‘These three words represent a programme of moral beauty’, explained Pierre de Coubertin. The words were Citius, Altius, Fortius and the motto was that for the Olympics he founded in 1894. As conceptions of moral beauty go, Faster, Higher, Stronger was blunt. To strive, to seek and not to yield might have been better, but sport has always slipped easily from desiring excellence and victory for oneself into wanting to inflict defeat and failure on others. The difference is vaster than empires and its effects may not always be visible, usually they are. If the spirit of the competitors is not clear in their striving they are probably not engaged in sport. Watching Usain Bolt sprint is to share in the glory of what humans can do. Watching him glance sideways and slow down as the race closes is to taste what it feels like to be satisfied with leaving people behind.
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Until 2008, the notion that exercise made you happy via endorphins was based on noticing that people said exercise made them happy, that their endorphin levels increased and that both could be prevented by opiate-receptor blockers. (Endorphins = endogenous morphines, meaning opiates.) This all sounds very persuasive and science-y. But the same could be said for levels of adrenaline as for endorphins, or for potassium (released by exercising muscles) or carbon dioxide, and again the effects of these things can be reversed in such a way that you will feel bad as a result. In 2008 new evidence arrived. Brain scans of ten people showed that after two hours of running there really were changes in their brains consistent with endorphin activation. ‘Impressive’, said one neuroscience professor in a report on the research. ‘This is the first time someone took this head on’, said another. ‘It wasn’t that the idea was not the right idea. It was that [previously] the evidence was not there.’1
The findings were interpreted as showing that endorphins were responsible for an experience that the scan actually only indicated they were involved in. Scanners might one day get good enough to show evidence from people’s brains that they reach too easily for bad reductionist explanations of human experiences. But that would be substituting scanners for thought, since we do not need scans to tell us that. Talk of endorphins tends strongly towards devaluing what they are – part of the convoluted process by which physiology becomes psychology – while fetishising what they do, namely playing some part in happiness.2 The notion that endogenous neurotransmitters affecting opiate receptors are involved in our experience of exercise is not a silly one; clearly they are. What is foolish is the notion they explain it. Scientific jargon sometimes offers only the masquerade of helping clarity of our thoughts.
Endorphins do seem involved in subduing the pain that builds up as a race progresses, but endurance athletes neither show on their faces nor report in their words that extreme exertion leads to pleasure and bliss. ‘Shut up, legs!’, the Tour de France cyclist Jens Voigt is reported to have said while racing. It was not their cries of joy he meant to silence.* Supplementing endogenous morphines with exogenous ones – giving them the drug – demonstrates the same point. The happiness created is not the one we have in mind but one that comes at the expense of the minds we have. As a step to making the human race happier, the intoxicating effects of morphine and Heroin are not widely seen as a success. It is entirely reasonable to suggest we will find new ways of drugging people into happiness. They will look like the old ones. There is no genetic or pharmacological or surgical switch to make us exactly as we are only a bit more cheerful. There isn’t even an easy cultural way of doing that, but at least there are an infinity of difficult ones.
Snatching after technical language and pantomime biochemistry matters even in the field of sport. We rest decisions and behaviour on scientific explanations that aren’t scientific and don’t explain much. We structure training programmes and make choices, swallow supplements and take drugs, all with only a tenuous idea of what we are doing.
In 2017, for the first time, a reliable study was carried out on the effects of erythropoietin, the hormone that prompts the body to produce more red blood cells, on competitive cyclists. The fact it took so long was not because the drug is banned in competition. It took so long because we were content believing that a drug that increased the viscosity of blood must be good for athletic performance – we were content with an untested simplification of an intricate physiological system. Looking back at the drugs abused by Tour de France cyclists would have warned us, if we had been willing to be warned. Over the years it has been clear that the enthusiasm to cheat outstripped knowledge of what worked. Ether and alcohol no longer have much pseudoscientific allure as performance-enhancers. But the notion that more blood was better has lingered. Is there a case to suspect that evolution has let us down by filling our veins with less than the optimum amount? It’s a possibility, since natural selection may have opted to reduce our performance in order to make gains elsewhere, in efficiency or cost or in resistance to disease and ageing. But it’s not reasonable to assume our guesses will be correct. Doing that is taking our body to be more predictable than experience tells us it is. There are many experts who know that erythropoietin and other drugs help, and many winners, like Lance Armstrong, who we can see have won because of them. But history is full of experts that were wrong, and of those who swallowed ineffective and harmful potions and yet did well. Leeches were used for precisely those reasons. The response of a cancer to a chemical is a simpler process yet as we have seen half of all new trial drugs, even after performing well in animal and human experiments, turn out to do more harm than good. Experience and expert opinion are no guide. Simple explanations are often no explanations at all. ‘World is crazier and more of it than we think,’ wrote Louis MacNeice, accurately.
Only after decades of use, in which erythropoietin was vested with all the aura of scientific power and all the confidence of expert opinion, was the experiment conducted to see if it worked.3 The authors of the 2017 study noted that the previously existing experimental support for the drug’s power was so poor as to be absent:
The evidence for the performance-enhancing effects of [erythropoietin] in high-level competitive sports is rather scarce. The evidence constitutes of small, often uncontrolled studies, in arguably unrepresentative populations and is often inappropriately expressed only in exercise parameters that mainly evaluate maximal exercise performance.4
Evaluating maximal exercise performance, some brief test of power produced on a bike in a lab, isn’t enough. It’s a soft outcome, an unreliable surrogate for the hard outcome of sporting success. Maximal performance doesn’t win the Tour de France, only sustained performance does that. Drop an elephant onto someone’s knee as they are pressing down on their pedal and the force with which that pedal gets pushed down will increase massively. Their maximal performance will briefly rise. It does not follow that one cycles more quickly with elephants on one’s knees. Erythropoietin increases haemoglobin levels and various performance measures dependent on them but it does not follow that this helps with performance overall.
The trial took forty-eight elite cyclists and randomly allocated them, in a blinded fashion, to two months of injections of erythropoietin or to matching placebo injections. At the end those given the erythropoietin had thicker blood with more haemoglobin and scored better on two short-term measurements of performance. On another laboratory measurement of performance over the slightly longer term (forty-five minutes) there was no difference. To measure results overall, on the outcome that matched the goal of the cyclists, a proper Tour stage, the participants raced up Mont Ventoux. It was there the cyclist Tom Simpson died in 1967, having taken both amphetamines and alcohol in order to improve his performance. Both amphetamines and alcohol have good short-term effects on athletic performance but their effect on something as prolonged as a cycling race up a mountain is less sure. They certainly have drawbacks.
The study found that whether the cyclists had been given the placebo or the erythropoietin made no difference whatsoever to their ascent of Mont Ventoux. Just as with a thousand medical interventions before, the fact that the drug was known to do something effectively, the fact people had seen it work and the fact people understood the mechanism by which it did work, did not stand in the way of the greater fact that it didn’t work at all. Theory, expertise and observation have no power to figure out the truth of interventions on a system as intricate as the human body. Only structured, randomised, blinded trials will do. The lessons of science don’t suit our wishes. If they did, they would not be lessons and science would need no method.5
Historically, we would have had, as a species, less blood in our bodies than we have today. Frequent infections, a poor diet, lack of iron – a host of factors meant normal haemoglobin concentrations were much lower, just as they are still lower in poorer countries. It might be the case that athletes do better in today’s richer societies, with more blood and more erythropoietin, but it doesn’t follow that it’s true. There was nothing stupid about the idea that erythropoietin might make cyclists faster. The stupidity came from believing that because it might, that it did: from the overconfidence that meant we believed an idea without appreciating how important it was to test it, or how rigorous such tests needed to be. Might there be situations in which less erythropoietin and less blood gave one an advantage? There might. Maybe even in the Tour de France. Each litre would carry less oxygen and carbon dioxide but each litre would be easier to pump and more likely to match the composition of the blood our circulatory systems evolved to expect.
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Science handled properly – rather than as window dressing – will continue to help us go faster, stronger and higher. Olympic records keep falling. Part of the improvement comes from the fact we are healthier and more numerous, part from the fact that professional sport is not something we have taken seriously for very long. Efforts to screen and encourage children with athletic potential are recent. Permutations and combinations of training regimens are being refined. It is not surprising records are broken so regularly. It implies no evolutionary process, no change in the gene pool.
Are there limits to what evolution could accomplish, given time? Even in the absence of any genetic engineering technology, given enough generations and resources and the sufficient subjugation of freedom, could we select for humans to become ever faster, stronger, higher? Overlooking the manpower shortages – the global deficit in mad scientists and the modern decline in the number of dictators6 – selective breeding could help. Humans are not masters of anything save for intelligence and a capacity to sweat† and there seems no hard roof even to those. But enforced selection over generations, though, has limits. We see that in pedigree animals, from dogs to cattle. The largest dog breeds are notorious for joint problems, while all start developing a host of issues once inbred enough, from behavioural problems through to smelly anal glands. The law of unintended consequences runs riot after only a few generations.
The body with its tangled interactions is not so easy to re-engineer. Improve one bit and you create consequences, some of which you will not be able to anticipate. Horses have been intensively selected, over multiple generations, for speed. We have the records of their times, over set distances in known races, going back two centuries. While trends suggest some room for improvement over short sprints (distances we have not historically focused on), improvements over medium to long distances appear almost finished. Horses seem as fast as selective breeding will ever make them. For the past few decades, speeds, in the three races that make up the US Triple Crown, have been broadly flat.7
Horses need to live as well as race, and to race they need to have lived first, and to have trained. Mutations that would increase their flat-out running speed, at the expense of the life needed to get them to the start line, will not prosper, even if selected for. Another sort of limitation comes in the form of balanced polymorphisms, where a desirable quality is derived from a blend of two genetic factors. If they give an optimum result when evenly mixed, selecting for either would disrupt and balance and slow the horse. Physiology is full of trade-offs. As creatures get bigger, their theoretical speed increases yet their actual speed does not. The theories are based on calculations of the power produced by ever more muscle. They fail because it is hard to predict the constraints that pull tighter as size grows, constraints of power delivery and of blood, flesh, bone, heat regulation and countless other factors, some known and some not. Just as elephants are slower than cheetahs, so the tyrannosaurus probably lagged behind the velociraptor.8 As human height continues to grow, it might not follow that sports that now favour the tallest will continue to do so.
Women are 21 per cent faster over 1,500 metres since the Second World War and over 60 per cent faster than they were in the marathon; men are improving too but they have been competing fiercely for longer so the improvements are smaller – their 1,500 metre time is 14 per cent quicker over the past century and their marathon time 23 per cent so.9 Stats from other disciplines tell the same story of improvement, even if not yet of a plateau. In the 1966 World Cup final, the German players passed the ball some 300 to 400 times and got it to reach its target 78 per cent of the time. In 2014 the number of passes almost doubled and accuracy rose to 86 per cent.10
Humans will continue to get faster and stronger, even if not forever.11 With a rising population there is more variation to draw from and the extremes will stretch. Training regimens, with or without effective drugs, will get better – the lack of experimental rigour in sports science suggests room for improvement. More importantly, the sheer increase in human health means more records to come. A hundred years ago many of the great athletes came from the upper classes because others did not have the opportunities. A hundred years hence countries now too poor to make the most of their citizens may be rich enough for those citizens to make the most of themselves. That height is still rising in even the richest countries suggests that, there too, our physical capacities continue to expand in ever more nurturing conditions. Faster, higher, stronger seems a poor programme for moral beauty in itself but a rich reward for general improvements in human lives.
Will genetic engineering make a difference? Efforts to edit our genes are not beyond us – they are in front of us, already fumblingly usable. The same interplay of influences that stops horses getting faster with each generation will limit our power. No single gene equates to success in sport, nor any handful of them. We might make a few changes here and there but their effects will be small and unpredictable – it would take a generation each time to see if they match the ineffectiveness of erythropoietin. The subtleties of creating physical genius will happily remain out of our reach for the foreseeable future. Speculating on what might be achieved by a world beyond that becomes removed too far from fact. It has its own interest, but that’s what science fiction is for.
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A concern for physique dates back to the emergence of vanity, roughly a second before the development of sexual reproduction. Lord Byron’s battle to stay muscular was neither the first nor last. Sedentary people with sedentary jobs do not have the bodies of those who hand-ploughed their fields any more than such ploughmen had the shape of those who spend half a week on a bench-press.
Trends in muscularity are framed by biology but not decided by it. As our bodies have changed our biology hasn’t. Could we develop pills to give us muscular bodies without the need for exercise? We already have: a bodybuilding, rugby-playing acquaintance referred to them as vitamin S. Anabolic steroids give us muscles we have not done the work to deserve. Such drugs are not sold over the counter. That’s not because we judge that people should have the shapes they earn. It’s because the drugs enhance only some of the effects of exercise. They give an appearance of vigorously powerful health that is only muscle deep.
New drugs with similar effects will have similar side effects. They go together. The suite of stresses imposed on the body by exercise are not easily reproduced. What about a drug to help speed your metabolism and burn fat? We have that too and amphetamines are also not widely advised for the pursuit of health. Muscular power is no more reducible to anabolic steroids than happiness is to endorphins: something of both can be produced using drugs, and very effectively so in the short term, but nothing close enough to properly suit.
Might it be we will soon develop a new drug that will do much better than anything we have had before, a drug to make us more lastingly muscled and trim and healthy, less plump and indistinct? Vanishingly unlikely. Drugs like antibiotics have effects that seemed miraculous. They really were ‘magic bullets’, hitting their targets with precision and power. Antibiotics aim at parts of bacterial cells that are essential for them and non-existent in us: the potential for accurate targeting was there as a result. When it comes to the countless interdigitating processes that direct our bodies, no magic targets exist. We have evolved to become strong and slim in certain conditions and to lose muscle and put on fat in others. Those capacities are based on no single biochemical thermostat. They are the results of the thousand different processes by which the varied parts of our bodies constantly adjust themselves. Even exercise gives no standardised results. Rugby produces a different physique from mountaineering and within the physical shapes they produce lie deeper physiological differences.
With all the genetic variability of billions of people, no single mutations have been found that make the difference between a forty-four-pound weakling and a hulking Charles Atlas. What we share instead are a host of genes that mean the choice is up to us and depends partly on the exercise we do: hence the success of Atlas’s training programmes. Nor, with all the money that has been poured into investigating drugs to slim us down or bulk us up, has much been achieved. We are not even at the stage of having a range of small but sound interventions to build upon. Those interventions may well happen in our lifetime – the firmer identification of genetic variations that add a percentage or two to svelteness or drugs that reduce a little the softening effect of a life spent sitting. Nothing more can reasonably be expected.
There are trends in human muscularity as there are in human fatness. They should not be muddled up in misty fantasies of future human evolution. Our evolution continues at the same pace it always has. No predators or catastrophes are needed, only for some of us to have more children than others. Tracing the trends is not a matter of asserting that only now have women fancied good-looking men and men returned the favour. The issue is noticing that the trends that matter here are not biological.
What sort of bodies we have in the coming century, the shapes and forms we desire and seek, will be determined by taste and circumstance, not drugs or gene editing. As with so much else, what matters is not strictly our genes, only the roomy capacities they grant us. Our intelligence gives us a potential that is not unique save in its extent. It confers an ability to operate on the basis of an inheritance not to be found in our genes.
* If it hurts me, he is said to have consoled himself, it must be hurting the others twice as much. The latter comment makes one like him less.
† The latter is due to being functionally hairless. If you have fur, sweating is like getting wet while wearing cotton – not a good way of controlling your temperature. Being able to sweat so superbly helped facilitate our rise in intelligence, temperature control being critical for the brain. But our lack of fur did not give rise to intelligence, only meant it was possible when pressures selected for it.