And now we’re talking about Olympics that were presumably attracting top level competition? And you were an average high school swimmer, no special suit, no steroids… This is even more mind blowing than the sprinting comparison because it takes technology out of the equation. Can anyone explain this?
The technology is MUCH more in the equation:
They were wearing wool full body suits. A speedo and a Mach3 is just as big of a techology jump as waffles on a rubber track.
You would have to go back to at least 1980 for the 100 metres, I think.
Certainly, since 1984, all 56 Olympic 100 metre finalists have been of African-American origin. In 1980, the year of the US-led boycott, there were 6 Europeans and a couple of Cubans. The hair colouring of the Europeans is unknown to me, except for the victor Alan Wells (GB) who had black hair, but one of them might have been blond. I’ll let the experts sort that one out.
The last blond-haired Olympic gold medallist at the distance was the German Armin Hary in 1960. Hary was also the last white runner to set a new world record for the 100 metres, a feat he achieved in winning that Rome final.
Training was almost non-existent in those days. Besides the fact that training for any race was a mix of myth and malarky, as pointed out upthread, Olympic competitors were men of leisure, thus limiting the pool of potential athletes.
Just as an example, Walter George set a mile record of 4:10 with training that consisted of “100-ups”(running in place for 100 steps) and walking 1-2 km.
I don’t imagine training for sprints was any more scientific.
Today, you have modern tracks, starting blocks, understanding of technique, strength training and nutrition plus a much bigger pool of athletes to choose from.
Any high school runner who can’t break 12 sec. untrained is generally moved to the middle/long distance races.
It would seem that Aleksandr Aksinin (USSR), who finished 4th in this event, was blond. 
Do Americans use metres for athletics? At what level do they make the shift from imperial to metric? I seem to recall seeing a lot of people still refer to it as the “100 yard dash” for example.
Edit: Oh, I see that’s been partially discussed earlier in the thread.
:dubious:
All official competition(high school, college, national and international) is in meters although some high schools still have old tracks that are in yards and the races are referred to in a mix of imperial and metric. (1600 meter=mile, etc)There are still a few exceptions such as the mile and 2 mile are still official high school distances for some record purposes, although the metric distances are separate.
Sorry, that should have read something like, ‘athletes of West African descent including African Americans’.
Frankie Fredricks was of SW African decent. And Lindford Christie… well no ones figured him out.
There’s also the advent of goggles, you’d be surprised at how hard it is to see the wall without them. Modern swimmers also spend a lot more time in the water, a lot because of the goggles. There’s also flip turns versus open turns, which would make a huge difference in time.
I swim with a guy who swam in college in the early 60s. He doesn’t like to swim meets with goggles on, he’s so used to swimming without them.
As a distance runner, I think it is worth noting that the Marathon at the 1896 Olympics was run over a distance of 40km and won in a time of 2:58:50. That would give (assuming he could have kept up the pace) a standard Marathon time of 3:08:39. My 46 year old sister-in-law has run faster Marathons than that on several occasions and is nowhere near an elite runner.
More evidence that we really can’t draw any conclusions from the 1896 results.
Sure we can. I’ll start—they were incredibly slow. 
I found some records that clear things up for me. As some have noted above, the 100m sprinters in the 1896 Olympics were not even 2nd rate – they were just rich guys who happened to be in the first Olympics. This has the US collegiate national championship records going way back. Prior to 1896, people were running 10 second flat 100 yard dashes, which calculates roughly to around 11 seconds for 100m. These are the sort of times that were winning four years later at the next Olympics. And 11 seconds without modern shoes, tracks, crouching starts, etc. isnt too shabby.
Somebody in decent sprinting shape with access to shoes and a track should run 100m with and without the modern technology and see how much it affects things. I will try to get the track team kid I mentioned in the OP to try this out for me.