Are athletes really getting faster, better, stronger?

I thought you'd cited improving sprint times in one of the other threads on this topic. Correct me if I'm wrong.

I guess it's easiest just to ask you: Do you think Owens was inferior to today?

 

There's every reason to believe that he would have run a lot faster, under more realistic conditions (practice time getting acclimated to the conditions, world-class competition, a high-stakes scenario, more densely packed cinders, a neutral timekeeper, etc.) Believe what you want but I think you're fooling yourself.

 

I don't recall citing improved sprint times or expressing an opinion about how he stacks up to today's top runners.

 

Well, I don’t know how big weightlifting was back in history. But I know Andy Bolton’s training routine and it was 4 days a week and a half hour each of those days. Nothing to fancy that guys in history could not duplicate. I know Paul Anderson was a great lifter he probably stacks up well all time.

A lot of guys think modern training is special but if any of them ever trained hard for sports they would know it’s just a lot of trial and error for their specific body. These athletes back in history did the same thing.

 

Lets say that you discovered something that supported my position in an online debate, and contradicted yours, but I did not know about it.

Would you bring that information to my attention?

My guess is that you would not.

Did he agree to take part in the experiment, knowing that it was poorly designed, and thinking that it was going to make him look bad?

 

I find it funny in all these arguments people aren't bringing up two major points.

1. Boxing has a far longer history than most sports, and a longer history as a big money sport
2. Boxing wasn't held back by amateurism (like track and feild was).

Jesse Owens wasn't a professional athlete. He worked to pay the bills, while also studying at university, despite this the analysis of him (not just that experiment), suggests if you took out the differences in surface, he could still compete with the best today, other than Bolt (when he ran good, he could actually be inconsistent due to his height making starts harder). Also Owens was a long jumper as well as a sprinter

Roger Banister (the first confirmed man to break the 4min mile), couldn't even train nearly enough to get the best results, since his time was so consumed with his medical studies, which also meant he hardly ever raced, and pretty much focused on beating the record.

Another fun fact, despite all this Bob Beamon still has the second longest jump in history, from 1968! The best long jump since 1994 is stil 0.16m shorter, and the best this decade is 0.22m shorter!

 

I will make another observation about athletics and weight lifting.

Just because the records are broken, that doesn't necessarily mean that the best athletes improve.

Records sometimes get broken, by a specialist in a narrow discipline i.e breaks the dead lift record but is nowhere near it in anything else.

That might be like trying to argue that somebody was the greatest heavyweight of all, time, because they had the hardest ever right cross!

 

Why not? I've brought up evidence that arguably undermines my positions in the past. In any event, I'm not sure that failing to share that kind of information with you would be as ridiculous as me actively trying to talk up flimsy unreliable evidence just because it's consistent with my views.

Who knows what he thought? And I doubt he thinks it made him look bad. I don't see how any of this is relevant though.

 

I stand corrected, then.

In that case, Janitor would bear the full burden of proof (if he's trying to use Owens to affirmatively prove that the guys from the past were just as good.)

 

There's a flip side to that coin.

Individual records (which are often outlier performances by outlier athletes) can be anomalies, and they don't provide as much information about the athleticism of a given era as much as average winning times and the performance of the broader field do.

A similar mistake is when people try to compare the one or two most impressive athletes of two eras instead of looking at the more important differences between the hundreds of world-class athletes competing in a given sport. It's like arguing that NFL athletes haven't progressed because you think that Jim Brown is as good as any current running back. Or arguing that NBA athletes haven't evolved because you think Wilt Chamberlain is better than any current center or Jordan better than any current shooting guard.

 

On the other hand, boxing is a sport that compares individual athletes. If Owens was a crazy outlier in track & field, then it's plausible somebody like Louis might be one for boxing.

 

I agree up to this point, but beyond that you have lost me!

 

I am absolutely convinced that he was!

 

Louis definitely was an outlier in his time. Owens was too, but not with respect to sprinting (from what I understand, there were other sprinters who were basically just as fast as him).

 

Interesting discussion.

Let's take a look at records in some sports that can be measured and where speed and strength plays key role.

All the records in men's athletics were set after 1980.
BUT. Most of them per decade - 15 in 1990s. Less world records were broken in 2000s and 2010s respectively.

As for women, many records were set in in 1980-1999 too (9 in 80s and 9 in 90s).

If you look at weightlifting, the strongest athletes were in 80s.

Leonid Taranenko is a former Belarusian weightlifter. His 266 kg clean and jerk in 1988 is still the largest amount ever lifted in competition, though no longer an official world record due to restructuring of weight classes.

Not only him, but there were other Soviet athletes who lifted more than Hossein Rezazadeh, strongest weightlifting athlete of the 21st century (who set world record 263.5 kg in 2004 at 105+ class).

I think it proves that current athletes generally ARE NOT better/stronger/faster than athletes of 80s and 90s. That means that PEDs, HGH and other 'modern training methods' were nearly as good in 80-90s as they are now.