Athletes have been steadily setting new records for a century, as the talent pool has grown in numbers — and the individuals in that pool have grown more literally in height and weight:
Specifically, while the average human has gained about 1.9 inches in height since 1900, Charles’ research showed that the fastest swimmers have grown 4.5 inches and the swiftest runners have grown 6.4 inches.
The theoretical rules of animal locomotion generally state that larger animals should move faster than smaller animals. In his contructal theory, Bejan linked all three forms of animal locomotion — running, swimming and flying. Bejan argues that the three forms of locomotion involve two basic forces: lifting weight vertically and overcoming drag horizontally. Therefore, they can be described by the same mathematical formulas.
Using these insights, the researchers can predict running speeds during the Greek or Roman empires, for example. In those days, obviously, time was not kept.
If we try to predict ancient running times from modern data, we might be ignoring all sorts of things that have changed over the centuries.
An analysis of the footsteps of [an Australian aboriginal from 20,000 years ago], dubbed T8, shows he reached speeds of 37 kph on a soft, muddy lake edge. [World record holder Usain] Bolt, by comparison, reached a top speed of 42 kph during his then world 100 meters record of 9.69 seconds at last year’s Beijing Olympics. With modern training, spiked shoes and rubberized tracks, aboriginal hunters might have reached speeds of 45 kph.
Peter McAllister’s Manthropology cites a number of examples of our athletic decline:
Roman legions completed more than one-and-a-half marathons a day carrying more than half their body weight in equipment.
Athens employed 30,000 rowers who could all exceed the achievements of modern oarsmen.
Australian aboriginals threw a hardwood spear 110 meters or more (the current world javelin record is 98.48).
Modern humans do not live athletic lives, and even modern athletes tend to spend more of their youth sitting at a desk in school than running, jumping, climbing, and throwing.
[W]e’ll use the example they give of a German Female shot-put athlete. This athlete had been training for 14 years before she was put onto the programme, so certainly, her improvement in results cannot be explained by a response to training, as it might be if she was still a junior athlete.
So the Figure below shows the improvement in performance in this woman shot putter during a 5 month period in 1968. The blue block on the X-axis shows when she was given the drug — Turinabol, in doses of 14 tablets per week (10 mg per day, each tablet = 5mg). You’ll see how she gains muscle strength and improves her performances dramatically in only a few weeks — we’re talking 9% over the course of about 10 weeks of drug use! But it gets better (or worse, depending on your point of view!)
Jump ahead to 1969, where the same woman went through very much the same procedure. The Figure below shows the performances over a similar five month period. This time, the drug was administered in slightly higher doses, and in three separate cycles. The result is the same. Her performance improved by an amazing 17% from the start to the end of the season, with a new world record of 20.10 m the culmination.
There was more to come. In 1970, the same athlete was again systematically doped, but with even higher doses. She once again broke the world record, and this time, broke the indoor world record as well. She ended with a personal best of 20.22 m, which was a fully 2m further than she had managed to achieve on 14 years of training BEFORE starting on the doping programme! This is an 11% improvement! But what is particularly important is to notice how her performances when NOT ON THE DRUG are so ‘poor’ — she starts each season a full 3 m off what she will reach at the end, with the aid of the steroid.
Anabolic steroids also dramatically improved female runners’ times — by 4–5 seconds in the 400 m, 5–10 s in the 800 m, and by 7–10 s in the 1500 m:
So if you look at the current world record in the 400 m event, it stands at 47.60 (Marita Koch). No one has managed to even threaten it since the 1980′s, and it’s quite conceivable, assuming the table above is correct, that this 47.60 is worth about, oh, 50.60. And suddenly then, today’s runners are comparable!
As more women entered the world of sport, experts predicted that the performance gap between men and women would shrink, but in the last decade the performance gap has grown, especially in sprint events:
In the last ten years, the gap between the men’s fastest 100m time and the women’s fastest 100m has been around 11 to 12%, whereas the world records suggest a difference of only 7%. A similar thing has happened in the 200m event, where the difference between men and women in the last ten years is also 11 to 12%. So rather than time closing the gap, it’s only getting larger. But there is a potential reason for this…
The reason, as you may have already guessed, has been suggested to be the use of drugs in sport, which was absolutely common-place in the 1970’s and 1980’s. If you look at the world records (which are half the equation in the graph shown above), then you will see that from the 100m event up to the 1500m event, the world record in women’s events was set in the 1980’s. Think Florence Griffith Joyner, Marita Koch, Kratochvilova. We know that doping was rife in the Eastern Bloc countries in particular, and there’s no reason to think it was any less so in the USA. In the middle and long distance events, you have the Chinese of the early 1990’s who hold most of the world records, and that was widely speculated to be due to doping. I suspect that some of these records will NEVER be broken. The women’s 400m record, for example, stands at 47.60 s (Marita Koch of Germany, set in 1985). No one has even come within a second of this since. It’s highly unlikely they ever will.
But whereas doping practices were largely uncontrolled during the 1980’s when these records were set, there are now much stricter methods in place. And although the use of drugs is probably still wide-spread, as indicated by Marion Jones’ story and our recent posts on doping in sport, it is a very real possibility that the reason the gap is widening is because the use of anabolic-androgenic agents in women is decreasing. This theory, proposed by a scientist from Norway (Stephen Seiler) and a market researcher from Chicago (Steven Sailer — a bizarre co-incidence that the names are so similar!), attributes the flattening out of women’s performances to the tightening up of doping control, which has narrowed the “hormone gap”. So while men have continued to improve (the 100m world record has been broken five times in the last 2 years), the women have levelled off, possibly due to the greater control over these anabolic-androgenic agents.
When British sprinter Dwain Chambers went to get reinstated after failing his drug tests, he had Victor Conte of Balco describe his prescription for success to anti-doping authorities:
Your performance enhancing drug program included the following seven prohibited substances: THG, testosterone-epitestosterone cream, EPO (Procrit), HGH (Serostim), insulin (Humalog), modafinil (Provigil) and liothryonine, which is a synthetic form of the T3 thyroid hormone (Cytomel).
THG is a previously undetectable designer steroid nicknamed “the clear.” It was primarily used in the off season and was taken two days per week, typically on Mondays and Wednesdays. Generally, these were the two most intense weight-training days of the week. The purpose was to accelerate healing and tissue repair. Thirty units (IU) of the liquid was place under the tongue during the morning time-frame. THG was used in cycles of “three weeks on and one week off.”
Testosterone-epitestosterone cream was also primarily used during the off season. It was rubbed into the skin on the front of the forearm two days per week, typically Tuesdays and Thursdays. The dosage was ½ gram which contained 50mg of testosterone and 2.5mg of epitestosterone (20 to 1 ratio). The purpose was to offset the suppression of endogenous testosterone caused by the use of the THG and to accelerate recovery. The testosterone-epitestosterone cream was also used in cycles of three weeks on and one week off.
EPO was used three days per week during the “corrective phase”, which is the first two weeks of a cycle. Typically, it was on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. It was only used once per week during the “maintenance phase” thereafter, typically this was every Wednesday. The dosage was 4,000 IU per injection. The purpose was to increase the red blood cell count and enhance oxygen uptake and utilization. This substance provides a big advantage to sprinters because it enables them to do more track repetitions and obtain a much deeper training load during the off season. EPO becomes undetectable about 72 hours after subcutaneous injection (stomach) and only 24 hours after intravenous injection.
HGH was used three nights per week, typically on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays. Each injection would contain 4.5 units of growth hormone. Once again, this substance was used primarily during the off season to help with recovery from very strenuous weight training sessions.
Insulin was used after strenuous weight training sessions during the off season. Three units of Humalog (fast-acting insulin) were injected immediately after the workout sessions together with a powdered drink that contained 30 grams of dextrose, 30 grams of whey protein isolates and 3 grams of creatine. The purpose was to quickly replenish glycogen, resynthesize ATP and promote protein synthesis and muscle growth. Insulin acts as a “shuttle system” in the transport of glucose and branch chain amino acids. There is no test available for insulin at this time.
Modafinil was used as a “wakefulness promoting” agent before competitions. The purpose was to decrease fatigue and enhance mental alertness and reaction time. A 200mg tablet was consumed one hour before competition.
Liothryonine was used help accelerate the basic metabolic rate before competitions. The purpose was to reduce sluggishness and increase quickness. Two 25mg tablets were taken one hour before competition. There is no test available for liothryonine at this time.
In general terms, explosive strength athletes, such as sprinters, use anabolic steroids, growth hormone, insulin and EPO during the off season. They use these drugs in conjunction with an intense weight training program, which helps to develop a strength base that will serve them throughout the competitive season. Speed work is done just prior to the start of the competitive season.
It is important to understand it is not really necessary for athletes to have access to designer anabolic steroids such as THG. They can simply use fast-acting testosterone (oral as well as creams and gels) and still easily avoid the testers. For example, oral testosterone will clear the system in less than a week and testosterone creams and gels will clear even faster.
Many drug-tested athletes use what I call the “duck and dodge” technique. Several journalists in the UK have recently referred to it as the “duck and dive” technique. This is basically how it works.
First, the athlete repeatedly calls their own cell phone until the message capacity is full. This way the athlete can claim to the testers that they didn’t get a message when they finally decide to make themselves available.
Secondly, they provide incorrect information on their whereabouts form. They say they are going to one place and then go to another. Thereafter, they start using testosterone, growth hormone and other drugs for a short cycle of two to three weeks.
After the athlete discontinues using the drugs for a few days and they know that they will test clean, they become available and resume training at their regular facility.
When Aretae mentioned the recent refutation of the 10,000-hour rule, Dr. Pat chimed in with a story about a chat he had with a graduate of the Chinese Olympic program:
She’d be selected from a nationwide search at the age of 7 and spent the next 13 years living and training in specialized facilities.
There was an initial selection: For swimming all the children were lined up on the edge of a pool, some objects were thrown in, and the kids told to retrieve them. Talent spotters grabbed the children who “showed promise” and they were selected.
This particular woman got into both the swimming and ballet programs. And stayed in both until at about 15 she had to choose, because nobody could specialize and keep up the training for both.
About the training, she just kept talking about pain. Lots and lots of pain. Hours of pain every day.
We were talking about the movie Black Swan, and she said that in real life it is much more brutal and painful than shown in the movie.
There was also a weird psychological thing about how a child who didn’t come from a horrible, poor, background could never be a good dancer because you needed pain to be able to put it into the dance. I’ve heard the same argument about music and I didn’t understand it then either. I’ve classified this as “Stuff I’ll remember the words to, as it may well be true, but that’s all I can do.”
To get back to the point: The Chinese certainly think it is a combination of innate talent combined with years of practice.
Ericcson’s expert performance framework, which says that you need 10,000 hours of deliberate practice to become an expert, is an already simple framework that often gets oversimplified — as in this video by table-tennis champion Matthew Syed, author of Bounce:
Tyler Cowen (and then Aretae) recently linked to a refutation of the expert performance framework — and especially of the oversimplified versions of it — by two exercise physiologists, Ross Tucker and Jonathoan Dugas:
I have that study, and what is remarkable about it is that Ericsson presents no indication of variance — there are no standard deviations, no maximums, minimums, or ranges. And so all we really know is that average practice time influences performance, not whether the individual differences present might undermine that argument. Statistically, this is a crucial omission and it may undermine the 10,000 hour conclusion entirely.
While I strongly agree that we need distributions, not single average values, to characterize such things, Tucker and Dugas attack something of a straw man here:
If the theory is that 10,000 hours of practice are needed, and there is no innate ability, then you should not find a single person who has succeeded with fewer than 10,000 hours, and nor should anyone fail having done their 10,000 hours.
I have no trouble accepting the 10,000-hour rule as merely a rule of thumb that suggests the right order of magnitude.
Here’s where things get much more interesting — and data-driven:
Gobet and Campitelli studied 104 chess players and measured practice time and performance level, and looked at the time taken to reach the Master level. This is their finding:
So, the average time taken is 11,053 hours. That’s pretty much in agreement with Ericsson’s violin players. So far so good. But look at that Standard Deviation — 5,538 hours, and it gives a co-efficient of variation of 50%. [...] One player reaches master level on 3,000 hours, another takes almost 24,000 hours, and some are still practicing but not succeeding. That’s a 21,000 hour difference, which is two entire practice lifetimes according to the model of practice.
Darts, which has been studied by Duffy and Ericsson, offers more data:
They find the following when looking at darts scores and accumulated practice time:
The figure above shows how much of performance can be explained by deliberate practice. In chess, which I showed above, it’s 34%. In darts, 15 years of practice explains only 28% of the variation in performance between individuals! An extra-ordinary finding, because with all due respect, that’s in darts. What else is there that influences performance? Yet practice time accounts for only a quarter of the performance differences.
What else is there to influence dart performance? Plenty of random noise, I suspect, because of the peculiar scoring system. There’s clearly a skill to poker, but that skill only explains a tiny percentage of performance compared to chess.
This also fails to disprove the importance of deliberate training, if we accept that there are degrees of deliberate-ness that are hard to measure. The original finding, after all, was that top-tier musicians hadn’t practiced music more than third-tier musicians, but that they had deliberately practiced more:
All expert musicians were found to spend about the same amount of time on all types of music related activities during the diary week — about 50–60 hours. The most striking difference was that the two most accomplished groups of expert musicians were found to spend more time (25 hours) in solitary practice than the least accomplished group, who only spent around 10 hours per week.
During solitary practice the experts reported working with full concentration on improving specific aspects of their music performance — often identified by their master teacher at their weekly lessons — thus meeting the criteria for deliberate practice. The best groups of expert musicians spent around four hours every day, including weekends, in this type of solitary practice.
From retrospective estimates of practice, Ericsson et al. (1993) calculated the number of hours of deliberate practice that five groups of musicians at different performance levels had accumulated by a given age, as is illustrated in Figure 3. By the age of 20, the most accomplished musicians had spent over 10,000 hours of practice, which is 2500 and 5000 hours more than two less accomplished groups of expert musicians or 8000 hours more than amateur pianists of the same age (Krampe & Ericsson, 1996).
As the contest moves away from pure skill to something more physical, the primacy of skill naturally drops:
Start with Olympic wrestling, football and field hockey. Below are the findings from research on the USA Olympic athletes.
Clearly, 10,000 hours are rarely required. A subsequent study on Australian athletes found that 28% had participated for fewer than four years in their sport — that’s probably 3,000 to 4,000 hours, at most. One netball player from Australia had made the international stage on 600 hours of play.
Clearly there is some overlap between the skills and attributes needed for success in various sports, and some sports — coughnetballcough — are nowhere near as competitive as others.
Their last point is one that immediately jumped out at me when I read about the original research: which way does the causality run?
Ericsson concludes that these children just accumulate more training time and that this explains performance. The difference between the “best experts” and the “least accomplished players” is the training time.
But what if it is exactly the other way around? Let’s take two children at nine years old. Do they have the same ability to play on first exposure? Ericsson’s model says yes, and that the difference comes later, when one child practices more, gets better teaching. But what if the difference is present from the very first note, the first exposure to the activity? The parents of a child who shows some ability encourage further practice, they invest in teaching and training, and this child, by virtue of the fact that he/she has more ability to begin with, accumulates more practice.
But the child who has little innate ability makes the violin sound like the death march of stray cats, and their parents do not encourage more play. In fact, they discourage it -— the “go play outside” syndrome takes over, and the child is never exposed to teaching or practice. His trajectory is set precisely because he has less innate ability.
This Matthew effect was also popularized by the same Gladwell book that made the 10,000-hour rule so fashionable — but Outliers neglects to mention that this effect disappears past the junior level.
Tucker and Dugas tend to focus on sports with a strong metabolic component, like running, cycling, and swimming, where skill plays less of a role than endurance, which is highly trainable but has a strong genetic component nonetheless:
The study that is needed to answer this question is to take a large, random group of people and expose them to training, and then to measure how much they improve. And this has been done. There are four studies, summarized in the figure below, where big groups have been put through a supervised training programme, and their VO2max measured as an index of fitness.
So, on average, VO2max will improve by 15% as a result of training. In some studies, it’s been as high as 19%, in others, 9%. This may be due to differences in the training programme, or the people involved. However, what you should be asking, especially given our look at Ericsson’s violin study and the chess paper, is “What are the individual differences that make up that 15%, and what is the genetic impact in these studies?”
And for this, a paper by Claude Bouchard earlier this year. In this study, 470 untrained volunteers were put through five months of training, and their fitness levels measured before and after. The figure below shows the result:
As you might expect, most people improve by average amounts — 38% of the volunteers improved by between 300 and 500 ml/min (shown by they yellow and green bars in the breakdown of responders section). But either side of these “typical responses”, you see the extremes — the “low responders” shown in reds and oranges, and the “high responders” shown in blues and purples. 4% of the volunteers improved by 800ml/min or more, whereas 7% improved by less than 100ml/min.
Overall, there was a range of changes in VO2max all the way from 100ml/min (basically no improvement) to over 1000ml/min. That’s a 10-fold difference. You may recall that yesterday, we saw how chess expertise showed an 8-fold difference between the fastest and slowest to succeed at reaching Master level. It seems that a similar range of responses occurs for physiology.
The end result is that the bottom 5% of the sample, those who responded the least, improved their VO2max by less than 4%. On the other end, the high responders, the top 5%, improved by 40%. That is an astonishing difference, and the simple, and obvious question is where are you most likely to find an endurance athlete in this sample? The answer is on the far right — the individual who shows large adaptations to training, improves quickly and then reaches a higher ceiling. I am sure that every one of you reading this knows one of each of these people, perhaps you are one of them!
We should expect to see similar patterns in strength, power, flexibility, etc. — different people start at different levels and then respond to training and conditioning differently.
New York City hosted a giant bouldering competition in Central Park recently, and this was apparently enough to get the Times to cover the sport:
For decades, rock climbing was a sport about reaching places thousands of feet off the ground. These climbs can take days and require sleeping up on the rock. Spectators watch with binoculars below. Pinning ropes to the rock along the way is a necessary safeguard, and learning how to climb with a rope is a lengthy undertaking that long kept the sport on the fringe.
But in recent years, another, younger type of climbing — called bouldering — has opened the sport to a far wider group of participants and spectators. Bouldering requires no ropes because it centers on short climbs, usually up to 18 feet and lasting no more than five minutes. It is easier in many places to find a low rock to climb than it is to find a giant cliff.
And it is easier to watch friends, or professionals, when they are right in front of you.
Researchers have found that the steel plate-mail armor worn during the 15th century, which weighed 30 to 50 kilograms, required its wearers to expend more than twice the usual amount of energy when they walked or ran.
Four historical interpreters at the Royal Armouries — who could perform cartwheels in the armor — ran on treadmills for the study, which monitored their oxygen consumption, heart and respiration rates, and stride length:
The interpreters expended about 2.3 times the amount of energy usually required to walk and 1.9 times the energy usually required to run while wearing armor than when they weren’t, the team reports today in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B. This energy expenditure is much greater than the energy that a person wearing a backpack of an equivalent weight would use.
The problem is the legs. The pseudo-knights wore heavy leg protection: cuisses on their thighs, greaves on their calves, and pointed shoes called sabatons on their feet. Together, these weighed 7 or 8 kilograms, Askew says, and having to swing that weight with each step really weighed them down. The farther the weight was from the center of the body, the more energetically expensive it was.
The researchers also measured the interpreters’ breathing patterns, which normally increase in both rate and volume when a person works out. But the volume of oxygen consumed by the armored runners stayed the same — presumably, Askew says, because the torso was compressed by a chest plate — so they were forced to take many rapid, shallow breaths.
Throughout history, soldiers have armored first their heads, then their torsos, then their arms, and then their legs, because armoring the arms and legs hurts mobility.
Doubling the energy expenditure from walking would roughly halve daily march distances, which would prove terribly limiting for foot soldiers.
After observing children on playgrounds in Norway, England and Australia, Dr. Sandseter identified six categories of risky play: exploring heights, experiencing high speed, handling dangerous tools, being near dangerous elements (like water or fire), rough-and-tumble play (like wrestling), and wandering alone away from adult supervision. The most common is climbing heights.
“Climbing equipment needs to be high enough, or else it will be too boring in the long run,” Dr. Sandseter said. “Children approach thrills and risks in a progressive manner, and very few children would try to climb to the highest point for the first time they climb. The best thing is to let children encounter these challenges from an early age, and they will then progressively learn to master them through their play over the years.”
Sometimes, of course, their mastery fails, and falls are the common form of playground injury. But these rarely cause permanent damage, either physically or emotionally. While some psychologists — and many parents — have worried that a child who suffered a bad fall would develop a fear of heights, studies have shown the opposite pattern: A child who’s hurt in a fall before the age of 9 is less likely as a teenager to have a fear of heights.
And “safer” playgrounds often aren’t:
“There is no clear evidence that playground safety measures have lowered the average risk on playgrounds,” said David Ball, a professor of risk management at Middlesex University in London. He noted that the risk of some injuries, like long fractures of the arm, actually increased after the introduction of softer surfaces on playgrounds in Britain and Australia.
“This sounds counterintuitive, but it shouldn’t, because it is a common phenomenon,” Dr. Ball said. “If children and parents believe they are in an environment which is safer than it actually is, they will take more risks. An argument against softer surfacing is that children think it is safe, but because they don’t understand its properties, they overrate its performance.”
Reducing the height of playground equipment may help toddlers, but it can produce unintended consequences among bigger children. “Older children are discouraged from taking healthy exercise on playgrounds because they have been designed with the safety of the very young in mind,” Dr. Ball said. “Therefore, they may play in more dangerous places, or not at all.”
The army is banning “minimalist running shoes” — that means Vibram FiveFingers — during physical training, because they detract from a professional image:
There are a variety of minimalist running shoes available for purchase and wear.
Effective immediately, only those shoes that accommodate all five toes in one compartment are authorized for wear.
Those shoes that feature five separate, individual compartments for the toes, detract from a professional military image and are prohibited for wear with the IPFU or when conducting physical training in military formation.
You’d think this was a peace-time army. Anyway, not everyone thinks this was wise:
As to be expected, toe-shoe backers have already launched a campaign against the ban, referring to a photograph of a 10th Special Forces Group soldier jumping off the ramp of a CH-47 Chinook helicopter over the Gulf of Mexico. Yes, in five-toe shoes.
Some military observers are also concerned. “An army that is more concerned with looks versus results is a matter of national security,” writes defense expert Thomas Ricks in Foreign Policy.
The mythology is that old-time players, who did not lift weights and knew nothing about nutrition, had mercilessly short careers. And that today’s players, who condition themselves year-round — often with the help of private trainers, the most up-to-date scientific methods, nutritionists and massage therapists — play longer and have more years of peak performance. It makes sense. It’s also not true.
With more rigorous drug testing, a typical baseball career is beginning to look again as it did throughout the game’s history. Journeymen players stay in the game until their early- or mid-30s, and all-star-level players maybe a couple of years beyond that. A handful of superstars retain enough skills to make significant contributions into their late 30s. Those with the most talent almost certainly lose their skills at the same rate as lesser players, but they stay in the game for a long time because 85 percent of a superstar is still a very good player.
The rotund, hard-living Babe Ruth was a productive player until age 39. Older baseball fans remember Willie Mays’s sad last years with Mets, when he was past 40 and couldn’t play anymore, and may assume that he hung on far too long. But at age 40, while still playing for the San Francisco Giants, Mays led the league in on-base percentage and stole 23 bases.
Even the game’s greatest players, though, cannot defy biology. However long they play, their best seasons occur when they are still strapping young men in all their fast-twitch glory. Stan Musial, who played till age 42, had his best home-run year at 27. Joe DiMaggio retired at 36 but his strongest season — 46 home runs, 167 runs batted in, .673 slugging percentage — came when he was just 22. Ken Griffey Jr. played through the heart of the steroid era but is one of the few sluggers from that age untouched by scandal. His four best power years were from age 26 to 29.
We’ve seen evidence of ballplayers in the past who extended their primes into their thirties by working out. Slugging shortstop Honus Wagner peaked in 1908 at age 34, probably because he lifted weights. Ruth got himself a personal trainer after his bad 1925 season and worked out during the winters, so he had his famous 60 homer season in 1927 at age 32.
What about more recent examples of late resurgences?
I could list some, but one of my readers has a theory that the impact of steroids on famous American sports statistics can be traced way, way back before Jose Canseco’s 40-40 season in 1988. All those great seasons from the 1970s, 1960s, or even late 1950s that you think of as shining examples of a more innocent age? All on the juice, he asserts. After all, we know Olympic shotputters and the like were using steroids in the later 1950s, so why not professional athletes?
QB John Hadl has said that the San Diego Chargers strength coach was handing out steroids in the locker room in 1965. Or how about The Juice? O.J. Simpson went from a pretty good high school player in 1964 to the most exciting college football player since Red Grange in 1967. How’d that happen? (When Ken Kesey read about O.J.’s little run-in with the law in 1994, he said: That sounds like a combination of cocaine and steroids.)
Growing up on the West Coast in the 1960s and 1970s, I assumed, like most people, that the outstanding performance of West Coast athletes was simply part of the general shift of money and talent to California. Maybe, but maybe there was also a Venice Muscle Beach / Hollywood / Castro Street gay / Olympic track & field steroids connection to West Coast pro athletes going on.
As training camp approached, Gillman sent letters to his players, explaining that they would be lifting weights and turning the conventional wisdom of decades on its head at Rough Acres. On the first day of camp, he introduced a 5-foot-6 Louisiana man named Alvin Roy, the mastermind of their weight program.
“[Gillman] said, ‘This man is what every team will eventually have: a strength coach,’” says Hall of Fame offensive tackle Ron Mix.
And then Roy addressed the players.
“I still remember his speech, almost verbatim,” Mix says. “He said, ‘Because you’re going to be lifting weights in addition to working out twice a day, you’re going to need more protein.’ And he said, ‘When I was a trainer for the U.S. team in the Olympics, I learned a secret from those Rooskies.’ And he held up a bottle of pink pills, and he says, ‘This stuff is called Dianabol and it’s going to help assimilate protein and you’ll be taking it every day.’ And, sure enough, it showed up on our training tables in cereal bowls.”
Dianabol was the brand name for methandrostenolone, an artificial form of testosterone designed to promote healing and strength in patients. In 1963, it had been on the market for only five years, and used by U.S. weightlifters for fewer than three.
It was legal.
It wasn’t banned by any athletic organization.
And as the players discovered, it worked.
“It was probably at the end of the camp, people were talking: ‘Have you noticed anything?’ Yeah, I noticed,” offensive guard Pat Shea says. “The strength was there.”
This is the same era when they left “bennies” (amphetamines) in a bowl, like M&Ms, for the players to grab on their way in or out of the locker room.
The auction’s top-ticket item was Monroe’s famous white halter dress from “The Seven Year Itch,” the one that billowed up as the subway passed. It sold for almost $5.66 million (including the buyer’s premium) to an unknown phone bidder. Sharing a rotating mirrored platform with Hedy Lamarr’s peacock gown from “Samson and Delilah” and Kim Novak’s rhinestone- fringed show dress from “Jeanne Eagels,” Monroe’s costume was displayed on a mannequin that had been carved down from a standard size 2 to accommodate the tiny waist. Even then, the zipper could not entirely close.
But that’s just one dress. Perhaps the star was having a skinny day. To check, you could look across the room and see that Monroe’s red-sequined show dress from “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes” was at least as petite, as were the saloon costume from “River of No Return” and the tropical “Heat Wave” outfit from “There’s No Business Like Show Business.”
In fact, the average waist measurement of the four Monroe dresses was a mere 22 inches, according to Lisa Urban, the Hollywood consultant who dressed the mannequins and took measurements for me. Even Monroe’s bust was a modest 34 inches.
That’s not an anecdote. That’s data.
The other actresses’ costumes provided further context. “It’s like half a person,” marveled a visitor at the sight of Claudette Colbert’s gold-lame “Cleopatra” gown (waist 18 inches). “That waist is the size of my thigh,” said a tall, slim man, looking at Carole Lombard’s dress from “No Man of Her Own” (a slight exaggeration — it was 21 inches). Approaching Katharine Hepburn’s “Mary of Scotland” costumes, a plump woman declared with a mixture of envy and disgust, “Another skinny one.”
The pattern she noticed was real. At my request, Urban took waist measurements on garments worn by 16 different stars, from Mary Pickford in 1929 (20 inches) to Barbra Streisand in 1969 (24 inches). The thickest waist she found was Mae West’s 26 inches in “Myra Breckinridge,” when the actress was 77 years old.
I suppose knowing their heights would help put their other measurements in context.
“A different sense knocks into me when the ball is in the air,” [top NBA rebounder Kevin] Love says. “I know where it will hit and where it will land. I’m playing percentages, but it’s not a guessing game. Most of the time I’m right.”[…]The more accurate representation of Love’s prowess is his rebounding rate, the percentage of rebounds he snags when on the floor. Love’s was 24.6% through Sunday, the highest since Dennis Rodman‘s 25.6% in 1996–97.
[Minnesota Twins’ Torii] Hunter kneels during batting practice, and as each ball flies overhead, he tries to visualize where it will land. “If I’m right,” Hunter says, “I’m ready.”
Giambi said he had always been able to memorize a pitcher’s movements. In an interview, he casually mentioned the way Josh Towers, a Toronto Blue Jays pitcher, threw his curveball. Then Giambi moved his hand to other angles, showing how pitchers can telegraph location.? “I get on deck and I start looking at guys’ release points,” Giambi said. “You can pick things up from the side. I can tell you without even looking at the catcher, from his release point, if that’s a ball or a strike.”
Dr. Vickers says the best goalies and tennis players she’s studied have two skills. First, they use the quiet-eye technique to take a clear snapshot of an approaching object and then, while it approaches them, will instantly compare it to a vast library of memories drawn from years of practice and observation. By matching that object with others, they can make a perfect calculation of where it will go and how to put themselves in position to make the play — even if they aren’t looking at the ball.
Gretzky’s genius at that moment lay in seeing a scoring possibility where no one had seen one before. “People talk about skating, puck-handling, and shooting,” Gretzky told an interviewer some years later, “but the whole sport is angles and caroms, forgetting the straight direction the puck is going, calculating where it will be diverted, factoring in all the interruptions.
As tennis turned into a ball-crushing baseline game, men and women who rely on kooky spins, unique grips or downright strange strokes have been squeezed out. The evolution is logical. The harder players hit the ball, the less time they have to prepare, so technique today is abbreviated and tends toward uniformity. Training methods have become global and kids start to play under professional supervision at younger ages.
“There’s no more place, maybe, for fun,” said Fabrice Santoro, whose two-handed strokes and subtle spins earned him a spot in Grand Slam draws in four different decades. “When you start as a kid now, your coach normally says, ‘OK, if you want to be a champion, it’s going to be very hard, you have to be very serious, you have to work hard every day, so listen to me, be like this.’ They don’t say, ‘Have fun,’ — they don’t say this.”
Dolgopolov, 22, used to be one of those kids. His father, Oleksandr, coached Andrei Medvedev, the former French Open finalist, and started taking his son on the tour when he was not yet four years old.
Dolgopolov picked up his first racket at three and hit with many top pros throughout his childhood, when he wasn’t playing video games in the player lounges.
“I had classic technique — one of the best techniques when I was like 10, 12, but then I changed,” he said. For Dolgopolov, creating his own style was a first step toward independence from his father.
[...]
In practice Wednesday, Dolgopolov showed off his rapid fire serve, which looks like a normal serve set to fast forward: He bounces the ball twice, tosses it, and hits it when it reaches its peak, if not just before. He’s so quick that he can bounce the ball off the ground with his racket and then spring into his service motion and fire a bullet into the box (he demonstrated this). He says he can bounce the ball off the butt of his racket handle and then serve it.
In matches, Dolgopolov is a master of misdirection, especially with his two-handed backhand. “I hit the ball early and move my wrist a lot, so I get bigger angles,” he said.
Tennis was never dominated by funky players, but the sport used to have many more of them. Pancho Segura hit a two-handed forehand that Jack Kramer dubbed the greatest shot in tennis. Alberto Berasategui’s underhand forehand grip was so extreme that he would simply turn over his wrist and hit his backhand with the same grip (and with the same side of the racket). In 1967, Francoise Durr used an arsenal of self-taught strokes, including a sweeping backhand hit with a forehand grip, to win the French Open. John McEnroe’s serve and forehand were as unusual and inimitable as they were beautiful.
FC Barcelona is known for its tiki-taka style of constant touches between short passes. That style allows them to control the ball for 70 percent of the game and to make the opposing team run themselves ragged — but their defensive strategy of applying constant pressure means they also run themselves pretty ragged:
According to Stats Inc., which tracks the distance each player travels in a match, Barcelona’s players have covered 627,366 meters of turf during their six Champions League knockout-round matches, or about 390 miles. Its opponents, meanwhile, have run 611,120 meters or 380 miles, about 3% less, which is significant considering they are all chasing the same ball.
Bob Sykes: While both Russia and China are authoritarian (but nowhere near Stalinist or Maoist), their Elites are both more representative of their people and work more in their people’s interests than do the US, UK, or EU regimes. The late Senator Graham is a good example of just how hostile to the American people our Epstein Rulers really are.
Jim: As far as I can tell, “robber-baron capitalism” was a rhetorical cudgel used by the power center that established the Federal Reserve System, an hereditary banking oligarchy, against ordinary self-made industrial magnates.
Gaikokumaniakku: The 19th century glorified robber-baron capitalism along with other myths of individual heroes. They forgot that Newton said he was standing on the shoulders of giants — and of course they also forgot that when Newton said that, he was referencing a long string of writers who had used the phrase for hundreds of years, back to Bernard of Chartres: “We are like dwarfs perched on the shoulders of giants, so that we can see more than they, and things at a greater distance, not by...
Harper’s Notes: RAND developed the Delphi Method during the early Cold War for estimating thermonuclear warfare casualties among other things. It works well under the right circumstances. Uses anonymity and sequential polling. But the right circumstances are generally difficult and rare. Most recently the Super-forecaster Project (Tetlock) has resulted in several the high-scorers participating in (betting) prediction markets, in which there are both advantages and disadvantages in non-anonymity.
Gaikokumaniakku: I greatly enjoyed both Runaway and Looker in the 1980s. Marginally relevant link: Starring the Computer: Computers in Movies and Television Starring the Computer: Computers in Runaway (1984)
Gaikokumaniakku: This is why crazy paradigm-breakers have so much potential for improvements to the collective system. Sadly, the rewards usually don’t work out. Crazy, dishonest charlatans are often rewarded, and crazy honest autistic crusaders for truth are usually burned at the stake. I think it was Colin Wilson who claimed the crucial distinction between real thinkers and followers was that real thinkers were capable of breaking away from socially acceptable paradigms.
TRX: Crichton was also a novelist — a fairly good one – and wrote almost all of his own screenplays. He should have known the screenplay for Runaway stank. Watching Runaway a few months ago, I had a hard time believing it was a Crichton movie; it’s a mess. I didn’t like all of Crichton’s movies, but they were put together better than that. While on the Critchton subject, I’d like to make a plug for Looker, done about the same time as Runaway, but much better. Crichton had a...
Isegoria: Lower attendance is what we’re going for.
Bob Sykes: The problem facing all colleges and universities is that the number of white 18 year-olds, the primary consumers of college, is declining rapidly both relative to other races and absolutely. Many small liberal arts colleges are decidedly second rate academically, and so are the students they cater to. So, neither the loss of the schools nor the loss of the students is really a big deal. The health of the college system and the meaningfulness of the degrees awarded is actually better off...
Isegoria: Rising Sun came a decade later. I remember reading the novel right around when I read Jurassic Park. The Terminator, on the other hand, came out the same year as Runaways and was a much bigger deal.
Kentucky Headhunter: Huh, I remember Runaway being a fairly frequent Saturday afternoon movie option on cable. Not to the level of Rising Sun, but it was on at least once every three or four months. Now, unlike Rising Sun, I never actually left it on…
TRX: Crichton usually got his computer stuff correct, though. He picked up a degree in “computer graphics” while he was getting his M.D. at Harvard. When he decided he didn’t care for doctoring, he went to Hollywood and made more computer-ish movies than doctor-ish ones. I only discovered “Runaway” earlier this year; I thought I was familiar with all of Crichton’s movies, but apparently not. I don’t remember ever seeing any mention of it anywhere.
Isegoria: Crichton clearly had little interest in the details of weapons. In the movie, a household robot goes rogue and acquires a revolver — which makes a pump-action shotgun racking sound before each shot and leaves a ragged two-inch hole in the drywall. Sigh. So I’m not surprised he gets his warships mixed up.
Lucklucky: “battleship Sheffield” It was a mere destroyer not a battleship…
Buckethead: Adjacent to Atomic Rockets is ToughSF. Well researched and fascinating speculation on space. He posts only every so often, but he did do an interesting series on stealth – and piracy — in space.
Isegoria: Thanks for putting in the work, George. Grok also kept pointing to this blog. Apparently AI struggles with comments repeated across multiple pages.
George: Gemini claims (and I haven’t confirmed) that it’s: …a classic historical description written by the Scottish physician and traveler Dr. John Macculloch in his 1824 book, The Highlands and Western Isles of Scotland.He used this vivid phrase to describe the famous and treacherous pass of Glencroe… After searching all three volumes as PDFs, I’m pretty sure Gemini is hallucinating. And substantial time spent searching keeps leading me back to this blog. Cough up the...
Isegoria: I don’t think you’re alone in your struggle, Handle.
