Usain Bolt wins gold at Rio 2016 Olympics (L), Bob Hayes wins gold at Tokyo Olympics 1964 (R).
Dylan Cleaver compares how Olympic gold medallists in 2016 would have fared against the winners from the last Tokyo Olympics in 1964.
It was no more than 10 million years ago that hominini formed a taxonomic tribe of the homninae, bringing with it a special feature: a larynx that repositioned itself during the first two years of life – the evolutionary precursor to vocalised language.
These earliest ancestors of man still had some way to go before they could organise themselves to run races against each other over set distances, let alone conceive of riding a bicycle around a banked track at great speeds. Bipedalism – the ability to walk on two legs – started about six million years ago, so at a rough estimate, it took about four million years before the hominini could even walk the talk.
About three million years ago, the Lower Paleolithic age for those of you counting, saw the development of sophisticated tools. Olympic historians like me refer to this as the starting point for competitive javelin.
From then on it has been a blur as we've raced through the Holocene period, and the blurriest blur came on August 16, 2009, when a homo sapien of the Jamaican (by way of West Africa) variety ran 9.58s over 100m in Berlin.
It remains to be seen whether Usain Bolt is the apex of that particular discipline. History tells us he probably won't be, but then again history tells us a lot of things we don't really understand.
The subject of human potential and athletic evolution is the reason we keep watching sports – particularly higher, stronger, faster sports that make the Olympics what they are. For a subject rooted in science, I would like to offer this unscientific observation: if we thought that humans had evolved to the point where we couldn't run faster than Bolt, Kipchoge or Flo-Jo, or couldn't swim faster than Federica Pellegrini or put a shot further than Randy Barnes we'd quickly lose interest.
It's the idea of progression that fascinates us and is the favoured subject of author David Epstein, author of The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance.
"We all have this feeling that we're just somehow getting better as a human race – inexorably progressing," Epstein said in a widely shared TED talk. "But it is not like we've evolved into a new species in a century."
Well, no, not this century at least.
We've invented a bunch of things though, from synthetic all-weather track materials to water-dispersing lane ropes to carbon wheels to steroids (sorry, "supplements"), to shoes built to mess with traditional ideas of the friction coefficient – and no, do not ask me to express that as an equation (editor: μ = f÷N).
The idea proposed by Epstein is that biologic human evolution is, as always, moving at a glacial pace, but technology isn't.
With that in mind, as a thought exercise we have picked some citius, altius, fortius-styled events from the last time the Olympics were held in Tokyo and compare them to the most recent Summer Olympics, held in Rio de Janeiro in 2016.
There are some factors to take into account, such as less sophisticated timekeeping, so we'll round to the common point of reference, which is, generally speaking, hundredths of a second.
100m Men
1964: Bob Hayes (USA) 10.0s
2016: Usain Bolt (JAM) 9.8s
Hayes would have been at the 98.00001m mark when Bolt crossed the line.
Not a massive gap, although it is worth noting that if Bolt had crossed with that time four years earlier in London, he would have finished behind himself, Yohan Blake, Justin Gatlin and in a dead heat for fourth with Tyson Gay, so 2016 wasn't a fast race. But there was also evidence that the phenomenal Hayes could have gone faster.
Although assisted by a tailwind that was within the allowable parameters, the American ran in lane one, which had been brutalised by the men's 10,000m that had been raced previously. We can safely say Bolt's freakishness has given the false impression that the evolution of sprinting has been rapid.
Women
1964: Wyomia Tyus (USA) 11.4
2016: Elaine Thompson (JAM) 10.71
Tyus would have been at the 93.95m mark when Thompson crossed the line.
On the face of it, a massive margin. OK, so it is a massive margin but we have to acknowledge that while Thompson has enjoyed all the privileges of a highly professionalised Jamaican sprinting programme that puts as much emphasis into its female athletes as the men, it was a radically different picture in the 1960s, when athletes like Tyus were still in many ways pioneers.
Marathon*
1964: Abebe Bikila (ETH) 2:12:11.2
2016: Eliud Kipchoge (KEN) 2:08:44.0
A marathon is 42.195km long. Bikila would have got to the 41.09km mark when Kipchoge won.
To give you some scale, if the marathon was held on the track, Bikila would have been two-and-a-half laps from the finish when Kipchoge crossed. Given the race would been a touch more than 105 laps long, that's not a lot.
Throw in the advancements in shoe technology and hydration delivery systems (that is to say, fancy drinks), then you can argue the legendary Bikila's achievement was more impressive. We might, however, be doing Kipchoge a disservice. While Bikila smashed the world record, conditions were perfect and the course was very flat and very straight. In Rio, the race was held in wet and muggy conditions with time lost on the numerous corners.
Men
1964: Dallas Long (USA) 20.33m
2016: Ryan Crouser (USA) 22.52m
Women
1964: Tamara Press (USSR) 18.14m
2016: Michelle Carter (USA) 20.63
How do we put this delicately? Let's try something like this: the athletics world was yet to enter the golden age of "supplements" in 1964, though there were certainly suspicions about what was happening behind the Iron Curtain, even in the 60s.
The world records for the shot put were set in 1987 (women) and 1990 and are unlikely to be beaten anytime soon. As it is, the half century distance between Tokyo and Rio has seen significant gains.
It cannot go unreported that Tamara Press was strongly suspected to be, if not intersex, then along with sister Irina, supported in her athletic endeavours by male hormones. This cruel suspicion lingered to her death earlier this year, fueled in part because the sisters suddenly retired just before the first major meeting to introduce mandatory sex testing and never competed again.
High jump
Men
1964: Valeriy Brumel (USSR) 2.18m
2016: Derek Drouin (CAN) 2.38m
Women
1964: Iolanda Balas (ROM) 1.70m
2016: Ruth Beitia (ESP) 1.97m
High jumpers have benefited from the improvement of all-weather runways and event-specific footwear but that's not where the 20 and 27cm differences come from.
It is purely technique. Brumel won gold in '64 using a diving straddle style, which was a relative of the classic western roll. Balas used a scissors hybrid and it makes for bizarre viewing even now. Four years later Dick Fosbury rocked up to Mexico with his flop and within a decade more or less it was the universally jumping style.
100m free men
1964: Don Schollander (USA) 53.4s
2016: Kyle Chalmers (AUS) 47.58s
A pool is 50m long. Schollander would have been 10.92m (89.08m) from the finish when Chalmers touched the wall.
Women
1964: Dawn Fraser (AUS) 59.5
2016: Penny Oleksiak (CAN)/ Simone Manuel USA 52.7
Fraser would have been 11.43m (88.57m) from the finish when Oleksiak and Manuel touched.
200m fly men
1964: Kevin Berry (AUS) 2:06.6
2016: Michael Phelps (USA) 1:53.4
Berry would have been 20.765m (179.235m) when Phelps touched the wall.
100m fly women**
1964: Sharon Stouder (USA) 1:04.7
2016: Sarah Sjöström (SWE) 55.48
Stouder would have been 14.31m (85.69m) when Sjostrom touched.
The gaps appear massive and, let's face it, they are. There are technique and training aspects to this, particularly in the dive off the blocks and the initial underwater hydrodynamics, but the effects of technology should not be discounted. Swimsuits are designed to be a second skin, reducing friction and modern facilities have side gutters that eliminate water bouncing back off the side walls creating turbulence, as do the latest lane markers.
Team pursuit men***
1964: Germany 4:35.67
2016: Great Britain 3:50.26
The team pursuit is run over 4000m. The velodrome is 250m long, so the race is 16 laps Germany would have completed just 3341.33m when Great Britain crossed, that is 2.635 laps behind. That means they would have completed just 13 laps and 91.25m when Great Britain won (although if they raced head to head, it would have been called as soon as the Brits lapped them).
Technology, technology, technology. The velodromes are indoor, temperature controlled with super slick boards; the suits and helmets are all designed to reduce drag; wind-tunnel training and computer simulation means each member of the team knows how far they need to be back to create maximum aerodynamic performance with minimum energy output. And the bikes? They're barely recognisable.
MEN'S 1500m
1964: Peter Snell (NZL) 3:38.10
2016: Matthew Centrowitz (USA) 3:50.01
Snell would have been looking around the stadium, basking in the applause, probably wondering what all the fuss was about by the time Centrowitz crossed. Or to put it more scientifically, Centrowitz still had 41.55m to go when Snell crossed the line.
Yes, we couldn't help ourselves. Snell's specialty field was human performance potential but he wasn't far from being Ideal Man himself. Olympic 1500m finals tend to be cagey, tactical affairs but there is no way Snell would have allowed what passed for a race in Rio de Janeiro to have happened. "This is absolutely pedestrian," said a commentator as Centrowitz, Nick Willis and others ambled around the Olympic Stadium. Nobody ever said that about Snell – our greatest.
* There was no women's marathon in 1964. 800m was the longest women's race.
** Women raced only to 100m in butterfly in 1964
*** Cycling was a men's only sport at the 1964 Games
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