Is sport getting better? If so, why are some records never broken? Until Roger
Bannister managed it in 1954, many thought that running a mile in under four
minutes was impossible. As one contemporary writer explained, the figure
“seemed so perfectly round — four laps, four quarter miles, four-point-oh-oh
minutes — that it seemed God had established it as man’s limit”. Anything
faster than that was thought to be beyond human capacity. Some even thought
that running that fast was dangerous, perhaps lethal.
These days, four minutes is not even a landmark, let alone a barrier. The
present record, 3min 43.13sec — held by Hicham El Guerrouj — is more than 7
per cent faster than Bannister’s time. The four-minute mile was just another
step in human evolution.
Marathon-running makes the point more starkly. In 1896 it took the Olympic
gold medal-winner just under three hours; now the best marathon runners
hover close to two hours.
There are all sorts of reasons for the sharp increase in human athletic
evolution. First, modern training is far more scientific and advanced.
Secondly, the professionalisation of sport means that athletes can devote
their lives to improvement. (Bannister, on the other hand, squeezed his
training into hour-long lunchtime breaks from his medical studies.) Thirdly,
nutritionists fine-tune athletes’ diets to make sure that they will be in
perfect physical condition come race day.
Techniques have also advanced in huge jumps. Before 1968, high jumpers took
off from their inside foot and swung their outside foot up and over the bar.
But at the Mexico City Olympics of that year, Dick Fosbury, of the United
States, raced up to the bar at great speed and took off from his right
(outside) foot. Then he twisted his body, going over the bar head first but
with his back facing down. Fosbury jumped 2.24 metres and won gold. The
world record — by Fosbury flop, of course — stands at 2.45.
Deeper, longer-term demographic trends have also helped records to tumble.
Most sportsmen are naturally bigger and stronger than their ancestors. A
12-year-old child in 1990 was about nine inches taller than his 1900
counterpart. Improved diet and health have made us grow bigger and earlier.
Worldwide population has exploded, so the talent pool of potential
record-breakers has increased hugely.
So, if health and diet continue to improve and training techniques become more
scientific, surely sporting aptitude will continue to evolve indefinitely?
No. There are some barriers that cannot be broken. “We will never run a mile
at the same speed at which we now run 100 metres,” Andrew Berry, the Harvard
evolutionary geneticist, has said. “The laws of oxygen exchange will not
permit it.”
Racehorses seem to have reached that physical limit. Like human athletes, for
years their speed records steadily improved. From 1850 to 1930 the winning
times for the Derby dropped from 2min 55sec to 2min 39sec. But then horses
simply stopped getting faster. From 1986 to 1996 the average time stayed at
2min 39sec. Racehorses are bred to run, but you can go only so far. You can
only breed horses with ultra-light, thin bones to a particular point; the
bones will crack under stress if they get any lighter.
The same principles will one day apply to humans. “Human improvement must
eventually bow to the basic constraints of biomechanics,” Berry said. There
is an outer wall of human endeavour. It is just that no one knows where it
is. But we do know that it is not the four-minute mile.
There is an obvious difficulty in applying this scientific method of
measurement to other sports. Cricket, for example, is a predominantly
skills-based game. There is also the Bradman problem: cricket’s towering
achiever played from 1928 to 1948 and in half a century of professional
cricket — for all the new training, better diets and vast talent pool — no
one has got anywhere near him. How is that for human evolution?
In fact, the Bradman problem is not unique to cricket. Being outstanding seems
to be getting harder. In baseball, the holy grail for batters is to average
more than .400. No one has done that since Ted Williams in 1941, but if you
look at the 50 years before then, eight players managed even better and hit
.401.
The same is true for cricket. Twelve English batsmen born before the First
World War had an average of more than 50, an achievement matched by only
three players born after it.
This is the central paradox of sporting progress. If the standard of sport is
improving, why do the greats of the past stand out more? Three reasons:
better defence, more information and a higher base level of achievement.
The first thing a coach can do in any sport is to provide a defensive
structure. Attack and flair, which rely more on instinct, are harder to
systematise. But defence is more a question of alignment and tactics. Given
two balanced teams, if one of them takes defence at all seriously it can
easily make scoring very difficult for the opposition.
Secondly, professional sports teams now have much better information about the
opposition. Access to television footage, newspapers, books and the internet
means that you can analyse future opponents in huge detail. As a result,
more strategies are devised to counteract exceptional players.
Again, the easiest application of that information is defensive. The Body-line
theory was infamously devised to stop Bradman. Bodyline may have been
extreme and unsporting, but it was philosophically ahead of its time. These
days, devising strategies to limit opposing star players is commonplace —
bowling well wide of Sachin Tendulkar’s off stump, for example.
Thirdly, the less good players in professional sport are a lot better than
they used to be. Stephen Jay Gould, the scientist, polymath and baseball
nut, conducted a study of the history of baseball averages. He found that as
the game improved, the lowest averages crept up. An average that once made
you a struggling but employed baseball player now leaves you out of a job.
And yet the overall batting average has remained reasonably constant. In
fact, there is exact symmetry — as the worst have got better, the best have
stood out less.
Gould explained all this as a perfect scientific example of “declining
variation” — the bunching of elite sportsmen as the professional league
improves overall. Gould measured this decline in variation throughout the
history of Major League Baseball. He simply took the five highest and five
lowest averages in each season and compared them with the league average. He
discovered that “the differences between both average and highest and
between average and lowest have decreased steadily through the years”.
In a cricketing context, Gould’s argument provides a scientific explanation of
why there will never be another Bradman, even — in fact, especially — if the
standard of general play does constantly improve. The sophistication of the
modern game works against freakish solo domination.
Bradman proves Gould’s point better than any baseball player could. He was
better at cricket than anyone has ever been at any other measurable sport.
His feats are more remarkable, the second-best player is farther adrift, the
chasing pack trails by a greater margin. When Bradman died in February 2001,
The New York Times mathematically converted his cricket average into other
sporting measures — basketball points per game, baseball hits per inning.
Bradman, it concluded, was better than Michael Jordan or Babe Ruth or Ty
Cobb.
When I was 5 I met Bradman in Adelaide. We stayed with friends who lived two
doors along from the great man. I was crazy about cricket and our friends
kindly arranged for us all to have tea with “the Don” and for me to have a
net session in the back garden. It was the ultimate dream come true for a
cricket-mad kid. I remember meeting a shrewd-looking old man, who seemed to
have a sharp, analytical expression.
A few balls were thrown for me to hit into a net. He watched and did not say
much. More balls were thrown. I hit some OK with my size 3 Stuart Surridge
bat. “For God’s sake stop throwing him half-volleys — make it a bit harder
for the lad!” he exclaimed. The Don had spoken and everyone laughed.
I did not realise then, of course, what writing this has helped me to
understand. I had been privileged to meet not only a genius — there will
always be geniuses — but a genius from an age when they stood taller above
their contemporaries. The sporting world was smaller in Bradman’s time, so
its giants loomed larger. No one stood higher than him.
Buy What Sport Tells Us About Life (Viking, available from Thursday,
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The rundown
— Ed Smith, 30, is captain of Middlesex and became the fifteenth
Smith to be selected for England when picked against South Africa in 2003.
— He earned the call-up on the back of scoring hundreds in six successive
matches, including a double hundred. He made 64 in his first Test innings
but a total of 23 runs in his next four. He has scored more than 1,000 runs
in each of the past seven seasons.
— Smith read history at Peterhouse, Cambridge, where he gained a double first
as well as averaging 58 for the university.
— His previous books were Playing Hard Ball and On and Off the
Field.
A league of his own
— Sir Donald Bradman ended his Test career in 1948 with a batting average of
99.94 from 52 Test matches. The highest end-of-career average to that point
had been Herbert Sutcliffe’s 60.73. Graeme Pollock (60.97) and George
Headley (60.83) are the only other batsmen to have ended their career with
an average of more than 60.
— Mike Hussey, of Australia, is averaging 78.14 after 36 Test innings. At a
comparative point in his career Bradman was averaging 95.30 and had scored
almost 1,000 more runs.
