How short can 100 metres get?

BUSINESS DAY, 19 SEPTEMBER 2002

SOME PART OF the joy of being a sports fan is that sport is not a precise science. You can discuss forever whether these or those tactics should have been used, you can niggle over the nuances of selection and the imponderables of temperament and talent. It is impossible to quantify how good a given team or a given player might be, which allows for additional hours of pleasurably heated debate about whether young Ali would have whipped young Tyson, say, or how the 2001 Australian cricket team would have fared against the 1971 SA team.

Such arguments are the very stuff of being a sports fan, and the deep pleasure they afford lies in the fact that they can be endlessly recycled and rehashed, picked over and tweaked and wrangled without any real prospect of resolution. In the right hands, such arguments can be as fruitful and creative and intellectually engaging as the most ardent academic dispute over the mechanics of evolution or the wave-particle nature of light. And yet there is another sporting event whose magnetic appeal lies precisely in the fact that it is measurable and quantifiable, and there is no room for dispute or debate. It is not a sport that much arouses the passionate imagination, but it speaks to a primal sporting – which is to say, human – curiosity.

Almost the sole appeal of the 100m sprint for men is to answer the question: “Who is the fastest man in the world?” Increasingly, that question is inseparable from the question: “Who is the fastest man that has ever lived?” This week Tim Montgomery became the latest man to be the fastest man ever to have lived. His new world record of 9,78 seconds, set in Paris, was the shortest recorded time in which a man has run 100m from a stationary start. Even Ben Johnson, the thick-skulled, drug-cheating Canadian disgrace, only ran 9,79, even with chemical assistance.

At the time, before the drug scandal broke, observers were scratching their heads and wondering how it was possible for such a quantum leap forward in human physical achievement. Now the record is hailed, but it has hardly caused jaws to drop and headlines to be written. It is just taken for granted now that human beings are not only capable of continually physically improving, but are expected to do so. When we were little kids, it used to be a favourite topic of conversation to speculate whether there was a point, a kind of invisible golden line running through our communal DNA, that would prove to be the cut-off boundary of human speed. Surely, we speculated, there must be some point beyond which our bodies cannot go and will never go. For instance, no human being will ever be able to run 100m in two seconds, which means there must, somewhere on that timeline, be a time faster than which no human will ever run. Nine seconds? Eight seconds? We could not guess.

And yet as long as a new sprinter keeps coming along every few years to lower the record by a thousandth of a second, it is hard to imagine the moment when the next wave of athletes, with their training and their nutrition and their genes, is not going to be able to run a thousandth of a second faster than the previous wave. Human beings are faster now than they have ever been before – the world record is always held by a sprinter of the current generation – and there is no reason to assume that trend is going to change. The 100m is more than a sporting event. It is a small showcase of selective human evolution. Where can it all end? I look forward to watching and finding out.