Hello Tyler
I'm a British blogger and avid reader of your superb blog. I have a question for you and your readers.
In the wake of the World Athletic Championships (and Bolt's spectacular achievement) I've been wondering: what will happen when the last world records are set?
For example: nobody will ever run the 800m in one second.
Which means someone, somewhere will set a record in that event that never gets broken.
Similarly, nobody will ever throw a javelin five miles. There's got to be a limit point.
What happens after that? What happens when all the Final Records, as it were, have been set?
Of course, we won't know it when it happens. We'll keep striving to break them. But at some point we'll look back on the preceding twenty years and remark on the fact that no new records have been set. In the meantime, incrementally, everyone has caught up to a similar level as everyone else.
What happens then? Does track and field die?
Of course a new record may beat an old record in asymptotic fashion, but at some point this ceases to be exciting. One partial solution is to redefine the unit of achievement: how many 100-meter races in a row did the person win against peers? There can be a "Grand Prix" of accumulated race performances. Another partial solution is to introduce weights or enhancements, to redefine the terms of the competition. In short, I expect entrepreneurs will always find ways around this problem. In chess the gaps between the top fifteen players have narrowed considerably, yet the public doesn't seem to have lost interest in the game. Alternatively, individual basketball scoring performances still interest the fans, even though Wilt Chamberlain's 100-point game probably will never be topped. It's enough if the activity itself is fun. What else will happen?
I would like to comment on the intrinsic difference between Basketball (or any sport in which one competes against someone else) and Athletics (or any sport in which one competes against an objective metric, such a weightlifting).
The difference is that we cannot really compare Basketball players from different eras because their performance depended o the other team. We can argue for ever whether LeBron James or Michael Jordan was a better player, or Maradona vs. Zidane, or Steffi Graf vs. Venus Williams. But we cannot know for sure. Moreover, it is a meaningless question.
In sports with objective metrics, we know that Usain Bolt would have beaten Carl Lewis. We also know that Tyson Gay’s second place in the World Championship would have beaten any performance pre-2008.
My point: Competition with objective metrics is competition against the other athletes, plus competition against all previous athletes in History.
But answering the original question: when world records get closer to the human limit, there will be a shift of attention to events where the focus on the record is not that strong. In relative terms, the 1500m will earn attention at the expense of the 100m. The suspense makes 1500m races fun to watch no matter what the clock says. Same for field events: Pole vaulting, for instance, has a lot of drama whether or not a record is broken.
I disagree with the British Blogger’s assumption that there will be some insurmountable barrier to breaking athletic records. As long as the “athletes of tomorrow” can use drugs, genetic enhancement, cybernetic implants, or other technology of that sort, we will have nothing to worry about. We shall indeed, hopefully, get to see someone throw a Javelin 5 miles and run the 800m in half a second.
By the asker’s admission, one will never know at the time it happens, since at this time the record is attainable (by definition), therefore conceivably replicatable by peers.
But by the same logic of not being able to predict ex ante the number of seconds that will be the humanly possible limit, it is also impossible to tell at which point after the fact we can be certain that the limit has been reached.
If 20 years were enough, we would not have women running the 100 and 200m by now. Florence Griffith-Joyner set both records in 1988, 21 years ago.
Inspite of Bob Beamon setting a Long Jump record that wasn’t broken for decades , there was no loss of interest as to who was winning the Gold medals in the next few Olympics . So a person competes nt only against the metrics but more important against others.
@ Iondenio: I think the example you gave for basketball also applies to Athletics. I feel Lewis and Gay are not on the same level field (no pun intended) , when Technology of the Track ,equipment such as Shoes etc are taken into account. Though probably Bolt is a class by himself.
Presumably we will then go on to track and field on the Moon, which will be different to say the least.
Doesn’t matter. At any point in time we will have a heavyweight camp, the fastest man on earth, the best woman tennis player currently playing, the winner of the SuperBowl, etc.
It’s enough if the activity itself is fun.
And competitive. Bolt’s time or Pele’s greatness is only somewhat relevant to how hard youth practice and run the 100m or play soccer.
If you want to find out what it looks like when the records stop falling, just look at Women’s althetics. Thanks to a combination of Flo-Jo, some suspicious Eastern Europeans (Marita Koch?) and those Chinese distance runners reputedly using rather effective traditional recipes, I always thought the only records that could ever fall were the ones our own marvellous Paula Radcliffe was breaking.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_world_records_in_athletics#Women
I think the real interesting stuff begins when prosthetics outperform normal limbs. How long until a serious debate begins in baseball over the player whose high-performing prosthetic legs make him faster and more agile than any other player? Prosthetic prohibitionists will have to advocate banning victims of injury, disease, and birth defects (the terms “handicap” and “disabled” will likely go out of use) from sports. I imagine they will find it hard to ban the first player whose prosthetics simply make him competitive (the Jackie Robinson for prosthetic-wearing-amputees will probably be a hero), but what about when they would make him the fastest/most agile in the league? Someday, perhaps the “special” in Special Olympics will become synonymous with “enhanced” rather than “handicapped”, and the athletes there will outperform the regular Olympic athletes.
So maybe someone will do a one second 800m. In this world, the drag racing and track-and-field will combine.
Also… in a world where high-tech prosthetics are a clear advantage, how long until the Chinese start cutting peoples’ limbs off?
to follow up on cricket:
What happened in cricket was all batting records become relative to Don Bradman’s record.
The reality became, who will be second to Don Bradman?
For comparison (if you are not cricket savvy) :
Bradman’s batting average is 99.99%
Since past 50 years , the batting average for second place (as of today) is still in just 60′s.
It doesnt make the game less exciting but it only makes players accept Bradman as demi-god.
Game and life goes on great with an unattainable threshold level set in an different era. (well atleast until someone comes up with an equivalent of an “escape velocity”)
Be a philosoph and read this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sorites_paradox
There are always new sports being invented. With each new sport comes a panopoly of potential records to set and break. We will never run out of records to break, because we will never run out of new sports to play.
“Of course a new record may beat an old record in asymptotic fashion, but at some point this ceases to be exciting.”
I disagree. A record is a record and most people don’t share your hatred of asymptotes.
A great analysis of running records was done in this blog: http://gravityandlevity.wordpress.com/2009/04/22/the-fastest-possible-mile/
Like Tyler, he assumes (through his data analysis) that there is some assymptote to times of running specific distances, his was based on the one mile as the data was most reliable and accessible.
I’m not sure what will happen when this assymptote is reached (if this theory holds up), but perhaps measurements will be made on smaller intervals (thousandths seconds rather than hundredths) and even more emphasis will be placed on reaction times and acceleration.
Zenophobia: The irrational fear of convergent sequences.
Remembering the days when the 4 minute mile, the 16 foot pole vault and the 60 foot shotput were still out there as goals to be aspired to, I’d say track and field has already declined tremendously in the ink (electrons) it attracts as opposed to other sports.
Regarding prosthetics, the future has pretty much arrived. Oscar Pistorius is the double-amputee who tried to qualify for the Olympics in the 400m. His current prosthetics, after a lengthy process, have been ruled legal, but they are probably quite far from optimized for all-out speed (they’d be longer and springier.)
Depending on how you want to read “mechanical enhancement,” bicycles or human-powered vehicles (faired recumbent bicycles) would hold every record beyond 400m (and I’m pretty sure the standing-start 200m would be beatable) using the liberal definition of “no stored power, human-powered solo effort.”
The problem of no world records left doesn’t seem to be a big issue for interest in the sport, as several have noted, and I’d add that the baseball batting average record is listed at .426 (Napoleon Lajoie, in 1901), and nobody has hit above .400 for a season since Ted Williams.
721 claps per minute
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=85IEmnJ-8No
Fast Hands (guiness record) Emily Foxx
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5e8tQZ_bzSk
OK, I’m done – I don’t want to join the company of the world’s most obnoxious blogger….
What about bowling? No one can possibly beat the current record score, 300, but no one seems to care. It is about the competition between the bowlers and who can get close to or at 300 most consistently. I imagine that’s what it will be like in track and field. Sure, you got the world record last year, but who is going to win this race right now?
well for one, you will see people seek to set records in multiple events.
Australian Don Bradman has a batting average of 99.99% and its simply no possible for anyone to break it now. Almost 50 years have passed and holds true. My guess is till will forever.
This is correct, except that (for the record) :-
* batting averages in cricket are not percentages – they represent the number of runs scored over the matches in question, divided by the number of times the batsman has been out. (One’s innings can end without one’s having been out.)
* Bradman’s Test Match average (as opposed to his average over a wider class of matches) was 99.94.
I’m surprised the British blogger in question didn’t think of this, but there probably has already been one ‘Final Record’ in sport: Sir Donald Bradman’s batting average in cricket, which has stood since his retirement in 1948. At 99.94 it’s about 50% higher than any of the next highest career averages, and about twice the average of most ‘great’ batsmen.
Another example of a record that hasn’t been beaten and isn’t likely to is the record that Frank McGee set in the Stanley Cup playoffs in 1905: 14 goals in a single game. If I remember correctly, he scored three goals (a hat trick) in 90 seconds in that game. With all of his record breaking stats, Wayne Gretzky never came close to that.
At the time, Frank McGee was blind in one eye.
“In chess the gaps between the top fifteen players have narrowed considerably, yet the public doesn’t seem to have lost interest in the game.”
Alrighty, then. There are great days ahead for some of our favorite sports if they can if they can still aspire to the popularity of chess.
What will happen? Genetic engineering.
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