~40 kids /class) school in a rural area. Track is the last sport played before the school year ends and I had been regularly updated by various students on how the season was progressing. On the last day of school, partly as a joke and partly to satisfy my own curiosity, I challenged one of the students to a 100 meter race. The 100m dash was not his best event (he ran middle distances), but he was the fastest on the team, so I figured he would be a good yardstick. I had always considered myself fairly fast, but we did not have a track team when I was growing up and I had occasionally wondered how I would have fared in this sport. I am 34 and do not run, although I keep myself in decent shape.
Not surprisingly, I lost – but not by more than a yard or two.
Recently, I came across a web page (http://www.hickoksports.com/history/olmtandf.shtml#m100) that listed out 100m dash times, starting from the first modern olympics in 1896. Apparently, the gold medal winner in that year won in 12 seconds flat. The student who beat me did not make the finals of the local sectional meet after running an 11.78 in the semis.
So a high school junior, not known for his sprinting, ran faster than the fastest man in the world in 1896?! Considering that I narrowly lost to him, its quite possible that I might have been able to beat 12 seconds as well.
How is this possible? I know track shoes, tracks, and technique have improved…but this is high school, so I doubt he had top of the line shoes, and he is certainly not coached by accomplished sprinters. Unless they were running though mud or tall grass, this makes no sense to me.
IIRC the winners were awarded silver medals at Athens 1896. The great Paavo Numri’s times are now beaten by women. It is pretty standard in sports especially atheletics, as the sport becomes more professional times reduce.
My very first thought is that sneakers weren’t invented yet. I don’t know what they ran in, but I imagine even cheap shoes from Wal-Mart would do better. Also, according to Wikipedia, no one broke the world record (which is doesn’t list).
My uneducated WAG would be threefold: 1) better nutrition 2) more leisure time 3) we know much more about how to develop the body for specific tasks - ie explosive strength for sprinting.
But I’m talking off the top of my head and largely out of my ass.
Almost all sports are like that even if you just look back one - three decades let alone well over 100 years. Athletes today are simply bigger, stronger, and faster than they ever have been and it can get to the ridiculous point like you just described. There are select individuals from the past that would be very good today but the effect is much stronger in the team sports for lots of reasons.
As I understand it, the modern Olympics were started by gentlemen, for gentlemen. The reason for the “amateurs only” rule was to keep out the hoi polloi, who couldn’t afford to compete if they weren’t getting paid for it. And people of leisure are not generally noted for their athletic fitness.
I understand what all of you are saying…but this seems to go beyond that. If I were comparing a top athlete from present day to one from 1896, then one would expect them to be better for all those reasons: nutrition, training, technology, etc. But I am not comparing athlete to athlete. I have NEVER run competitively, I do not jog AT ALL, I have not regularly played any sport that even involved bursts of sprinting in OVER TEN YEARS, I have NO IDEA what good sprinting technique involves, and I did not train for my race with the kid AT ALL. And I am not some super athlete – if we lined up random males who appeared to be fairly athletic, I would expect to run faster than many, but we probably wouldn’t have to line up too many before we found one faster than me. There is no way that I should be running a time comparable to a gold medal winner of any time period.
I don’t think you are fully appreciating just how slow 12 seconds is. Look, one of the posters above noted that they ran 12 seconds, not in a track meet, but in 8th grade gym class!
There must be some other factor at work. One thing I noticed was at the next Olympics, 4 years later, they were running a FULL SECOND faster. What happened? 11 seconds is a MUCH more believable time for an Olympic champion from long ago. Was there some weird conditions at the 1896 Olympics?
Besides the points noted above, I don’t think they had a good benchmark to shoot for. Track and field runners today have a very firm idea of what they need to shoot for down to the 1/100th of a second. They didn’t have that then and their clocks weren’t even very good. Today’s sprinters will risk severe injury to beat a time but there was no reason to do that then plus their competition was just almost as lame as they were.
From my extensive research into Olympic sprinting history (well, OK, watching “Chariots of Fire”) I seem to recall that there were no starting blocks back then. A standing start on a poor surface with non-grippy shoes can really impede acceleration.
As pointed out above, the 1896 Olympics were for Gentlemen. It’s highly unlikely that the fastest men on Earth were competing.
[Non GQ stuff: I’ve done a lot of running, but only long distance. 12 seconds for 100m doesn’t seem all that slow to me. I’m wondering whether some people are confusing 100 yards with 100m.]
Is that true? It makes the time make more sense…I mean, 12 seconds seems much more in line with a fast guy at a company picnic than at an International track meet, thats for sure.
It says here (http://www.hickoksports.com/biograph/burketom.shtml ) though, that “As a student at Boston University, Burke won the AAU 440-yard event in 1895, the IC4A 440-yard in 1896 and 1897 and the 880-yard run in 1898.” That makes him appear to be an athlete of some kind. Did they have collegiate track teams in those days? or are these just referring to some races they had within the student body?
Of the 24 high school runners in this year’s section IV semi-finals, only THREE had times that were over 12 seconds. And I don’t think central NY is a hotbed for sprinters.
That might be relevant for longer races, but for a 100m race, you probably wouldn’t even need the curves at all. A track built around a football field (for any given value of “football”) is going to have straight sections along the sides longer than 100m.
I did my research watchig Chariots of Fire too. Added to the gentlemen factor is also the level of participation – which was then very transport dependent. The games were not as high profile 110 years ago. Selection criteria often ammounted to who could get there to represent their country. (And pay their own way to do so.) You didn’t necessarily end up with the best international athletes.\On top of this, in an event like the 100m the goal was to win – not necessarily to beat the clock. If there was a significant difference in ability between the top two contestants (which could be due to the quality of last night’s dinner as much as the calibre of the athlete) then there was little incentive for the winner to break too much of a sweat.
Nitpick: At the stadium used for the 1896 Athens Olympics, the track was not built around a football field. (In fact, that is generally true of Olympic stadiums.)
Fussy nitpick: Where “football” has the value “Australian Rules”, the playing field is oval, and has no straight edges on any side.
A couple of the above posters hit the nail on the head with the fact that in the beginning the Olympians had to pay their own way.
Supposing you were a fast runner but couldn’t make it to the host city. Tough luck for you. Unless you found a sponsor you sat the competition out.
Places like NYC and Chicago used to host Athletic Clubs,in the late 1800s and as one poster noted, rich people belonged to them and part of the fun is these clubs would have trainers who, in addition to training these rich guys would also compete against each other. This was a very early example of sponsorship.
The clubs would give the athletes minimal work and a salary and a place to live. Usually the club competition was local, you know club versus club and rich people would consider it a status symbol to belong to the club that won.
The Berlin Olympics were really the first Olympics used by a nation to “show off” so to speak. Before than the Olympics were just another sporting event. Something that is nice, but not to invest time in.
So when you choose people on minimual talent and the ability to pay their own way or leech off rich people, you’re not going to get world records.
Then you have to add this to all the technical details the poster above noted.
Those athetes weren’t specialists, the same guy might run the 100m dash, then go for a 5K, and later toss a javelin.
Now if someone running 100m does something else, it’s 200m.
The first modern Olympisc were sort of a pilot implementation; a lot more things changed between them and the second ones than between two and three. News of the competition sparked interest, which got more people involved, people having trained and competed longer as well as more specifically…