Back in the high life again is Carl Lewis. First came the brilliant feat at last August`s World Championship in Tokyo, when Lewis shocked a crowd of 75,000 spectators, countless millions who follow international track and even his boastful self by winning the 100 meter run with a world record time of 9.86 seconds.
Then came adulation as the bad boy of American track suddenly re-emerged as a sentimental figure, thanks less to Father Flanagan than to his status as an underdog, his comeback from the threat of athletic oblivion and, most of all, his ability to run the fastest time in history at the advanced age of 30, when most sprinters have long since bid adieu to their intensely demanding sport.
But in the cold lens of retrospect, what had Lewis accomplished? His world-record time was but .04 of a second better than the previous best time set by the vaunted Leroy Burrell. His effort was only .02 of a second better than Burrell`s heroic 9.88 notched that same day, and .05 of a second faster than third-place Dennis Mitchell, who ran a 9.91.
These are intervals of time utterly imperceptible to the human sensory system. The brain cannot reasonably distinguish a tenth of a second, let alone two hundredths of a second or four hundredths. Both Lewis and Burrell seen running in isolation appear to be going fast, with just one well-sculpted, 10- inch body length separating them.
Four hundredths of a second is infinitely quicker than your hands can clap. It is almost literally a wink of an eye. Blink and miss the finish of the race.
But that is nearly always the way records are set in sports, by infinitesimal increments rather than magisterial thrusts-by bytes, by whiskers rather than lanyards. On a given day, one athlete`s body, mind, metabolism and timing are able to come together, for one brief moment, in a performance that has never before been attained by any peer and yet is better by but a bare clocktwitch or the approximate length of a well-endowed centipede. Seldom is the new record so far off the scale that a similarly endowed competitor might not soon equal it or surpass it by a like fraction.
Never does a pole vaulter come along who can suddenly vault 25 feet, even though such an achievement is within the realm of physical possibility. And even though the record for the mile run has come down by approximately 15 seconds in the last 36 years, from 4 minutes to 3:46, no one steps into the limelight to beat the current record by fifteen seconds in a single afternoon. Where is the baseball pitcher who can win 40 or 50 games in a season or throw the ball 120 miles an hour? It might happen someday, but most likely only after a prolonged period of collective progress toward that goal.
But if records, for the most part, fall by small degrees, the point is that they do fall. And continue to fall. Which raises another issue. Are there ultimate limits beyond which human performance cannot improve? Or will finite barriers be reached in various events beyond which an advance is impossible, causing the events to eventually wither and die from spectator boredom.
The question of why records are virtually always set by razor-thin margins has been extensively studied by Edward C. Frederick, of Exeter Research Inc., a consulting firm in New Hampshire. Frederick, a former middle- distance runner and basketball player at Baldwin Wallace College, places primary emphasis on psychology rather than physiology.
”I believe people will only do as well as they think they can do,” he says. ”The psychological factor is 90 percent of what`s achievable.”
”Every athlete has two sets of standards internally,” says Frederick, who has a doctorate in biomechanics and is former director of research for the Nike Shoe Co. ”There is a set of fantasy standards that they really don`t believe are possible. Then they have a set of reasonable standards, times or distances that they think are achievable. If you ask runners what they think they can possibly run, they have that time fixed in their brain and use it as a governor, even though they might have the physical ability to run farther or faster. They just don`t use that extra ability because it`s unrealistic to think you`re going to go a whole second faster, so it`s programmed in.”
That programmed time or distance is generally just a hair better than those achieved by one`s contemporaries or predecessors, since all world-class athletes are pushing the edge of the envelope anyway.
Frederick is careful to make the distinction between confidence and cockiness. ”Let`s not confuse cockiness with the kind of psychological preparation you need to be able to achieve a measurable record. We`re talking here about something you don`t discuss with the press, an attitude about yourself that goes very deep, what you really believe you can do, not a Muhammad Ali exterior with the boast that I can float like a butterfly, but what you are really believing inside.
”Carl Lewis is cocky. But I don`t know what he thinks about down deep. He has been close enough to Bob Beamon`s broad jump record that he could reach out and touch it, yet I wonder why he has never equaled it.”
Beamon`s record, incidentally, is the track and field effort most often cited as the exception to the rule that records are always set by slim margins. On a bright afternoon at the Mexico City Olympics in 1968, Beamon broad-jumped 29 feet 2.5 inches, a full two feet further than the previous world record, an unheard of spurt along the curve of human performance. Known in athletic folklore simply as The Jump, Beamon`s achievement surprised him as much as the sporting world.
When The Jump was eclipsed by two inches in Tokyo last August by Mike Powell, Beamon was surprised again, not by the achievement but by the achiever. ”I knew it was inevitable that someone would break my record but, like everyone else, I had assumed it would be Carl Lewis,” Beamon said.
A slightly different psychological explanation for performance is put forth by Thomas McMahon, a specialist in sports biomechanics at Harvard. ”My opinion is that athletes are aware of the current record and make an effort to break it by a satisfactory amount. They don`t break records by huge amounts because it`s not necesssary. Why doesn`t someone run the 100 meters a full second faster than anyone else? Because there is a psychological barrier in their minds, which is the current record, and when one does better than that, one has succeeded.”
Allan Ryan, author of ”Sports Medicine,” one of the standard texts in the field, believes records get broken because of a certain ”critical mass” that builds up among the pool of athletes in a given event.
”It`s like an atomic energy reaction,” says Ryan, a general surgeon who serves on the executive board of the National Association of Governors`
Councils on Physical Fitness and Sports. ”Say you have a 10-meter swim. The record is around 48 seconds right now. Say you get a number of people who are swimming 49 seconds and this becomes a common time for first-class swimmers. Then out of that group, some people begin to swim 48.6 or 48.4 When you get a critical number doing 48.4, then someone is going to leap from the pack and break 48 seconds. The mathematical formula for this appears to be in the range of 10 to 20 performances close to the record before somebody finally breaks through.
”This is what happens if you go back to Bannister,” says Ryan of Roger Bannister, the British physician who ran the world`s first four-minute mile in 1954. ”There were perhaps 15 world-class runners running 4.2 minutes, even 4.1. Suddenly 4 minutes no longer seemed inconceivable.”
But why was Bannister able to do it when nobody else could? ”Well, it was partly psychological,” Ryan says. ”Bannister began to think he could break the barrier if only he trained the right way. It was partly the fact that he was a physician and was familiar with exercise physiology and recognized what people could do to the capacity of their hearts and lungs. Second, he was a person capable of dedicating himself to that one purpose and the idea that he could do it. The psychological factor is very important. The brain always influences the body.”
The role of genetics and physiology, meanwhile, is stressed by James Hay, of the department of exercise science at the University of Iowa.
”When we talk about top-class sprinters today, for example,” he says,
”we are talking about people who are very far out on the distribution curve for speed, many deviations above the standard mean already. So if any person was to come along much more disposed to great speed, it would be a fluke of very high magnitude.”
If human physiology is not likely to change, what are additional factors that predispose one to break records?
In many events, new technology is a key. Not so long ago, when aluminum poles were in vogue, the world record for pole vaulting stood at 15 feet. Today it is 20 feet 1/2 inch, an indoor mark set last spring by Soviet athlete Sergei Bubka, who, alone at the top of his field, has been steadily improving on his own records by small increments. Bubka`s accomplishments are in part due to the introduction of the fiberglass pole with its greater flexibility.
Still another factor is the creative mentality of the athletes themselves, their intuitive ideas about how performance can be improved beyond what their coaches say. One of the prime examples of this phenomenon is skier Jean Claude Killy. At the time of Killy`s prime in the late 1960s, the dictum among coaches was that to ski downhill faster, one had to lean well forward on one`s skis. But as a result of his own experience, Killy came to disagree and felt one could do better by leaning back on his skis. Soon, as Killy became the world`s top skier and a household name, all skiers began leaning back, and coaching precepts changed accordingly.
Another example of a successful innovation is high jumper Dick Fosbury`s backward flop over the bar, which was so successful it spawned an entirely new style among his peers. And the skating technique now used by cross-country skiers has improved their performance by up to 30 percent.
