The end of an era of records: there is nowhere to grow without steroids

2024 Author: Seth Attwood | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-16 15:55

Eliud Kipchoge's recent record of running a marathon in less than two hours (1 hour 59 minutes and 48 seconds) has become an important psychological milestone in elite sports. The Kenyan runner has rekindled the debate about how many more records a person can set in traditional sports and where our limits are.

On the threshold of the era of transhumanism, this issue is especially acute: it seems that the records achieved without the help of medicines and technologies are still very few for humanity, and they have been talking about the reached limit for more than a year. Since the 1960s, a time when a world record in a particular discipline was recorded almost every month, it was predicted that the moment when a physiological person would not be able to give out a single new achievement - he simply would not be allowed to do it by his own body.

The end of the highest achievements

Humanity is at the edge of physical capabilities and in 50 years no athlete will be able to set a new record. This conclusion was reached by scientists from the French Institute for Biomedical and Epidemiological Research of Sports (IRMES). In the course of the study, scientists studied data from more than three thousand world records set since 1896 - the date of the first Olympic Games in modern times. First of all, the data of the basic Olympic sports - athletics, swimming, cycling, weightlifting and speed skating were processed. The sports performance chart has been steadily going up for over 100 years. A special leap was noted in the 1960s, when new training programs and significant support from pharmacology entered the sport.

Already today, the difference in the performance of leading athletes is only a fraction of a second - for example, the longest record in athletics is Bob Beamon's long jump record, which he set at the 1968 Summer Olympics. At the games, he jumped 8.9 meters, improving the current record by 55 cm and set both an Olympic and a world record. The record lasted 23 years, and was broken at the 1991 World Cup by Mike Powell.

Today, this biological fact has become a stumbling block around the participation of transgender athletes in sporting events. Recently, experts from the International Association of Athletics Federations decided that transgender women athletes would have to halve their testosterone levels in order to continue to compete in the women's category. This was due to the fact that more and more transgender athletes performed better than others than caused the discontent of other athletes. At the same time, the Athletic Federation will no longer require legal proof of gender identity. Transgender people will only need to write a statement in which they will independently determine their gender. Those athletes or athletes who do not meet the hormonal norms will be able to take part in men's competitions instead of women's ones without any problems.

One hundred meter wall

The capabilities of the human body without the support of technology are severely limited. The sport of the highest achievements demonstrates this fact in the best possible way. Already today, athletes in some disciplines run up against an insurmountable obstacle to physiology. So, in the 100-meter run, for a long time, a 10-second segment served as a psychological mark. In 2007, Jamaican Asaf Powell overcame this barrier and recorded the time at 9.74 seconds. Two years later, another Jamaican Usain Bolt broke his record and recorded the best time at the moment - 9.58 seconds. The women were never able to overcome the ten-second mark - at the moment, the record belongs to the American Florence Griffith-Joyner with a time of 10.49 seconds.

Various predictions say that sprinters have about 20 years left - progress in the hundred meters will stop at nine seconds and run into an insurmountable physiological plateau. It is sprinting that will be the first discipline that will begin the end of the era of records. Even doping will not help - according to forecasts, by 2060 even those reserves of the body that can be spurred on by pharmacological support will be exhausted. The records will remain unchanged, and the top athletes will fluctuate within thousandths.

Outsiders and front-runners

Medical professionals provide different perspectives for different sports. So, the most promising sport is pole vaulting - the athletes of the future will be able to increase the modern record (2.45 m) by 10 or 15 centimeters. But this can happen if the record is set by an athlete who is genetically predisposed to this particular sport, which already casts doubt on the result. However, this factor is quite acceptable in big sports.

The least promising discipline is sprinting, which already has a plateau of results. Sprint records are already being set at microscopic time intervals of fractions of a second and are becoming less and less frequent. So, in order to improve the time on the 100m from 11 to 10 seconds, it took 70 years. To get out of 10 seconds, the athletes had to work for almost 40 years - the numbers 9, 74 appeared on the scoreboard only in 2007 (the record was set by the runner Asaf Powell from Jamaica). Runners are predicted to have to work for another 20 years to reach 9 seconds. But whether records will be set after that is a big question.

Even doping cannot radically change the situation. The plateau of physiological capabilities rests on psychology - today athletes use almost all the capabilities of the brain. Scientists believe that by the middle of the century, athletes will begin to clearly lack psychological motivation. Not least this will happen because more and more people with pronounced genetic advantages will appear in professional sports - an example of such a monopoly on records today is the success of Kenyan runners.

Sports genetics

It is no secret that many human qualities, such as physique, strength, speed, endurance, properties of the nervous system, and so on, are genetically determined and inherited. To date, about 200 genes are known that are associated with the development and manifestation of human physical qualities. A detailed study of these genes is necessary for the correct organization of the training process, for predicting the capabilities of athletes. There is every reason to believe that the sport of the highest achievements in the near future will be due to success, primarily to genetics.

Sports genetics allows you to calculate the limit for each person to perform any type of exercise, depending not only on the nature of the task, but also on the genetic components. This means that potential record holders will be identified even in childhood or adolescence - after conducting a series of studies and revealing in a child an outstanding ability to run short or long distances, high jump or other specific features of the body. The introduction of such technologies will become a new step in setting records - a breakthrough in performance will be quite tangible. This milestone could become the basis for genetic speculation - it is likely that the 2100 Olympics will be the arena of competition between natural people and athletes with genetic changes. However, this can affect the entertainment of sports from the best side - only issues of ethics will remain relevant, which, as we know, can be very flexible.