Have sporting records reached their limits?

Bad news for athletes! According to a research institute, the era of world records is coming to an end. The reason? The human body is reaching its limits

Until now, Pierre de Coubertin had been spot on when he declared ‘higher, further, stronger’. Unfortunately, this motto is likely to become obsolete within a few years. This, at any rate, is the argument put forward by a study carried out by researchers at IRMES (Institute for Biomedical Research and Sports Epidemiology). The statistical model developed by the team led by Jean-François Toussaint, director of Inserm (the French National Institute of Health and Medical Research), is based on an analysis of 3,263 world records set between 1896 and 2007. The various graphs show a dramatic rise in records from 1896 to 1968, except during the two world wars.

“Periods during which neither the athletes nor society had the time, the resources or the desire to devote themselves to competition,” observes Jean-François Toussaint. But since 1968, the trend has shown “an inevitable decline in the number of their records.” ’ According to this same model, half of all records will therefore have reached 99.95 per cent of their maximum potential by 2027. “ We are reaching the limits of the human species’ physiological capabilities ” confirms the researcher. The year 2060 would mark the definitive end of world records, “unless, perhaps, we use stopwatches that measure millionths of a second”, before adding: “It is, however, unlikely that a man, on his own two feet, will ever manage to run the 100 metres in 9 seconds”.

Whilst this may be a hard pill to swallow for athletes as competitive as Usain Bolt, some athletes, such as Asafa Powell, seem to back up this conclusion: ‘Every time I run a fast time, my body feels strange. My legs are in a lot of pain; it feels as if someone’s been stabbing me all over. Running 9.74 every time would take too much of a toll on my body. I reckon that when I reach my limit, my body won’t be able to cope. We have to make an effort to respect that limit.”

Whilst this ‘glass ceiling’ is a cause for concern for the future of athletics, there are certain areas of potential improvement that give cause for optimism. The contribution of science should, in fact, provide a better understanding of what happens during exercise. Advances in equipment, for their part, should help to optimise sporting performance. The Pistorius case (the disabled runner with spring-loaded prosthetic legs) could, for example, give shoe manufacturers new ideas. Furthermore, certain disciplines long off-limits to women, such as the marathon, are showing promise of significant developments. Finally, it is hard not to suspect that some of the records used in this study may have been distorted by doping. Doping, incidentally, seems to have a bright future ahead of it. It is therefore legitimate to ask: are records really on their last legs?