As good as ever: Today’s undefeated Olympic athlete would have won gold decades ago

When you reflect Zoe Hobbs’s achievements As the first New Zealander to compete in the 100-meter sprint at the Olympics in nearly 50 years, consider this, too: Zoe Hobbs ran fast enough that, until 1964, she won gold at every Olympics.

During the Olympics, the world’s attention is focused on the medal winners – who is the fastest, who is the strongest, who can throw an object the farthest, who can jump the highest (with or without assistance).

But behind every gold medalist, there are dozens of athletes who have trained for years or even decades to not even make it past the preliminaries or heats.

People tend to focus on the improvement in gold medal times and Olympic records over the years, and less on the improvement of the entire field of athletes.

The data shows that even the lowest-ranked current Olympian can still easily outperform champions from past Olympics – sometimes even from the 20th century.

Some of the most notable heat results were achieved in swimming events.

Nearly 80 athletes participated Men’s 100m Freestyle Paris warm-up match.

Of those, 20 swam fast enough to win gold as early as the 1996 Atlanta Olympics, but with only 16 semifinal spots available, not all of them even made the cut in this year’s preliminaries.

New Zealand Olympians Moss Burmeister finished fourth in the men’s 200m butterfly Michael Phelps, the most decorated Olympian of all time, at the 2008 Beijing Olympics.

Burmeister, whose performance at those Olympics is still competitive today, believes that Phelps’ underwater “fish stroke,” or dolphin kick, has had a huge impact on modern swimming performance.

“That’s a huge improvement or change — the actual turnaround and the really high-quality underwater (stage).”

Sometimes an athlete makes such great progress in his or her sport that his or her competitors are willing to take up the challenge.

“The limits of a sport or certain events are determined by who pushes the boundaries at a particular moment,” Burmeister said.

“Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte really pushed their events to the extreme…You find the guys who end up competing in a particular event or era are very, very strong.

“I would say the same thing is happening with New Zealand swimmer Erica (Fairweather) right now in the middle distance freestyle – I think the 400m freestyle is the most competitive swimming event in this Olympics.”

Burmeister said gradual changes to equipment, such as adjustable starting blocks and a small starting platform for backstroke swimmers, and even the pool itself being made deeper and producing less wave motion, have helped everyone get faster.

He also noted that a wealth of data is currently available.

“People can’t see it, but there are people sitting at the very top of the stands with cameras shooting down. They’ll time the swim portion of the race; like from the five-meter flag to the 40-meter swim. Then they’ll analyze the turn portion: entering the wall, leaving the wall, underwater distance, all the way to the 15-meter mark,” he said.

“So they can basically break the race into smaller segments and see where people might be faster or slower than their competitors.”

Simon Briscoe, head of innovation at High Performance Sport New Zealand and a former performance analyst, said the segmentation of competitions had dramatically improved performance across all types of sports and distances.

“I had no idea at the time how groundbreaking Peter Snell and his training were,” Briscoe said.

“He was one of the first people to really periodize training — he broke it up into segments and had speed and endurance as separate segments.”

He said speed itself is “very difficult to train,” but athletes can improve in many other areas.

Data from this year’s Olympics shows that warm-up times for sprint events are still relatively low compared to previous gold medal results, possibly because of the different qualification paths for swimming and sprinting.

In swimming, the fastest times in all heats advance to the later rounds, while in sprint events, the top two or three finishers in each heat automatically qualify, regardless of how they perform compared to the other heats.

While top-seeded swimmers typically try to conserve energy in their heats, the effect seems to be more pronounced for sprinters: If they don’t want to be overtaken by their opponents, qualifying rules allow them to slow down in the final few meters and save energy for the final.

Even so, half of the runners crossed the finish line at a pace that would have astonished spectators in the 1960s and 1970s.

Briscoe said the greatest improvements in history have come not from increases in speed or power, but from “rethinking the problem and trying to solve it in a better way than before.”

Innovations such as the flop high jump, the rotational technique in throwing events and the tumbling turn in swimming are classic examples, he said.

Briscoe and Burmeister say setting specific milestones, such as the four-minute mile, is counterproductive.

“If you look at how fast time changes before and after you break the barrier, once you break the mental barrier, time starts to drop much faster,” Briscoe said. “It’s a really interesting example of how we can sometimes be limited by our own thinking.”

The “Bannister effect” has proven to be false: the economy stagnated during World War II and then began to decline again – something that neither Bannister nor his biggest rival, John Randy, thought was impossible at the time.

But Burmester, while repeating this myth, also agrees Roger Bannister Way of thinking.

“Personally, I don’t think anything is impossible. I’ve always believed that there will be slow, incremental progress no matter what.

“In my mind, the four-minute mile was going to be achievable eventually, and I wasn’t going to give up on that goal at that point.”

The metric standard – 3:42.22 for the 1,500m – is now obsolete. Every competitor in the men’s 1,500m preliminaries at this Olympics ran faster than that.

In addition to big improvements, Briscoe said future progress will come primarily from small, ongoing improvements that are personalized to each athlete.

A big part of this lies in consistency in training, which has seen an increasing level of specialization among athletes and coaches in recent decades.

Today, attention is also turning to injury prevention, Briscoe said.

“One of the biggest barriers to people’s development is injuries, which can hold people back, so being able to predict and manage injuries could be a huge step forward.”

Burmeister believes the quality of coaches is another underrated factor.

“You look at Bob Bowman – he had Michael Phelps and now he has (French swimmer) Leon Marchand.

“Great coaches always create great programs… There’s definitely a connection there.”

Today, Mos Burmeister is also a spectator and, like the rest of us, is watching to see who will push the boundaries of human physical capabilities.

“Of course – seeing athletes perform at their best.”