It’s hard to imagine running almost 35 kilometers an hour just using my own two feet.
Like… that’s car speed, not human speed.
But that’s how fast Jesse Owens ran during the 100 meter race at the 1936 Olympics which
he won in 10.3 seconds, matching the world record speed at the time.
The upcoming film Race is about Owens, an African-American runner who earned a spot
at the Olympics in Nazi Germany and then won four gold medals, even though the Nazis tried
their best to stop him from competing at all because of his race.
It’s been 80 years, and at 9.58 seconds, Jamaican Usain Bolt's world record from 2009
has only shaved 7% off of Owens’s time.
But in other sports, like swimming and pole vaulting, the records have improved by a lot
more.
So, why the difference?
Well, one part of the reason these records get broken is that some humans are just better
at sprinting or swimming or pole vaulting.
But another big factor in breaking world records is science: namely, the materials athletes
use to help them do their thing.
And some sports just involve more of that science than others.
Sprinting, for example, doesn’t have much of it.
The physics of the 100 meter dash is pretty straightforward: you run along a track, and
try to travel 100 meters as fast as you can.
Your speed mainly depends on how hard you can push off the ground, and how quickly you
can do the pushing.
Runners move a little faster these days because track surfaces are a lot firmer Owens ran
on ash and modern running shoes help with grip.
But anything else is basically down to tiny improvements in running techniques especially
ones that let sprinters leave their feet on the ground for shorter amounts of time.
That, plus incredibly talented and dedicated athletes.
So that’s why the world record for the 100-meter-dash isn’t that much shorter than it was 80 years
ago.
There aren’t many materials involved that we can improve or re-engineer.
It’s just the human body doing its thing.
Researchers think we’re actually closing in on what they predict to be the fastest
a human could possibly run 100 meters, based on the limits of what our muscles and joints
can do -- which turns out to be 9.27 seconds.
Swimmers, on the other hand, have gotten much faster over the years.
In 1936, the world record for the 100 meter freestyle swim, held by American Peter Fick
was 56.4 seconds.
In 2009, César Cielo of Brazil swam it in 46.91 seconds an improvement of almost 17%,
and a record that still holds today.
Part of that has to do with improvements in swimming techniques, but a lot of it also
has to do with technology specifically, the materials used in swimsuits.
They’re important because there's a big difference between running and swimming.
When you run, you hit atoms and molecules in the air that do hold you back that's what
we call the drag force.
When you swim, water molecules are doing the same thing.
But water is a lot more dense than air meaning that you crash into way more molecules, and
the drag force is much stronger.
So anything that reduces that drag can help you go much faster which is exactly what special
swimsuits called supersuits are designed to do.
They’re made of fabrics meant to reduce drag, like by having little grooves that let
the water flow around you more smoothly, so you move faster.
To make you even more streamlined, the suits also compress certain parts of your body,
basically turning you into a human tube.
Supersuit technology made swimmers so much faster that the International Swimming Federation
decided to ban them in 2010 -- but by then, swimmers had broken more than 130 world records
while wearing them.
The new rules restrict things like what kinds of fabrics swimsuits can be made of and how
much skin they can cover.
But companies are already building better suits that follow those rules.
So when it comes to swimming, humanity probably has plenty of record-breaking left to do.
Then there’s pole vaulting another sport with slashed records, and another one that
depends a lot on advances in materials science.
In 1936, George Varoff, an American held the record for the highest-ever vault, at 4.43
meters.
French athlete Renaud Lavillenie set today's record in 2014 when he vaulted 6.16 meters
39% higher.
Unlike running and swimming, pole vaulting is a lot more complicated than just getting
from point A to point B as fast as you can.
Instead, you take a running start while holding a pole, then you stick that pole in the ground
and use it to fling yourself over as high a bar as possible.
The pole acts like a long, thin spring, and helps turn your sideways momentum from running
into vertical momentum when you jump.
So the springier the pole, the higher you’ll fly.
In the first half of the 20th century, athletes used bamboo poles, since they were relatively
light and flexible.
They did tend to break, though which was both dangerous and a quick way to ruin a good jump.
Around the 1940s, some athletes started to switch to steel or aluminum poles, because
they had about the same springiness but didn’t break as much.
Then, in the 50s and 60s, everything changed when companies started to figure out how to
make good poles out of fiberglass plastic reinforced with glass fibers.
The plastic makes the poles flexible, and the glass makes them strong you can bend some
fiberglass poles almost entirely back on themselves, and they won’t break.
Which meant that athletes could jump much higher.
Men’s pole vaulting records slowed way down by the early 1990s, and the record for the
highest jump has only been broken once since 1994.
So it’s possible that we’re approaching the limit of how high humans can jump using
fiberglass poles.
But who knows!
There could also be some material out there that we haven’t discovered yet that makes
a better pole.
Thank you for watching this episode of SciShow, which was brought to you and inspired by the
movie Race, starring Stephan James and Jason Sudeikis.
Focus Features is releasing Race nationwide in theaters on February 19th, and there’s
a link to the trailer in the description.