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| Gerald Bybee |
Steady focus: Sure, swimmer Sheila Taormina was an Olympic gold medalist in the 1996 800-meter relay, but she only picked up triathlon a year ago. Can the 31-year-old athlete run down her dream to win another medal this month in the sport's Olympic debut?
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WORLD AND OLYMPIC RECORDS have been kept for more than a century, but over that span there never has been a year in which records have not been broken. Performances that were world-class only 50 years ago are almost routine now. Again and again, feats thought physiologically impossible have been surpassed. In 1954, Roger Bannister ran the mile in 3:59.40 to
break the four-minute barrier and stun the world. But within six weeks even that improbable mark fell. Fast-forward to 1999 and Moroccan Hicham El Gerrouj lowered the record to 3:43.13.
So it goes: In the Mexico City Olympics of 1968, Bob Beamon shattered Ralph Boston's world long-jump record of 27 feet, four and one-quarter inches with a jump of 29 feet, two and a half inches. For nearly 23 years Beamon's record was considered to be beyond unbreakable, until the 1991 World Championships in Tokyo, where Carl Lewis came within one inch
of it and Mike Powell actually beat it by two inches at the same meet.
The first modern record for the 100-meter dash was 11.0 seconds, set by Great Britain's William MacLaren in 1867. It got chipped away over the next several decades until American Charles Paddock dropped it to 10.2 seconds in 1921. His time didn't see a major improvement until 1956, when countryman Willie Williams ran a 10.1. Then, last year, U.S.
sprinter Maurice Greene set a world record of 9.79.
The steady improvement in records of all sporting events may, at first glance, look like biological evolution, but this couldn't be further from the truth. Evolution might still have played a role shaping us back in the Ice Ages, when we were fragmented into small isolated populations, regularly dropping dead due to athletic deficiencies and other forms
of bad luck. No more. Living as we now do, in large, increasingly homogenized populations, any mutation that might crop up and that could be of value for athletic performance (e.g. an enormously large lung capacity for marathoners) would quickly be diffused in the gene pool.
That's not to say changes can't happen. Could a species stuck with our bipedal design evolve and someday run as fast as ostriches? Maybe we're still so unspecialized for the task of running that selective breeding could accomplish this. But even if we attempted that unthinkable experiment—if we bred humans like, say, racehorses, along lines of
pedigree—the project would probably have to continue uninterrupted for hundreds or thousands of years. We have no idea what makes a Secretariat different from an also-ran, but if we want to beat a Secretariat, we begin with Secretariat genes. Still, if we did create human thoroughbreds, there's good reason to believe the physical "improvement" would
eventually stop; despite selective breeding, thoroughbreds haven't gotten any faster in the last 100 years. Why should it be any different with us?
Genetically we're pretty much the same as we've been for hundreds of thousands of years; the basic changes for running, throwing, jumping, and the like were made long ago, and the trajectory, and eventual endpoint, were determined then as well. Physiologically speaking, on average we may well be devolving, so to speak. If we
picked one of our six billion brethren at random and had that person run against a fit-for-survival Pleistocene man or woman, there's a good chance we'd come out the loser.
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