Why are athletes so much faster now?

The Game Room
1

Out of curiosity I compared Jesse Owens’ legendary 1936 performance in the 100 m to those of current athletes.

Owens won the 100 m gold medal in 10.3 seconds:

http://www.databaseolympics.com/players/playerpage.htm?ilkid=OWENSJES01

That means that the fastest man on the entire planet in 1936 could run 100 meters in 10.3 seconds.

Well, that would have been good enough for 4th place in a recent NCAA Division II track meet, consisting of smaller and less competitive schools:

1 Dennis Boone Jr St Augustine’s 10.21
2 Kawayne Fisher So Lincoln 10.26
3 Brad Mueller Sr Slippery Rock 10.29

http://www.flashresults.com/2008_Meets/outdoor/DivisionII/

You can extrapolate from that there are probably hundreds if not thousands of men around the globe who can run faster than Owens did in 1936. Why has everyone gotten so much faster?

2
  1. Better nutrition
  2. Better shoes
  3. Better coaching
  4. Detailed analysis (computer and otherwise) that helps improve technique.
  5. Better understanding of optimal training strategies.

You can see the same phenomenon in most other sports as well for similar reasons.

3

Adding to Shagnasty’s list, the number of people ever entering a sanctioned 100 m dash event back in Owen’s days must’ve been a fraction of today’s. 70 years ago, from an already small world population of just a third of today’s, probably innumerable natural sprinters never knew what they were capable of. Today, an exceptional runner even in a developing country will end up competing at the national level, at least. Put simply: hundreds more specifically talented athletes striving for the #1 spot in any given event.

4

Another factor is that modern tracks are much faster than the cinder, dirt and grass tracks of that era.

5

Steroids, maybe?

6

Probably also better training and more concentration on doing so from a younger age.

7

I think there’s a lot to be said for better training methods, better coaching, better nutrition, and so on.

But I would also suggest that it’s because a human runner (a) knows of the current record, and (b) strives to meet or beat it. What he or she needs to beat is comprehended, in other words, and the athlete can work towards doing just that.

By comparison, look at horse racing. Jockeys and trainers and owners and horseplayers all know a given track’s record for a given distance. But the horse–who has to do the work–doesn’t, and wouldn’t understand it anyway. As a result, racetrack records sometimes stand for years. They are broken from time to time, but times at racetracks certainly don’t “get faster” from year to year and from meet to meet the way human track records do. Horses know they’re running to beat other horses, but humans know they’re running to beat other humans and a clock.

8

Very interesting- expect there’s probably something to that.

9

I suspect that people are taller on average as well (part of that whole better nutrition thing.)

10

While training, nutrition, tracks undoubtedly play a part, the key element imo is competition. Jesse Owens was as good as he had to be. The bar simply keeps being raised.

11

Moving thread from IMHO to The Game Room.

12

How accurate were the timing devices back then?

13

So much faster? You’re talking about differences of hundreths of seconds. This is easily measurement error.

14

Hundreths of seconds between the fastest man in the world (1936) and three guys who couldn’t make it in “big time” college track.

You want to compare the fastest man in the world (1936) to the fastest man in the world (2008, Usain Bolt), it’s now 6 tenths of a second. Jesse wouldn’t have made it out of the quarter finals in the 2008 olympics, running 10.3. In fact, in the finals, he would have been as far behind the last runner, as the last runner was behind Usain Bolt, who beat the field by a considerable margin.