In well over 100 years, there have been only 25 men who have tasted the Olympian heights and laid claim to the title “Fastest Man on Earth”. It is elite and also an eclectic club. The stories of these fast men are an extraordinary blend of success and disaster, as well as glory and tragedy; ranging from amazing wealth to grinding poverty; superstar adulation and national hero status to bankruptcy, shame, prison, even suicide.
As a compelling human interest story, it’s been an extraordinary rolling soap opera. And it doesn’t look like stopping any time soon. With arguably the sport’s greatest ever sprinter Usain Bolt on a one-man mission to rewrite the history books, it looks likely the fastest men that follow him will need to be even more extraordinary. But what about these future fast men? Who will they be and just how fast could they go? And is it now a cast-iron fact, at least at the elite level, that white men can’t sprint? These are perennial questions for fans of track and field, and the source of endless study and debate among scientists all over the world.
Scientific experiments on the world’s fastest men are nothing new. After the Berlin Olympics of 1936 and the Nazi sneers about “black auxiliaries” running for the United States, Jesse Owens agreed to take part in a revealing study. It had been dismissively suggested that the real reason for his Olympic triumph was that he possessed longer tendons in his feet, a physiological advantage, so scientists of the day surmised, of black athletes. However, when the study results were published, it was discovered that Owens had, in fact, shorter tendons than all the other sprinters at the Games.
But isn’t it demonstratively clear that black athletes are fundamentally better equipped to run faster than their white counterparts? After all, the last white Olympic 100m champion was Allan Wells in 1980. In fact, Moscow was the last time any white man lined up for the Olympic 100m final, and that was more than 30 years ago. The debate can cause a good deal of political and cultural friction, and the scientists themselves have been accused of closet racism for suggesting natural differences may exist between the races.
A fascinating study of the subject was made by think-tank scholar and journalist Jon Entine in his 1999 book theatrically entitled Taboo: ‘Why Black Athletes Dominate Sports and Why We Are Afraid to Talk About It.’ Entine’s theory about sprinting is that not all black athletes have a natural advantage, rather just a subset who can trace their ancestry back to West Africa.
Just as East Africans appear to have a natural ability for distance running, he says, the West African athletes and their descendants appear to have more successes in sprinting. He correctly claimed – back then – that no white, Asian or East African athlete had ever broken 10 seconds in the 100m, in which case it is just possible his theory has some substance rather than being a sweeping generalisation.
Research published in the early 1970s suggested that black sprinters had six major differences from their white counterparts: less body fat, shorter torsos, thinner hips, longer legs, thicker thigh muscles and thinner calf muscles. But, in terms of running fast, there was also another, critical difference: a higher percentage of what physiologists call fast-twitch fibres. The motion of the average human is geared by a largely even balance of slow-and fast-twitch muscle fibres, but research shows that just as marathon runners have an imbalance – sometimes as much as 80% slow-twitch fibres – so too do sprinters. The top sprinters have 80% fast-twitch fibres, and these allow them to be far more explosive and faster in short bursts.
Given this intriguing physiological information and despite the young Frenchman Christophe Lemaitre becoming the first white man to break the 10-second barrier in July 2010, it’s hard to imagine a white sprinter climbing on top of the Olympic 100m podium ever again.
The talented and long-legged Lemaitre has since lowered his personal best to 9.92, but it’s not false modesty when he admits he is simply running for a place in the 2012 Olympic final.
His current best would have given him equal fifth place in Beijing, and the widely held view is that on current form he will need to find at least another couple of tenths to trouble the podium in London. But Lemaitre is a significant exception to the rule of what makes the perfect fast man, and that leads us on to the next question. What are the common characteristics in the world’s fastest men and is there a human speed limit?
As to how far Usain Bolt can go, Pfaff has an interesting coaching perspective. “Bolt is so far ahead of the field that he can be joyful, playful and relaxed. It would be interesting if two or three people could challenge him. He doesn’t lose a lot of sleep over what happens in the first 10, 20 or 30 metres. But at 50m he knows what he has to do. When he gets to 50m there’s not usually a lot of traffic around him, so it would be interesting to see if he got to 50m, 70m, even 80m and three guys were still with him. Would he run a crazy time or would he fold?
So at the Olympic Games of 2036 – 100 years after Jesse Owens – we could be witnessing some extraordinary times if the scientists get their way. It may sound like a bad plot for a kids’ cartoon but if the history of the fastest men on earth has taught us anything, then it’s always to expect the unexpected.
Source from www.guardian.co.uk