Unbelievable…
What do you think about 200 mt final?
p.s. Excuse me because I had not seen that it was another same thread…
Amazing…
No human speed limit? By: Davis, L., Fraser, L., Health, 1059938X, 19920401, Vol. 6, Issue 2
Section: VITAL SIGNS
LOS ANGELES–If the past is any indication, runners in this summer’s Olympics will probably break a world’s record or two. World-class athletes have continued, year after year, to improve their times and researchers have begun to wonder just what the limits are: How fast can human beings run?
To determine when performances might level off, physiologists Brian Whipp and Susan Ward of the University of California at Los Angeles plotted mends and women’s world track records since 1920. They expected to find that the rate of improvement was slowing down, indicating that runners are reaching their limits.
Instead they found that athletes have been steadily running faster and faster, with no drop-off in their rate of improvement. “Physiologically, it seems the human body isn’t running into limitations yet,” says Ward.
The runners’ ever-increasing speeds may reflect the fact that there are more people competing in races than ever before, she says, so chances of finding genetically faster athletes are better. The number of women competing in sports has exploded in the past few years. This may account, in part, for why their rate of improvement is twice that of men–a finding that was widely noted because the researchers predicted that if those rates hold, women could outpace men in some events early in the next decade.
There are other reasons for runners’ steady improvement: better running shoes, improved tracks (synthetic surfaces are faster than old-fashioned grass or crushed brick), carbo-loading and other quick-energy nutritional strategies, and more sophisticated techniques for treating sports injuries.
It could be a long time before human beings clock the fastest possible man–or woman. But, says Ward, “We may live to find out if women can run faster than men.”