Despite all the glitches and the controversies, the Olympics have provided a great spectacle of skill and prowess. Not least was the dramatic men’s 100 metres final, won by America’s Noah Lyles by five thousandths of a second in a time of 9.79 seconds.
Wildly hailed as the greatest ever 100 metres final, seven of the eight finalists were within less than 0.1 of second of each other.
Of course, in terms of absolute prowess, Lyles would have been two metres behind Usain Bolt when Bolt ran his world record 9.57 seconds in 2009.
But, despite all the razzamatazz around the Olympics, we might reasonably reflect on how much progress has been made in this prestige event over the years.
At the 1968 Olympics, the American sprinter Jim Hines became the first man to break 10 seconds for the event and would have been just a metre behind Lyles.
Hines’s near-contemporary Bob Hayes registered even more dramatic times.
In the Tokyo Olympics of 1964, the athletics events were still held on a cinder track. One has to be of a certain age even to recall this type of track. But it is safe to say that as a running surface it was markedly inferior to today’s tracks, designed at the cutting edge of technology.
In the final, Hayes was drawn in the inside lane, where the cinder track still showed signs of wear from the men’s 20 kilometre walk final which had taken place the day before. He ran 10.06 seconds – in shoes he had had to borrow at the last minute from a teammate running the 800 metres because of a mix-up with his coach.
His real triumph was in the 4×100 metres final, where his leg was timed at an incredible 8.60 seconds, the fastest time ever recorded. Immediately after the Olympics, Hayes signed to play American football for the Dallas Cowboys, so we will never know what he might have gone on to achieve.
It is clear that in the 1960s, sprinters were putting in performances comparable to those of the great Usain Bolt.
In other events, progress in reducing the world record has been slow. In the men’s 1,500 metres, for example, another prestige event, the record was set in 1998. In the 5,000 metres, the record is only marginally under the times being set in the 1990s.
Both shoe and track technology influence speed. Released in 2017, Nike’s new Vaporfly shoes were so successful that some people claimed that they amounted to “shoe doping”. Prior to the 2020 event in Tokyo, the Olympics Committee had to introduce detailed new guidelines about what kinds of shoes are permitted.
Of course, Nike’s shoes are perfectly legitimate. But throughout elite sport, suspicions of actual doping are widespread, while at the current games in Paris the performances of some of the Chinese entrants have been described as “super-human”.
It is a rather curious world in which developments in things like shoes, track and diets which boost performance are permitted but others are frowned on.
We can in fact look forward to the Enhanced Games in 2025, an event in which performance-enhancing drugs, and even prosthetic limbs, will be permitted. The organisation running the event claims to have secured the necessary financial backing, including the support of billionaire tech investor Peter Thiel.
The general reaction, including that of the International Olympic Committee, in the world of sport has been very negative. But at least the Enhanced Games are being open and honest. And if someone does manage to break 9 seconds for the 100 metres, who knows which the fans will eventually prefer?
