If you need a little pick-me-up, try this video of two nonagenarians racing each other in the 100-meter dash. Seems like there's gonna be a clear winner from the start but...
Both men were born in 1918; if the video were filmed this year, that would make them 95. (via @gavinpurcell)
Or rather, just an amazing performance, full stop. I was alerted to this video by Dunstan Orchard who tweeted "this must be the most remarkable track race I've ever seen". I don't want to spoil it too much but pay attention to the guy in last place coming out of the curve.
Like a freight train! I've watched this race about 8 times now and it never gets old. The runner, Richard Whitehead, set the world record in the race. He also owns the world record in the marathon, which, amazing! Oh, and this table tennis shot is pretty great too.
From Slate, some speculation that Caster Semenya sandbagged the 800 meter final in order to avoid further gender-related scrutiny.
After the race, track and field aficionados questioned her tactics. The BBC's David Ornstein said it appeared that Semenya "had more left in the tank." His story quoted BBC commentator Kelly Holmes, who won this event in the 2004 Olympics, suggesting that Semenya hadn't made her best effort: "She looked very strong, she didn't look like she went up a gear, she wasn't grimacing at all. I don't know if her head was in it, when she crossed the line she didn't look affected." Meanwhile, Sports Illustrated senior writer Tim Layden tweeted that Semenya "seemed oddly disengaged most of race and not tired at end."
I watched the race and Semenya's finish was odd...she made her move super-late and was moving at a tremendous pace when she crossed the line. Had she worked her way up to the front before the final turn, she may have beaten the field by several lengths.
Update: Here is a more nuanced analysis of Semenya's effort in the 800 meter final.
Perhaps there is nothing to her performance other than that she runs a more even pace than her rivals.
A comparison between her semi-final and this race is interesting in this regard. In that semi, she went through 400m in just over 58 seconds, 600m in about 1:28 and then closed the final 200m in 29.5s, looking like she had something in reserve.
Tonight, she went through 400m in 57.69s, then through 600m in about 1:27.1, and then closed in a touch over 30 seconds. My point is, her performance in the final was slightly faster at every stage than the semi, until she closed slower over the final 200m. To finish SLOWER than she did in the semi implies that she has little reserve and that she is closer to the limit than she looks. She wasn't actually that fast over the final 200m, it's just that everyone else was very slow!
(via @andrewsmit)
Jesse Owens' medal-winning exploits against the Aryan backdrop of the 1936 Olympics are well known, but I had never heard the story of his friendship with his German rival in the long jump. Owens explained in a 1960 Reader's Digest piece:
Walking a few yards from the pit, I kicked disgustedly at the dirt. Suddenly I felt a hand on my shoulder. I turned to look into the friendly blue eyes of the tall German broad jumper. He had easily qualified for the finals on his first attempt. He offered me a firm handshake.
"Jesse Owens, I'm Luz Long. I don't think we've met." He spoke English well, though with a German twist to it.
"Glad to meet you," I said. Then, trying to hide my nervousness, I added, "How are you?"
"I'm fine. The question is: How are you?"
"What do you mean?" I asked.
"Something must be eating you," he said-proud the way foreigners are when they've mastered a bit of American slang. "You should be able to qualify with your eyes closed."
"Believe me, I know it," I told him -- and it felt good to say that to someone.
Here's a video of Owens competing in Berlin:
Update: Or perhaps Owens fabricated the story? (thx, @jessakka)
For his final project at the Royal College of Art in London, Luc Fusaro outlined a process for building custom-fitting sprinting shoes that weigh just 96 grams.
The shoes are fabricated using a selective laser sintering process that uses precise 3-D scans of an athlete's foot to achieve maximum fit. The really tantalizing (but unfortunately uncited) bit about Fusaro's design is that by fitting shoes to a sprinter's feet so precisely, significant performance improvements might result:
Scientific investigations have shown that tuning the mechanical properties of a sprint shoe to the physical abilities of an athlete can improve performance by up to 3.5%.
For 100-meter world record holder Usain Bolt, a performance improvement of 3.5% could lower his world record to 9.24...just by wearing different shoes. That seems insane but Speedo's LZR Racer suit that was responsible for dozens of world records falling in 2008 were shown to lower racing times by 1.9 to 2.2 percent so that sort of improvement is certainly possible. (via @curiousoctopus)
Scientists are studying older athletes, like 91-year-old track star Olga Kotelko, to see how their bodies react to exercise. There is emerging evidence that a key to staying healthier longer is not just exercise but intense training.
You don't have to be an athlete to notice how ruthlessly age hunts and how programmed the toll seems to be. We start losing wind in our 40s and muscle tone in our 50s. Things go downhill slowly until around age 75, when something alarming tends to happen.
"There's a slide I show in my physical-activity-and-aging class," Taivassalo says. "You see a shirtless fellow holding barbells, but I cover his face. I ask the students how old they think he is. I mean, he could be 25. He's just ripped. Turns out he's 67. And then in the next slide there's the same man at 78, in the same pose. It's very clear he's lost almost half of his muscle mass, even though he's continued to work out. So there's something going on." But no one knows exactly what. Muscle fibers ought in theory to keep responding to training. But they don't. Something is applying the brakes.
And then there is Olga Kotelko, who further complicates the picture, but in a scientifically productive way. She seems not to be aging all that quickly. "Given her rather impressive retention of muscle mass," says Russ Hepple, a University of Calgary physiologist and an expert in aging muscle, "one would guess that she has some kind of resistance." In investigating that resistance, the researchers are hoping to better understand how to stall the natural processes of aging.
After sitting out 11 months awaiting the results of gender testing, runner Caster Semenya has been cleared to compete in IAAF-sanctioned competitions. For some background, check out this New Yorker piece on Semenya from last November.
This month's Esquire has a profile of Usain Bolt, a man ahead of his time.
It's worth keeping in mind that there is a significant difference between the final seconds of Usain Bolt's gold-medal run in Beijing in 2008 and the final seconds of his victory this afternoon in Call of Duty. In the video game, right up until the moment Sadiki took out the final terrorist, Bolt was on edge, nervous, uncertain. It taxed him. He almost lost.
Beating the video game was a challenge for him. Executing the most dominant and effortless performance in the history of the Olympic Games was not.
Ethan Siegel, a theoretical astrophysicist at Lewis & Clark College, recently charted a graph to demonstrate that, judging by the incremental progression of the 100-meter world record over the past hundred years, Bolt appears to be operating at a level approximately thirty years beyond that of the expected capabilities of modern man. Mathematically, Bolt belonged not in the 2008 Olympics but the 2040 Olympics. Michael Johnson, the hero of the 1996 Olympic summer games, has made the same point in a different way: A runner capable of beating Bolt, he says, "hasn't been born yet."
That 100-meter final at the Beijing Olympics still gives me goosebumps when I think about it. But all this business about no one being able to touch Bolt's pace for another 30 years, that's just bunk. The mark is out there. People are going to go for it. My prediction: Bolt will continue to break his own mark but someone else will approach or equal Bolt's current record in fewer than five years, if not three.
Ariel Levy did a piece on runner Caster Semenya for the New Yorker this week. Semenya's competition eligibility is up in the air because the IAAF (the worldwide governing body for track and field) can't decide whether she is a woman or a man.
She didn't look like an eighteen-year-old girl, or an eighteen-year-old boy. She looked like something else, something magnificent.
Love that quote.
At the track and field world championships in Germany this evening, Usain Bolt set another world record in the 100-meters: 9.58 seconds, besting his previous record of 9.69. Can he go under 9.5?
Update: Here's the race in HD. It's a lot closer than the Olympic final...Gay was really hauling as well. The Times reports that the 0.11 seconds Bolt shaved off the record was the largest difference since the advent of electronic timing in 1977.
Update: More on the 100 meter record. If you look at a graph of the 100 meter records (and here), Bolt's time looks even more impressive...he broke the record more than it's ever been broken.
But second off, you can also see that Usain Bolt is running much faster than humans ought to be running right now. This should give you an inkling of just how special these performances we're seeing from him are. We shouldn't be seeing times like this until the 2030s. Which means, honestly, that it ought to take around 30 years for someone else to come along and break his record.
Even Michael Johnson was impressed.
And then, of course, Bolt went out and broke his own record in the 200 meters, a record which seemed untouchable at the Olympics last year and he beat it by 0.11 seconds. Here's the video in HD.
Yesterday he ran 200m in 19.59s on a wet track with a headwind, winning by an absurd margin. (via biancolo)
Yesterday, Usain Bolt broke the unofficial record at the rarely contested distance of 150 meters, running it in 14.35 seconds on a temporary surface set up in Manchester's city center. This sounds made up, but here's the video.
(via biancolo)
Some physicists have worked out what Usain Bolt's time in the 100 meters in Beijing would have been if he hadn't started celebrating before the finish line: 9.55 seconds. The original paper is here. I tried doing this the day after the race but even the HD footage wasn't good enough to see the tick marks on the track and I didn't want to mess around with all the angles. (via justin blanton)
Update: The folks at The Science of Sport lay out a much more sensible case relying on split times that Bolt would have run somewhere between 9.61 and 9.69. (thx, jim)
With a Russian athlete leading the javelin competition, Czech thrower Barbora Spotakova stepped up for her final throw and thought about the Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia forty years ago that day. After her victory, she described her goal with that throw in a wonderful turn of phrase:
I was wondering if I could turn the date.
I don't know if that's a translation or what, but non-native speakers of English often express ideas more beautifully than native speakers do (Nabokov for example).
Somewhat related...how perfect is the name of the US women's soccer team goalkeeper: Hope Solo.
Update: I need a do-over on this one. First of all, Nabokov is a native English speaker; in fact, he could read and write English before he could Russian. Second, the NY Times modified the quote in that article! When I read it, the selection above was a direct quote attributed to Spotakova. Now the passage reads:
"Aug. 21 is a very special day for the Czech Republic -- it's the 40th anniversary of the Soviet invasion in 1968," she said afterward. "I of course had a Russian competitor against me. She was winning with such a long throw," she added, and said she wondered if she'd be able to turn the date to her advantage.
That's much less poetic...I wonder if there was a translation misunderstanding or something. (thx, dan & nivan)
Race Usain Bolt in this button mashing Flash game. I was a fair Track & Fielder back in the day so I beat Bolt on my first attempt. [Insert elaborate archery pose emoticon here.] (thx, scott)
A look at just how crazy Michael Johnson's 200m world record is.
Eyeballing the chart would suggest that the cutting edge of human achievement in the 200m is anything sub-19.7. A 19.59 at Beijing would be phenomenal. Then you scroll down -- way down -- and you hit Johnson's 19.32.
Johnson has stated that he's fully prepared for Usain Bolt to break his record.
The Olympic starting gun gives the runners on the inside of the track (near the gun) an unfair advantage because the sound reaches the outer lanes later and the loud bang scares inside-lane runners out of the blocks earlier.
Runners in lane eight got off the mark on average about 150 milliseconds after runners in lane one, Dapena found. A time delay of that magnitude translates to about a metre's difference at the finish line.
American sprinter Justin Gatlin sets world record in the 100 meter dash: 9.76 seconds. But, could he beat a horse the length of a basketball court?
Update: Due to a rounding error on the timekeeper's part, Gatlin merely tied the world record.
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