My wife wondered if we are reaching the limit of human ability in athletics; I think we’re only reaching the limit of people who actually take part in those sports.
You’re correct and she is wrong, very wrong
“I am, somehow, less interested in the weight and convolutions of Einstein’s brain than in the near certainty that people of equal talent have lived and died in cotton fields and sweatshops.”
evolutionary biologist Stephen Jay Gould
I’ve made this argument before relating to motorsports. Due to the barriers of entry (mostly cost, geography and connections), the best potential racing drivers in existence (from a biological perspective) will likely never step foot in a race car.
I would love to see F1 drivers being crushed by sim drivers
Honestly, i think most sim drivers could not physically handle driving a real F1 car. And by most i mean like 99% of them.
I mean accelerating a formula can hit you with force of 4g and in corners it can be even more than that.
Yeah, it seems I made a quite ignorant comment; as taking these factors into account, would make it an entirely different showdown. Perhaps putting both in a simulator, sim drivers might outperform the drivers; but would challenge just a select set of abilities.
That would be intresting to watch.
Theres a video on youtube i saw once of a rock climbing guy who went to a grip strength competition. These guys were body builders and he shows up just like 65 kilos of wiry muscle. He set a new world record in his weight class.
So yeah i think we haven’t seen what the human body is capable of. Not until everyone has leisure time to do what they want when they want we will see the true upper limit.
The name of that rock climbing guy is Emil Abrahamsson and this is the video you are talking about: https://youtu.be/LnIkgDrgGoo
He competed again a year later: https://youtu.be/7uB9BqanPtY
Thanks for linking it. He popped up in the algorithm for me so i couldn’t remember his name.
Yeah, for me too. This was his first video I watched but I subbed to his channel afterwards.
I definitely couldn’t run 100m in 8 seconds
Not with that attitude
…and my axe!
You cannot simply sprint into Mordor.
We have a student here in Outback AUS. Amazing at high jump and long jump. Went to the Big Cities twice to represent his state in athletics. And he only got a chance because the new sport teacher came in and pushed for him to go.
Out last sports teacher wouldn’t have made the effort. And who knows how many other great students walked through our doors, and didn’t get a chance to train/go big because of funds/transport/staff engagement etc.
We are very close to the limit of what human bodies can do without cheating. Genetic outliers who can slightly push these limits might exist, but they won’t suddenly jump 10m, rather narrowly crack the 30 year old record of 8.95m, for example. And someone might run a clean 2 hour marathon, but there won’t be anyone running it in 90 minutes. Until we do genetic manipulation or allow doping, the old records will stand or will only increase marginally.
Kinda but also maybe not
Records are continually broken and we do not know the limits when there is so much undiscovered talent and bodies combined w future technique and technology improvements
It’s kinda pointless to talk about but there are many genetic outliers who could dramatically push these limits but we will never know about them or get them in a position to train and try
We do know what human bodies are physically capable of. You can literally calculate that. With genetic outliers you can push this slightly, but not by a huge margin. There is a reason why so many records are still standing after 30-40 years. For a marathon, 2 hours is about the limit of human bodies. We reached that in 2023. Maybe someone can eke out a minute or two more, but without genetic manipulation or doping that’s it. The world records for long jump were set in 1988 for women and 1991 for men. The record for high jump was set in 1993. For these sports we have reached what human bodies are capable of. If they are ever broken, it will be by a few centimeters. No human will suddenly jump 10 meters.
Well there is always the Bannister effect, where when somebody breaks some arbitary record previously tought as unbeatable, multiple people start to beat soon.
Also i want to point out that before the 1991 long jump record was made in 1968. So it took 23 years for the record break that time and for those 23 years people also said we have found the human limit. Until the now standing record destroyed the previous one with 5cm. A huge increment.
Some records may only be capable of marginal improvement but those are still significant to break
I’m really not sure what point you’re trying to make
These are world records so the people involved absolutely care about small breakthroughs and that literally proves the human body was capable of more than we thought, even if just by a little
Who cares if it’s just by a little? We are operating at the absolute limit of performance where a small gain is actually huge
Humans are not set in stone, we’re constantly evolving. An ostrich can run 70km/h on 2 legs. Who’s to say we won’t one day have humans running that fast?
I don’t think you understand how evolution works. There is no evolutional pressure on humans to run long distances, jump far or high. And even if there suddenly were, it would take generations for noticeable changes. It’s much more likely that some parents let their kids be CRISPRd to create more red blood cells which would grant them an endurance boost or other such changes. That will probably happen in our lifetime.
Besides, your ostrich example is not helpful. A snow albatross is as tall as a small human and also has two. Maybe we will grow wings and fly!
I didn’t say anything about natural selection, I said evolution. Humans evolve by more means than natural selection. We also evolve through culture, through technology. And of course we still do evolve by natural selection, it’s just hard to see because the pace of technology is so rapid.
Take birth control as an example. It’s very recent technology. A blink of an eye in natural selection terms. You might think it would wipe us out by causing population crashes. But culture is evolving to counteract it. Cultural norms have already begun to shift heavily against birth control. I think it’s fairly easy to anticipate a future where birth control is not used very much.
Kinesiologists and mechanical engineers are the who. Ostriches have a radically different body plan than humans, one that’s mechanically much more suited to running fast. Add long, lightweight legs which bend the other way and hence have advantageous leverage and a stride length of 3 to 5 meters. (Usain Bolt has a stride length of less than 2.5 meters, and he’s an outlier among humans.) Even if we genetically engineered a hyper-fast-twitch muscle fiber and springy tendons, those would just tear apart our joints when paired with the body mechanics and locomotion style we’re working with.
That’s a lack of imagination. Why couldn’t we give a human legs like an ostrich? Maybe not achievable right now, but would you bet against it being achieved within 1000 years?
Or would you say that person with ostrich legs is no longer human? That gets to the deeper questions we inevitably get to with sports: what is fair? What does it mean to be human?
I really hate that Oscar Pistorious decided to become a murderer. His inspiring achievements with prosthetic legs actually were raising the above questions. I don’t think anyone questioned the fact that he’s human, but they definitely talked a lot about what fairness really means in sports.
Would that be a human with ostrich legs, or an ostrich with a human body? Indeed, there are a lot of philosophical questions, but if we’re allowing technological augmentation, then Todd Reichert is indisputably human and managed 144 kph.
Right, Todd Reichert raises another question: do we consider removable devices to be part of our body or not?
I think the ostrich question you raised has a bit of a simpler answer: does it have the mind of a human or the mind of an ostrich? That’s only a temporary reprieve though. Once we get into brain augmentation we have a whole other set of issues.
But even if we disallowed any augmentation whatsoever, there’d still be the issue of reproduction, selective breeding, and genetic engineering. Maybe you disallow gene editing and CRISPR, but how do you disallow selective breeding? It’s as basic as having the freedom to decide who to form a relationship with.
Statistics, anyone?
If we’re a simple ‘normal’ population, your wife’s idea holds; there should be 1 in 1000 athlete in every 1000 people. to get a 1 in 1000 athletic performance with a 50% confidence you need only take 693 samples. So if many thousands have played, you’d expect to have seen peak performance.
But we aren’t distributed like that. Z score analysis of a measurable sport indicates a known top athlete like Usain Bolt is in the order of 5 standard deviations from the norm (depending what we consider the norm data set). That’s more like 1 in a million to one in 10 million to get a Bolt. Which implies millions need to try (and train) to get a Bolt level performance (3 humans in that tier so far, implies between 3 & 30 million have tried). So a Bolt seems to be reaching human limits, reinforcing the wife position position for that sport - we are approaching the human limit.
But wait - that is a popular sport, with a single simple measure. If there were multiple relevant independent measures (say hitting and pitching, or running and throwing), even just 2, the odds become astronomical of finding the best. A dual 1 in 1000 is a 1 in a million. A dual z=5 athlete is 1 in 12 trillion.
So the implication is that for more complex sports where multiple attributes apply, it is much more likely we have not yet seen peak human capabilities. It’s also much harder to measure and recognize when we do - so props to the legendary players, and keep searching for them. We won’t know how good they really were until we sample (play) the sport for hundreds or thousands of years. Finding peak is incredibly lucky/unlikely for our most popular complex sports.
Im taking your wife’s side.
Competition squeezes blood from a stone. There are very few world records that were set without intention.
To your side, you could argue that I am making your point. Perhaps some folks haven’t been thrust up to the plate to take a swing, and thus haven’t been tempered in competition. Also, it’s possible that knowing what the records are imposes psychological limitations. For example, Ewa Kawakami, at 9 years old, did three back to back 900s in xgames skateboarding vert recently. Tony hawk asked him how long after his first 720 did he land a 900. He said “the next day.”
I am still going with competition being requisite for peak form. There are exceptions, probably for stuff like Worlds Strongest Man, but something like sprinting, deadlifts, marathon, fastest playthrough of flight of the bumblebee, etc, all take dedication and competition to rise to the top
i always wonder how the usa would fare in soccer if it actually had its top athletes playing the game. usually its the 4th or 5th tier athletes who play soccer growing up. the upper tiers either go into football, baseball, basketball, or hockey
Yes and no.
I’ve never played football; to think I could outplay, say, Sir David Beckham in his prime or whomever, is just complete and utter nonsense — in my current state.
Now, if I’d been playing football since I was a wee lad and I had built up that skill over the course of my life as I assume he has, maybe there is a chance I could have competed on his level. But we’ll never know because I spent my life playing video games and reading books. I’m fine with the fact that I probably have more hours in Cyberpunk 2077 than he does. (That does not matter to me in the slightest. I’m just saying there are things I can do better than a professional/world renowned football player. And not that I am the best in the world at those things, either.)
Furthermore, I think the people who will excel at those things are the people who are actually doing them, because they had an interest and it drives them. The exception would be people who injured out in school and never had a chance to go pro. So if you change their past and remove that one incident, they could have gone pro and may have gone on to set records. But those of us who never had an interest in playing? No, I do not think we would ever measure up to one who has lived and breathed the sport their whole life.
There has been a huge uptick in interest in the sport of weightlifting because of crossfit. Hampton Morris was our first US male Olympics medalist since the 1960s, and Olivia Reeves won gold.
I think for sports like weightlifting talent is pulled away by professional sports. You could go to the Olympics, or you could go play for an NFL team.
That’s true about everything. How many Mozarts are out there that never picked up an instrument? My son has a world-class, heartbreaking singing voice. In high school, he had the lead in every musical, and girls would literally cry when he sang, but he has absolutely no interest in pursuing it, even as a hobby.
How many great writers, great chefs, great runners, great artists, even great mathematicians, etc. who just weren’t interested in the subject?
Nah. IMO genetics is a pre-requisite, but just one component. If you have the right body, you can be competitive if you do everything else.
It costs a lot of money.
