Olympics: are the fastest and strongest reaching their mathematical limits?

The modern Games makes the precise measurement of achievement all-important. But as we approach the limits of human athletic ability, numbers only tell us part of the story

1. Tears. So many that the South Korean fencer's face shone. For more than an hour following her defeat at the ExCel arena on 30 July, Shin A-lam's epee lay on the piste beside her. She would not budge. Judges huddled, spectators slow handclapped. All eyes fell on the electronic clock. One second had distanced the Korean from victory and a possible Olympic gold medal. How long is a second? Longer, a pained Shin discovered, than her opponent's blade

2. In the Olympians' scrambles to finish first, a second often proves decisive. Even the greatest athletes can find themselves on the wrong side of time. Twenty four hours after the fencing drama, a pair of swimmers in the 200m butterfly touched the wall simultaneously.Michael Phelps – the most decorated competitor in the history of the Games – had to settle for a rare silver: his time of 1 min 53.01 sec was 1/20th of a second behind Chad le Clos of South Africa. Phelps, massaging his disappointment, might have cast his mind back four years to the Games in Beijing, at which another simultaneous finish had on that occasion gone in his favour. A review confirmed his seventh gold of the competition (matching Mark Spitz's record 1972 haul) by a margin of 1/100th of a second.

3. Such margins were unthinkable in Pythagoras's day. The ancient Greek athletes cared far more about timing (kairos) than time (chronos). Wrestlers and boxers sought the right moment, the instant of maximum opportunity, in which to throw a rival or land a winning jab. Victory was always visible, incontrovertible. It was the same story in other disciplines. The hurly-burly of chariot races made neck-and-neck competition virtually impossible. Falls and crashes occurred regularly over the 12 laps of the track. In the Games of 482BC, out of a field of 41, there was only one finisher.

4. As Armand D'Angour notes in his account of the ancient Greek mind, athletes showed no desire to perform more efficiently or race ever faster. They followed special diets and pushed their bodies to exhaustion, but only so as to be the best on the day. No accurate measurements were taken, no reliable records kept (we can safely disregard Phayllus of Kroton's 55ft leap as proverbial). No single standard was upheld. Discus diameters could vary from 5.5in to 13.5in. Every city state had its own version of the stadion (sprint) race: at Olympia, competitors ran 192 metres; at Delphi, 177; at Epidaurus, 181; at Pergamon, 210.

5. When Baron Pierre de Coubertin inaugurated the modern Olympic Games in Athens in 1896, he also rendered them mathematical. The same weights and distances travelled in quadrennial cycles from country to country and from city to city. New disciplines such as the modern pentathlon (invented by de Coubertin), which made its debut at the 1912 Games in Stockholm, ranked participants objectively using points. Current pentathlon rules quantify everything from the graze of an adversary's epee (which equates to a delay in the final 3,000m race of precisely seven seconds) to the worth of one second in the pool (plus or minus 12 points, depending on the swimmer's total time over 200m). Referees presently value the embarrassment of falling off a horse – during the showjumping round – as a 60-point deduction.

6. Using the numbers generated from these standardised units of measurement, the world's first official sporting records emerged. The record, in de Coubertin's analogy, became to the Olympic movement what gravity was to Newtonian mechanics. Its abstract numbers denote feats of human excellence of the kind once praised in Pindar's odes. But unlike poems, numbers are universal. Abstraction effaces the sore toes and false starts and noisy crowds of a particular place and date. Through it, we can compare Michael Phelps's record-breaking 200m butterfly swim in Rome on 29 July 2009 (1:51.51) with that of Mark Spitz in Munich on 28 August 1972 (2:00.07), or the spot where Jürgen Schult's discus landed at Neubrandenburg on 6 June 1986 (74.08m) with that reached by James Duncan, the discipline's first record holder, in New York on 27 May 1912 (47.58m). Rarely though do we pause to contemplate the stark differences in, say, nutrition, financial incentive or lane position. The numbers strike us as dispassionate, unflinching, authoritative.

7. No Olympic record better symbolises the quantification of accomplishment than that in the men's 100m sprint. The sprinter does not tackle any old 100m, but, rather, the idea of 100m: encompassing a standardised and tightly prescribed strip of territory. A century ago, spectators in Stockholm admired Donald Lippincott, a student at the University of Pennsylvania, as he set the event's first official world record in "the marvellous time of 10 3/5 seconds" (10.6sec). A row of straw-hatted timekeepers squeezed their stopwatches (accurate to within a fifth of a second) as he whisked by.

8. Electronic timing supplanted stopwatches at the Helsinki Games of 1952. In the final, no fewer than four sprinters made it to the line in a time of 10.4. More remarkable still, the runners were considered somewhat slow. The then world record, first set by Jesse Owens 16 years before, defined sprinting excellence at 10.2.

9. Records, though, are never immune to dissatisfaction. In many minds, those 2/10ths of a second nagged. Sixteen years after Helsinki, running at altitude in the Mexico City Games, the American Jim Hines's gold-medal-winning time of 9.95 seemed to redefine the race. Hines became the first human in history to run under the 10-second mark.

10. Today's sprinters are measured in hundredths of a second. Last week in London, the most hi-tech equipment followed the sprinter Usain Bolt's every step. His reaction time out of the blocks was 0.165 (ranking him a modest fourth of eight). But then the Jamaican got into his stride. His long legs disposed of the race in 41 strides. His Olympic record time of 9.63 put him an eighth of a second – some 4ft – clear of the pack. For Bolt, however, winning gold was insufficient, confiding to a reporter: "Then it popped into my head, world record! [Bolt ran 9.58 in 2009] … it's still a fast time, the second-fastest ever, but I won't say it was the perfect race because I know my coach would disagree."

11. Bolt had talked of running it in less than 9.5 in London. After all, if a record's abstract numbers allow us to contrast performances with the past, they make it equally possible to anticipate the future. The sprinters chase a ghostly number, a Platonic ideal of the "perfect race". What is this number? Mathematicians have long disputed the question. According to John Barrow, professor of mathematical sciences at Cambridge University, the limits of human speed remain a long way off. A faster reaction to the starter's gun, a maximum 2 metre per second breeze at his back, higher altitude and thus less resistant air: all would help Bolt pick up even greater speed. Barrow calculates a potential record of 9.45. The statistician Reza Noubary agrees, estimating "with 95% confidence" an upper limit of 9.44. Others, measuring the relative improvement in sprinting performances between consecutive Games since 1896, conclude that we will have to wait until at least the year 2020 before someone beats 9.5. Meanwhile the physicist Filippo Radicchi predicts an ultimate 100m men's time of 8.28 (in more conservative calculations, he has put it at 8.8).

12. But some query what the sports philosopher Sigmund Loland describes as the "cult of abstract entities" in which a race is turned into "a quest for objective knowledge similar to what we find in the scientific experiment". Attention swivels from the humanity of Bolt and Phelps – their peculiar stories and rivalries – to "empirical research questions": how fast can a human being run? How quickly can he or she swim? Behind such questions, Loland notes, lurks the Enlightenment idea of indefinite progress.

13. We are all children of the Enlightenment: we count calories, set alarm clocks, watch weather forecasts on TV. So habitual, so inconspicuous, are these daily rituals that we perform them automatically. Unlike the ancient Greeks, who considered man the "measure of all things", we feel at home in an infinitely expansive cosmos. Great thinkers of the 17th, 18th and 19th centuries passed down to us the notion of civilisation moving in a single – and desirable – direction. Thermometers, weighing scales and microscopes long ago moved us safely past the marshes of approximation. Time, risk and mortality are now told in numbers and quantified, since incremental progress relies on accurate measurement.

14. "Citius, altius, fortius," says the Olympic motto, but as Loland points out, the idea of unending progress risks leading sport into a bind. Records cannot continue to be broken forever. Soon, perhaps, 100m sprint times will feature a third decimal after the point. Even this solution, however, might not work. A thousandth of a second equates to a single centimetre, yet track lanes have been known to differ in length by twice as much.

15. Why reduce performance to a number at all? Every sport and sportsman and sportswoman is unique. Consider, in place of abstract records, a renewed focus on the human drama and infinite variety of the match.

16. Ball games such as tennis offer an alternative vision of sport's infinite variety: intuition and technical prowess compliment the athlete's speed and strength. The game's units are defined idiosyncratically (zero is winningly called "love"); statistics such as "total volleys" or "percentage of returned serves" mere side-effects of play. Achievement adjusts with every match. Hours before Bolt's race last Sunday, Andy Murray contested the Olympics men's singles final against Roger Federer. Weeks earlier, in the same spot, Murray had lost the Wimbledon final to the same man; this time, he struck gold. Followers of Murray remember the rivalry, the meaning of the match. And for a fleeting instant, like the overjoyed Scotsman, we forget ourselves.

Дата добавления: 2015-10-31