Are they training harder? or are athletes today just physically better?
In: Biology
Athletes are much more professional now. We never used to have teams dedicated to training for the Olympics or other competitions. Often participants were gifted or those with enough time and money to do some training.
People are also generally getting bigger, which doesn’t just mean we’re all getting fat, it includes taller and stronger. All thanks to better nutrition and health. When you think about it, we wouldn’t eat such a variety of foods all year around without things like cold chain storage.
And with better research we know how to tweak performance. Somethings like getting less colds over the year may only make a 1-2% improvement, but cumulatively with all the other small improvements, it gives athletes a winning edge.
Sports medicine and training have advanced a lot since the first olympics. In a hundred years time training methods of what works and what doesn’t have changed, even diet has changed. Athletes now have more stamina and strength than ever.
It took a lot of time to get to Roger Bannister who broke the 4 minute mile record running in 1954, now it’s a pretty normal thing for a good athlete to be able to do.
Along with the other comments about better training/nutrition, a huge part is actually technology. Shoes that return more energy per footstep, swimsuits that have less hydrodynamic drag, etc. There have been lots of controversies with leaps in technology for certain sports and world records being broken (i.e. the examples I just mentioned). Incremental improvements in technology for a certain sport are less likely to be in the spotlight or get banned, but they have just as much an impact on olympic or world records over the years.
To make it real short, science has figured out how to better train an athlete. Genetics teamed with science.
There’s a great book called The Sports Gene by David Epstein for anyone interested in this question. It addresses a lot of the reasons mentioned so far for continued advancement in sports records over the past century: improved nutrition, larger pool of athletes, the explosion of lucrative careers in professional athletics, better sports medicine, and better technology. It also shows how, in the past few decades, many of these sources of new generations of record-breaking performances are becoming exhausted. Pools of genetically gifted athletes have stopped growing at an exponential pace, and young athletes are combed over and shunted into their best sport with increasing efficiency. Sports medicine, training, and nutrition are all likewise generating decreasing marginal returns. Advances in technology have hit similar inflection points, and in many cases are being regulated or banned from competitive sports. The end result is that breaking records in sports has become increasingly impossible over the last couple of decades, and breaking a world record now means being born at the far edge of the distribution of human ability, together with consistently pushing one’s body to the edge of what is physically possible for years. The 20th and early 21st century in sports will soon be viewed as a brief, never to be repeated window in human history in which a population explosion, leaps forward in nutrition, medicine, and technology, and the professionalization of sports all led to records being broken by percentage points instead of hundredths of percentage points.
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Here’s a great [Ted Talk](https://www.ted.com/talks/david_epstein_are_athletes_really_getting_faster_better_stronger?utm_campaign=tedspread&utm_medium=referral&utm_source=tedcomshare) that explains your question actually. Technological advancements and sports medicine have made athletes into who are they are today versus a century ago.
If you accumulate tiny incremental advantages over your opponents, they add up to big gains. Athletes have support teams of nutritionists, physiotherapists, exercise physiologists, sports psychiatrists. All those fields get better every year. They have technological improvements: bikes, swimsuits, running shoes. Olympic athletes are supported financially by their governments. There’s a wider pool of athletes to choose from and talent scouting is better. People are growing bigger and stronger than ever before because of all the food we have access to now. The baseline level of technical skill in a sport increases over time, too.
All these comments about training and equipment? Let’s be real. It wasn’t too long ago that smoking and beers in the dressing room was common.
USA certified track coach here. The science of exercise didn’t really take off until the 60s and 70s. We began to learn so much about training and recovery that we could start fine tuning training plans to fit individual athletes. Drugs really helped advance it because what workouts work well for drugged athletes will also benefit non-drug athletes. We also had money injected into sports that allowed athletes to train exclusively and not try to qualify for the Olympic a while holding down a part time job and eating table scraps. Nutrition also took off and our knowledge on that has been monumental in training.
There’s still a lot we don’t know, particularly in area of the nervous system and gene doping that could further unlock performance in ways we haven’t imagined.p
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