Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger?

Poorly-designed experiments aren’t scientifically valid and their results are generally pretty much worthless. The flaws in that experiment are so glaring and so obviously skewed toward reducing the speed of the modern athlete that the results don’t really offer any meaningful support for the claim that’s Owens was as fast as today’s Olympians. The fact that nobody’s done a better experiment yet doesn’t change that.

Fastball speed seems like a pretty narrow indicator of athleticism but dozens of pitchers have thrown over 100-mph in the past few years. How many threw that hard during Ryan’s era? Put the 50 fastest pitchers in the world against their counterparts 40-50 years ago and they’d smoke them. And Ryan’s fastball was only faster than today’s fastest if you buy the claim about radar placement (I don’t know enough about it to assess it either way but I’m skeptical until I learn more). Otherwise, there are several recent pitchers who’ve been clocked throwing faster than him.

 

Huh?

 

Buddy, it’s a timed sprint he lost by a second. You think Degrass did not want to run faster then Ownens? Think again.

Nolan Ryan, Bob Feller and most likely Steve Dalkowski threw harder then anybody today.

 

aha playing it dumb i see.

 

If you think that race represented anything close to the best Degrasse could ever run on that surface, you're fooling yourself. I've already explained the obvious flaws and biases in the experimental design but I get why some people would rather just overlook these things.

Still think top fastball speeds are a strange measure of athletic ability, but none of those guys were ever clocked as fast as Chapman or several other recent pitchers who've thrown 100+ in recent years.

 

Same with weightlifting. The pros in the early 20th century were weaker than today, but they left their challenge dumbbells behind, and modern strongmen still have some trouble with them at times. The deadlift records from pros are pretty good considering they did it without steroids or lifting gear.

The experiment shows that the older conditions would decrease a modern athlete's time. By how much is a more open question.

 

The only thing the experiment really shows is that running for the first time in replica old-school shoes on tracks made of uncompacted cinders (and from what I understand Owens ran on compacted cinders in the Olympics) is a very different, and relatively difficult, experience for people who have no experience whatsoever running under such conditions.

Other than that, the experiment was too poorly done to draw any meaningful inferences imo. It's not hard for me to imagine that shoe quality and track conditions make a difference, but not because of anything this silly experiment supposedly proves.

Give De Grasse months to train with those shoes and a track actually like the one Owens raced on in Berlin, and then time him in a high-stakes race against the top sprinters in the world, and you get very different results. Obviously.

And let me ask you guys this: Do you really think that if Jesse Owens arrived in a time machine, was given a pair of new shoes and taken to a new track and timed sprinting by himself, in his first run under those conditions, he'd put Bolt-Gatlin Olympic numbers? (And if he didn't would that you really consider that proof that today's athletes are indeed much faster than him?)

 

Come on now.

If this experiment had produced the results that you wanted, you would be crowing it from the rooftops!

Let's be cautious about the conclusions of the experiment, but at the same time lets call it what it is.

A significant counter argument to the idea that athletic times are improving.

 

Not everyone is as reasonable as you are. Many would deny that shoe quality and track conditions make a difference. For those people, the experiment is useful.

If we're trying to measure relative effects of the track and shoes versus unfamiliarity with the track, a better question would be whether Owens could put up Owens numbers.

Either would be a Seamus question.

 

Maybe Degrass could of run a little faster but we are talking about a huge chunk of time. If you don’t think so then you don’t know nothing about sprinting.

Throwing a baseball is a physical thing and is as athletic as punching hard. And the hardest throwers and hitters for that matter are scattered back in history.

 

To be fair, I don't actually think that mrkoolkevin owes this reciprocal duty. mrkoolkevin says Owens is worse than today, but didn't specify how much worse. If he'd said that Owens was so bad that a modern runner could beat him at his own game on the first try, then the video would settle things.

But mrkoolkevin only maintains that Owens was inferior to some unspecified degree. The video disproves the claim that Owens utterly sucked. It doesn't disprove the claim that Owens may have sucked just a little bit.

 

An utterly baseless assumptions on your part. You have no reason to believe that I'd be crowing anything from the rooftops about anything or that I even cared about the outcome of this silly experiment. I take experiments and empirical studies very seriously, and I've never been one of those guys who's so desperate to score points in an online argument that I cling to whatever flimsy evidence appears to support my case (although there are people like that around here...).

But more importantly, your point doesn't really make any sense. If this guy managed to run as fast as Jesse Owens, despite the poorly-designed experiment being so heavily stacked against him doing so, that would be a pretty remarkable outcome indeed. Do you not see the difference?

 

That's mostly fair but did I even say that Owens was inferior/worse than today?

 

I apologize. I originally was going to quote you about something, but chose to address the thread title instead. I forgot to change the quote source. It's fixed.

 

Ok, no problem.