Has the Gold Standard Topped Out?

Last night I watched a terrific special on the History Channel about how so many of the monsters of ancient Greek mythology were probably based on fossil remains.

I’ll confess I’m a total geek for Greek legends and lore. I got hooked on the classics in college, and have never really gotten over it. Say the words “Trojan war,” and my mind fills with a hundred thoughts, not one of which involves condoms.

One consistent belief you find in Homer’s epics and elsewhere in classical mythology is that the ancient heroes were bigger than modern men. Literally bigger, two or three times the size of Homer and his contemporaries.

The reason for this, according to the experts interviewed by the History Channel, is that certain areas of Greece contained a lot of fossilized mastodon bones that farmers regularly uncovered. Of course, they had no idea what a mastodon was, so when they found gigantic thigh or jaw bones, they just assumed they were human. And since they were two or three times the size of human bones, they assumed that Greece had once been populated by people much bigger than themselves.

Americans, unlike the ancient Greeks, want our modern heroes to be a little bigger and stronger than the last generation of heroes. We don’t imagine that George Washington would tower over Colin Powell, for instance. (Although, interestingly, Washington and Jefferson were among our tallest presidents ever, at six-two and six-two-and-a-half; Lincoln was the tallest, at six-four.)

But some, according to this New York Times story, wonder if our athletes have gone as far as they can.

The gist:

“In some of the most basic ways imaginable – how fast people can run, how high they can jump, how far they can throw – the march of progress has stopped. The track and field athletes competing in Athens Olympic Stadium over the next week and a half may well struggle to match the performances of their predecessors. …

“In more than two-thirds of track and field events, in fact, the gold-medal performances in 1988 would have been good enough to win again in 2000. Just one result from 1976, by contrast, would have won in 1988, among the 32 events in which comparisons are possible, said Raymond Stefani, a professor of electrical engineering at California State University at Long Beach who studies the Olympics.

“In more than a century of Olympic history, only world wars, by killing millions of people in their athletic prime, had previously caused this kind of stagnation.”

Now, if you’re reading with the same jaundiced eyes I use (I got them on sale at Lenscrafters), your first thought is, “What about the steroids?”

The Times had the same thought:

“At least some of the record performances from the 1970s and ’80s owe themselves to the miracle of drugs. Only now, after a decade of more effective drug testing, do athletes seem to be catching up to the steroid-aided results of the past, many Olympics watchers say.”

Another thought, not mentioned in the Times story, is that records tend to fall when bigger athletes compete in sports traditionally contested by smaller athletes.

I’m not sure if I can back this up across all sports, but in swimming, it’s instructive to note that Michael Phelps and Ian Thorpe are six-four and six-five, whereas Mark Spitz, if memory serves, was about six-one.

Also, according to this, Phelps has some one-of-a-kind advantages:

“His body is freakishly built for speed in the water. Although he is 6ft 4in, his legs are unusually short for his height and his arms unusually long. Most people’s wingspan is equal to their height; Phelps’s is three inches longer, giving him extra long levers with which to pull himself through the water while his short legs create less drag. All competitive swimmers learn how to use their bodies in the most efficient manner but Phelps is built to slice through water naturally.”

The Times sums it all up nicely:

“The idea that no future generation will devise ways to top this one is as misplaced now as it has always been, say those who believe the stagnation has more to do with drugs than anything else.

“‘When I was competing in the early ’60s, we thought our times were pretty close to the human limit,’ said Phillip Whitten, the editor in chief of SwimInfo, a magazine that covers the sport. ‘And now they’re pretty good times for 13- and 14-year-old girls.’”

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