Sports: Bigger, faster, stronger: Hockey, baseball, football vs. track and field

Ilya Somin, Volokh Conspiracy law profs' blog (Jan28,2k110

Has Sports Performance Peaked? Posted: 28 Jan 2011 12:37 AM PST (Ilya Somin) In this recent Boston Globe article, sportswriter Paul Kix argues that human sports performance is close to reaching its maximum limits because track and field world records have plateaued over the last two decades: In the sports that best measure athleticism — track and field, mostly — athletic performance has peaked. The studies show the steady progress of athletic achievement through the first half of the 20th century, and into the latter half, and always the world-record times fall. Then, suddenly, achievement flatlines. These days, athletes’ best sprints, best jumps, best throws — many of them happened years ago, sometimes a generation ago.  “We’re reaching our biological limits,” said Geoffroy Berthelot, one of the coauthors of both studies and a research specialist at the Institute for Biomedical Research and Sports Epidemiology in Paris. “We made major performance increases in the last century. And now it is very hard.” I am skeptical of this claim. If you look at most other sports, it’s clear that performance is steadily improving. Anyone who follows baseball, basketball, or football, for example, can see that today’s players are stronger, faster, and more agile than those of a generation ago. Consider Wayne Gretzky’s recent comments about the development of hockey since his heyday in the 1980s: “The game in my era was a completely different game [than] it is today,” Gretzky said. “The players today are so much bigger and faster and stronger, but that’s evolution. It just means our game is getting better. Fifteen years from now, these guys will look back and say, ‘What a different game.’...“ If Gretzky were playing in the NHL today at the same level as when he was in his prime, he would still be a great player. But he probably would not dominate to the overwhelming extent that he did back in the 1980s, when he was simply head and shoulders above the competition (at least until Mario Lemieux began to challenge him towards the end of the decade). I think the hockey experience is more typical than that of track and field. Moreover, a key reason why the track and field records of the 1980s and early 1990s have proven difficult to break is that that period was the era when the use of steroids and other performance-enhancing drugs was rampant in the sport. With the fall of the Soviet bloc (the Soviets and East Germans were especially egregious cheaters in this field), and the rise of tougher testing, today’s track stars are less likely to be juiced than those of a generation ago, and therefore have trouble surpassing the records set in that era. I recognize, of course, that steroids use also probably improved performance in other sports over the last 20 years, including baseball and football. So one could argue that these sports would have stagnated but for the availability of PEDs. But the standard of play in all of them remains much higher than in the 1980s, despite recent enforcement crackdowns. In the medium to longterm, I think progress will continue as a result of improvements in preparation, strategy, and conditioning. It’s theoretically possible that today’s techniques are the best that can possibly be devised. But that seems unlikely. Eventually, genetic engineering could also provide a big boost. -- Ilya's VC blog-entry reposted by Sportikos