Building the perfect Olympian

31 July 2016 - 02:00 By Oliver Roberts

Oliver Roberts visits the Sports Science Institute of South Africa and witnesses how science is breaking through the physical limits of human potential Where is our limit? Exactly how fast can a human run or cycle or swim? What's the furthest he can throw a javelin? And exactly how do we achieve these maximums?These are the questions that sports science is continuously trying to answer and yet despite huge advances in the way we understand athletic performance and physiological processes, we are still, in the year 2016 - when athletes are multimillionaires and held up as gods - working to understand exactly where human potential lies. That is both exciting and a little scary.You only have to look at the steady drop in world records (see sidebar) or consider that Roger Bannister's supposedly impossible four-minute mile, achieved in 1954, is now considered standard among professional male runners and that in the past 50 years the mile record has been lowered by nearly 17 seconds, to understand that every time we think we've reached the peak of human potential, we shade our brows and peer towards a glinting horizon and realise that the limit is just a little further on, then again just a little further, and again a touch further, ad inf.story_article_left1And while it's true that the rate at which records are being broken is slowing, they are still being broken, some with a quite cavalier confidence: you've seen the way Usain Bolt has slowed down just before the 100-metre line, only to break his previous record by a tenth of a second or so, and you're left thinking, "If he hadn't been so damned cocky, he'd have beaten it by more." Yes?The real reason he does this is because there's a substantial monetary incentive to break the 100-metre world record and Bolt knows he's still got a few more tenths in him, so why lay it all out now when you know you could break it three or four more times and earn yourself even more millions?"We're still very far away from our limits," says Niel Michau, a biokineticist at the Sports Science Institute of South Africa in Cape Town. "I think that for the next 50 to 100 years, records will be broken, and then probably most records will stagnate. The gap is going to close to a point where eventually you'll have 10 guys lining up for the Olympic 100 metres and the difference between them will be a split second.A big reason for this is that the science behind how to train, how to strengthen, how to prevent injury, how to improve speed, is all coming together like no other time in history."The institute - the vision of Professor Tim Noakes, Morné du Plessis and Johann Rupert - opened in Newlands in 1995 and went on to form a partnership with the University of Cape Town and has since seen substantial results with athletes of all disciplines and levels. (The institute offers structured training programmes for amateur athletes as well.This is another thing - the amount of data and diets and professional equipment available to the "weekend warrior" is unprecedented. Amateur athletes can now pretty much train with more information and better methods than was available to Olympic athletes, say, 20 years ago.)Walking into the institute is like entering a utopia where staff and athletes-in-training burst with what the poet Pablo Neruda once spoke of as a "furious apple health [that] stretches without limit" - chlorine smell of the pool, echo of feet on the small indoor running track, ping and clatter of weight machines and pervading odour of effort and will.There's pretty much not an ounce of unhealthy fat in sight. There's also something called the Vicon System - an extremely advanced and therefore extremely expensive scheme of motion-capture equipment with which running style and mechanics can be filmed and analysed in near-maddening detail.At one point in conversation Sandhya Silal, a physiotherapist at the institute, uses the word "lab" while discussing the work that goes on here. And it is a lab, where the athlete is the rat and the running track is the little wheel it spins on all day under the careful watch of trainers and dieticians. This is how you make the perfect athlete.full_story_image_hleft1"In terms of buying into the science behind sport, we've seen significant changes in the attitudes of coaches, medical staff and athletes over the past 10 to 15 years," says Silal. "Before, there was a kind of ignorance."Michau goes on to explain that, previously, athletes were coached by former athletes using the same methods they did when they were successful - that is, sticking to the training regimes of 20 or 30 years ago. This simply will not work any longer.As with any kind of science, sports science is continually advancing, on an almost daily basis and, even if you're a really gifted athlete, unless you're privy to intricate physiological research and substantial financial whack, you absolutely will not win a medal."The Australians have showed us that the amount of money you spend on your athletes is directly proportional to the amount of medals you win," says Michau. "They identify talent at a school level and then nurture and sustain it all the way to the Olympics. You can't wait for your athletes to struggle and then somehow magically qualify and only then start helping them out, like, six months before the Olympics."block_quotes_start If I knew back then what I know now about training and training load, I would have ridden way better block_quotes_endThis, I guess, is often where the quick-fix of doping comes in. In 1967, American doctor Gabe Mirkin asked competitive runners: "If I could give you a pill that would make you an Olympic champion - and also kill you in a year - would you take it?" More than half of the 100 who responded said yes, they would take the pill.Lots has been written about performance-enhancing drugs like steroids and erythropoietin or EPO (made famous by one Lance Armstrong), as well as cheat methods like blood doping (taking a bag of blood from an athlete, storing it and then re-introducing it into the bloodstream just prior to competition to increase red blood cell volume - also made famous by Armstrong), but the new kid on the cheat sheet is gene doping.Yep, that's right - soon the "perfect athlete" could be manufactured in utero, literally giving birth to generation after generation of running, jumping, cycling, swimming humanoids whose illegal enhancements are almost impossible to test for.And even though the World Anti-Doping Agency put gene doping on its prohibited list in 2003, you can't exactly be banned for having good genes, unless it's proven those genes were somehow artificially augmented.It's suspected that some countries are already involved in gene doping. But nobody really yet knows what would happen to an athlete who fiddled with their DNA.story_article_right2It has been speculated that gene doping would, at best, provide only a temporary boost in performance, one not enough to threaten the status quo in professional sports, and that, in the end, the doping would - like many other forms of doping - do more harm than good to the doper's long-term health.Still, gene doping is still in its infancy, so who knows? In another 100 years or less we might have a situation where athletes come mute and pre-packaged, like action figures on a toy store shelf, each with a list of its programmed strengths and with varying price tags.But let's get back to the question of our actual, natural human limits, free from artificial flavours and colourants. How much of our perceived limit is physical, and how much is mental?In one chapter of his PhD thesis, the institute's Jeroen Swart, a sports physician and former professional mountain biker, conducted a test to assess that very question. He got a group of cyclists to ride a 40km time trial five times over the same course. As expected, they performed incrementally better each time they rode the course because they learnt to pace themselves and go a little further into their perceived reserves. I say "perceived" because, as Swart points out, it's a given that the cyclists would go progressively harder each time they rode the course, but what we don't know is exactly how much reserve is left.Swart says: "We know that if you ask someone in the last five minutes of an hour-long time trial to get out of the saddle and sprint as fast as they can, they can more than double their power output, but then 30 or 40 seconds later they return to 'normal'. So in terms of muscle function, the muscle is not failing but that sprint causes enough of a change in metabolite concentrations or whatever it happens to be that they subsequently have to slow down if they still want to finish the ride. But there is always this reserve, and if you interrupt feedback of knowledge of exactly how far an athlete has gone, that reserve increases."Swart proved this in the final time trial by blinding the riders and confusing them as to how far they'd gone. It disrupted their entire pacing mechanism and initially their performance dropped off significantly."But then in the last kilometre we told them they've only got 1km to go and they increased their power output dramatically, sprinted to the finish. Knowledge of the end point is such a key variable. We know that there is a big physiological reserve that your brain holds and it uses that because there's always this uncertainty about when you're going to need those reserves."full_story_image_hleft2One way to delve into your reserves is to chemically alter your brain. Yes, through illegal means like amphetamines (used extensively, and then unregulated, among professional cyclists in the 1950s and '60s, leading to the death of Tom Simpson during the 1967 Tour de France) - but caffeine, a legal stimulant, has a similar, less lethal effect.You could say you're chemically "tricked" into thinking your limit is further than you previously thought, but is it really a trick? Isn't a natural stimulant a bit like LSD - making you see what wasn't there before that might have been there all along?I mean, did you know that the molecules of our bodies are constantly on the move, in and out of us, with no concept of our skin as a boundary, no idea of where we start or end and therefore where our bodily limit is? What does this mean? If we study ourselves at that kind of quantum level, what could we transcend? We've seen over and over that our perceived limit has been proven to be an illusion, a trick of history's light. When, if ever, will we become limitless?"If I knew back then [when he was a professional cyclist in the early 2000s] what I know now about training and training load, I would have ridden way better," Swart says. "Now guys are implementing proper training methods and you're unlocking even more of the potential that was there.The performances now are certainly better than in the '50s and '60s when everyone was on amphetamines. We won't see massive increases in performance; it'll come in minor increments instead. But if we do everything right, we're probably not far from what's physiologically possible."..

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