The casual supremacy of Usain Bolt’s record-vapourising 100m sprint on Sunday night has everyone wondering how much more human beings can wring from their bodies. Have we witnessed the ultimate, unsurpassable sprint? Or, like Roger Bannister’s four-minute mile, did we just watch another barrier to human achievement getting kicked down?

Science, which increasingly underpins any sporting endeavour, claims to have the answer. We are at the far edges of the envelope, it says, but the show is about to get even more interesting: for now, humanity will continue to get faster, higher, stronger — so long as we can keep finding athletes who are ever bigger, freakier and more pathologically fixated. At just 22, Bolt certainly thinks there’s more under the bonnet. The triple Olympic champion shaved 0.11 seconds from his win at Beijing in 2008 to record a time of 9.58 seconds.

“I think it will stop at 9.4 but you never know,” the Jamaican says. Well, record-breaking has a habit of confounding even the best-qualified pundits. Maurice Greene, the former 100m world champion and world record holder, who retired last year, reckoned he might see a low 9.6 but never a 9.5. Fifty years ago, many thought the four-minute mile unachievable. Then Bannister did it in 1954 and the psychological gates burst open. More than 1,000 runners have since broken four minutes.

But before we get too cocky, here’s the baleful eye of statistical analysis. “We are going into a plateau where performance improvements will be more incremental and a single anomalous sprint doesn’t change that,” says Greg Whyte, the Professor of Applied Sport and Exercise Science at Liverpool John Moores University.

Whyte has created a mathematical model for future athletics records, based on their progress over the years. “Our research shows that performances have begun to plateau. With shorter events such as the 100m the margins are ever shorter. The world record in 1912 was 10.6 seconds, so we’ve not gone much quicker than that in a century.”

Whyte’s predictions are bolstered by a study last year by the French Institute of Sport, which concludes that athletics will finally hit the ceiling in 2060. After that, no more world records. The institute analysed all 3,260 world records set since the first modern Olympics in 1896, and says that athletes are nudging their physiological limits. It estimates that athletes were operating at 75 per cent of their potential in 1896, while in 2008, they were at 99 per cent. By 2027, the athletes in about half of the events will have reached 100 per cent, and by 2060 they all will.

Meantime, excitement will still mount, each millisecond presenting a more tantalising milestone than ever. To achieve this, sport will increasingly rely on, well, freaks: physically highly unusual specimens endowed with remarkable psychological resilience.

Michael Phelps, the 16-time Olympic gold winner, is a prime example of sport’s increasing reliance on strange Darwinian dice throws. “The bottom line with Phelps is that he is markedly an outlier,” Whyte says. Phelps has a 6ft 7in armspan and the flexibility of a limbo dancer. He is tall at 6ft 4in but he is almost all back, with comparatively short legs and two huge feet. Even to the experts, there is mystery about his technique. Russell Mark, the biomechanics manager of the US swimming team, says: “People aren’t made to move like that.” And Whyte adds: “Researchers in human performance will be looking for the outliers — others will call them freaks of nature, but I don’t like the term. These are people who are unusual, externally and internally, with unusually efficient metabo- lisms. The shorter events such as sprints particularly rely on the true outliers.”

Technology could help us out of this impasse. In 1973, the Tour de France legend Eddie Merckx set a mark of 49.931km for the cycling hour record. In the next 27 years, increasingly sophistica- ted training methods failed to beat the record significantly. In 2000, the Briton Chris Boardman added only 11m to Merckx’s record using a similar bike.

However, when Boardman switched to a state-of-the-art bike and an aerodynamic helmet, he beat the record by almost 7km. But high-tech can often seem like spoilsport cheating. Last month, FINA, the international governing body of swimming, banned the full-body suits that streamline the physique and repel water to make for more seal-like progress. So the sports world is casting its net ever wider to find outlier athletes. Increases in human performance will be largely due to the increasing populations from which athletes are drawn, with Africa being the most notable newcomer, Whyte says.

Several countries have already developed programmes to spot those with a natural propensity to excel at sport. In Britain, UK Sport’s Sporting Giants talent-identification programme has been looking for outliers in body size — females over 5ft 11in and males 6ft 3in aged between 16 and 25.

After the embarrassment of winning no gold medals at the Montreal Olympics, the Australian Institute of Sport (AIS) was established in 1981 to locate and nurture potential superstars. Athletes as young as 12 are analysed using sophisticated techniques, and while it is now barred by the Australian Government from extending its testing to the genetic level, it is an area that the AIS has shown interest in exploring. Despite the discovery of “speed genes”, one AIS professor has predicted that genetic make-up may be a tiny factor in overall ability but as records are broken by increasingly slimmer margins, such factors may prove crucial.

Yet even if you do find your physically ideal athlete, they are nothing without a freakish level of determination.

“Psychology is incredibly difficult. Becoming a world-beater involves an awful lot of hard, miserable work,” Whyte says. “Physically, there are thousands of potential gold medallists out there, but if they’ve not got the internal resource to push themselves into the ground every day, you’re wasting your time with them.”

Bolt, all 6ft 5in of him, meets all the criteria for a true outlier. His long muscles produce remarkable power, but he is also unexpectedly fast off the blocks for such a big man. Then there’s his extraordinary psychology, too: he can goof for the cameras just before a race, but beneath the relaxation lies pinpoint mental focus.

Science believes that he has more to give. Shortly after Beijing, the Norwegian physicist Hans Eriksen analysed TV footage of Bolt’s Olympic final and estimated that he would have run 9.55 seconds had he not slowed down to punch his chest in joy at the performance. In another study, published by the Journal of Experimental Biology, Mark Denny, of Stanford University, looked at the limits to running in human beings and put the absolute limit for a 100m sprint at 9.48 seconds.

So what’s it to be? Eriksen thinks he can do 9.55, Denny says 9.48 and Bolt thinks he may better both. Only time and the finish line can tell.