Two athletes in a light aircraft wander way off course, become utterly lost and crash-land. Both are unharmed and one sets off to ask a person in the distance where they are. "47° 30' North, 19° 05' East," comes the reply. "Well," says one of the athletes to the other, on hearing this answer, "we still don't really know where we are, but we do know that was a sports physiologist."
This story was recounted at a meeting this month* which brought together scientists, coaches and athletes to ruminate about the potential for improvement in records in track and field events. At one end of the spectrum there were volleys of graphs and histograms from some of the scientists — hence the self-deprecating story, told by the physiologist P. E. Di Prampero (Univ. Udine, Italy), acknowledging the difficulty in translating detailed scientific information and theories into helpful advice for athletes.
At the other, there were the personal reflections of such performers as Sergey Bubka, holder of the pole-vault world record (at 6.14 m), and of Ana Fidelia Quirot, who recovered from horrifying burn injuries to win the women's world championship 800 metres in 1995. Kip Keino, Olympic gold-medallist in 1968 and 1972, and former world-record holder at middle distance, weighed in with an account of the reasons behind the rise and sustained success of Kenyan runners at world level.
Di Prampero's work exemplified the theme of the presentations on human biology, which is continued refinement of data on individual athletes that can be fed back into their training regimes. His model takes three main parameters: the energy cost of running per unit of distance, maximum oxygen consumption and maximum amount of energy derived from anaerobic stores. These measurements were carried out on middle-distance runners, predictions made as to their best times, and the results compared with actual performances. Di Prampero says that they agreed well, and the approach has since been applied to competition cyclists1: specific training could possibly be used to tweak the parameters to advantage for both athletes and cyclists.
There are also innovative ways of looking at the human body as a machine (J. Diamond, Univ. California Los Angeles; ref. 2). This research has involved calculating sustained metabolic rates of animals in the wild, of experimental mice undergoing intensive heat or milk production (and thus energy use), and of cyclists in the Tour de France. The overall conclusion is that whereas heart, lung and muscle are generally taken to be the organs that determine athletic performance, and so are monitored, the intestine, liver and kidneys are also important for energy budgets averaged over long times. These concepts are not directly applicable to track and field athletes generally, for few events are related to endurance as defined in this metabolic scheme. But again, they could be applied in training — to help devise individual diets that reduce the work done by the intestine, liver and kidneys, or to test the performance of these organs in search of factors that might limit training intensity.
Other areas of scientific contribution are the development of ever-more-refined tracks (G. Gambino, MONDO S.p.A., Italy). That track improvement has come a long way was graphically illustrated by a different speaker, a 400-metre runner from the days of cinder surfaces, when it might be best to draw the outside lane and thus the one least churned up in that part of the track used in the run-up for the javelin.
Consideration of the composition of the track can now be as sophisticated as calculation of potentially adverse heat transfer from track to shoe to the foot of the athlete during events such as the 10,000 metres, when the competitors make some 6,000-7,000 'foot placements' each. More contentiously, a debate polarizing sprinters and longer-distance runners is over the 'hardness' of the running surface: the former favour harder tracks. An answer may lie in the nine-lane stadium, with the inside lane being designed for higher energy absorption and hence for use in long- and middle-distance races. A further advantage of this arrangement, depending on the geometry, could be that the other eight lanes would have a shallower curve, to the particular benefit of the 200- and 400-metre runners.
Shoe design is also evolving. One approach stems from the recognition that the human foot is anatomically less suited for running and jumping than that of some animals; the goal here is to produce a shoe that constrains the foot and ankle to perform like, say, those of a cheetah, and yet is acceptable to athletes — and, presumably, officialdom. Another is to employ finite element analysis in examining the force transfer between shoe and track, with the aim of tailoring the spike plate to provide the most efficient combination of geometry and materials for the best traction for each event (C. Fusco, Adidas, Portland, Oregon).
So far, so positive. But two spectres hang over athletics. One is that, at the top level, its future depends on being successful as a business in fighting for sponsorship, TV coverage and public attention against rival attractions (most notably soccer). The other spectre, drug-enhanced performance and record-breaking, cropped up intermittently — to the dismay of some participants who feel that the malign influence of doping has been overstated. Nonetheless, the entire credibility of athletics, both as a public spectacle and as a human endeavour, hinges on drug eradication or at least its effective policing. Sir Roger Bannister tackled the issue head on. Bannister holds a unique position, being a scientist and an international icon for his achievement, in 1954, in beating the four-minute barrier for the mile (a time now bettered by 16 seconds, just one indication of improved performance over the years).
He is encouraged by the paradoxical and astonishing decline, since the late 1980s, in best distances achieved each year in all throwing events except the javelin. Thanks to some exhaustive detective work involving analysis of Stasi records3, that decline can now be put down unequivocally to the artificial inflation in standards by the state-promoted use of steroids by East German and other countries' athletes before out-of-competition testing was introduced in 1988. Since then, testing has become tougher and the Berlin Wall has come down. The pigeons are still coming home to roost, however, in the continuing emergence of ill health in the subjects treated with steroids.
The doping question is far from straightforward. Legally, governing bodies face crippling legal fees and payment of damages to banned performers who sue them. No athlete accused of drug use has yet won such a suit outright, but the threat remains. Scientifically, there is a grey area between proscribed and approved drugs, and at present it is difficult to detect banned substances such as the natural hormones human chorionic gonadotropin and erythropoietin (the one stimulates production of testosterone, a steroid, the other increases the number of oxygen-carrying red blood cells). There is also a need for acceptance of the routine use of blood (rather than urine) samples. All in all, it may be through analytical chemistry that science has the most to offer athletics.
There was, however, one ever-present constant for all of the speakers with a first-hand experience of winning or record-breaking — the overwhelming importance of mental attitude in distinguishing the truly great athletes. As Fusco pointed out, the advantages of quantification of an athlete's day-to-day psychology would be enormous. As it was, athletes and coaches were uncompromising in their refusal to acknowledge physiological limits to performance. For Bubka the aim in the pole vault is now 6.20 metres; for the 100-metre sprinters coached by John Smith (Univ. California Los Angeles) it is a time of 9.76 seconds against a current world record of 9.84. If there was one conclusion to be drawn from the meeting, it was that athletics records will continue to tumble simply because they're there.
