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KEEP your eyes peeled. Among this year’s gold medallists you might see
something close to the perfect athletic performance.

Athletes have consistently shattered records throughout the past century. But
now they are pushing against the very limits of human potential, say
researchers.

“The improvement is real. But it’s starting to level off in most events,”
says François Péronnet, a sports physiologist at the University of
Montreal.

That doesn’t mean there will never be new records. But as athletes begin to
hit the ceiling of human ability, we’ll no longer expect each year’s performance
to be better than the last. For example, in the classic running events even the
best athletes are finding it increasingly hard to run faster than the champion
before them.

Instead, new world records will occur randomly, just like record-breaking
rainfall or droughts. Take the men’s 1500-metre event. The world record of 3
minutes 26.00 seconds was set only two years ago. But Péronnet says
results from the past 15 years are essentially random. From now on, the best
times for that event may scatter around the 3:26 mark—sometimes a little
better, sometimes a little worse, but with no overall trend towards faster
times.

Scientists are already trying to predict the ultimate human performance.
Robert W. Schutz, a statistician at the University of British Columbia, has made
predictions based on past performances in seven track and field events and
projected them into the future. He calculates that by the year 2050 the marathon
will be run in 2 hours 2 minutes 39 seconds (2:02:39), just three minutes faster
than the current best time of 2:05:42. Schutz has also projected the “asymptotic
value” for each sport—the point at which for all practical purposes
progress will stop—based on the flattening performance curves. That gives
us an ultimate time in the 100 metres of 9.51 seconds, just under three-tenths
of a second faster than today’s fastest man.

Péronnet has drawn up his own projections of what the ultimate athlete
may be capable of. He has tried to isolate those physiological factors that
limit performance. Péronnet combined lab studies and performance
statistics to spot changes in anaerobic and aerobic power and endurance in
runners over time. On the basis of these figures he suggests that over the next
50 years, record times will begin to hit these limits.

Others are more doubtful. “Every time someone says we’ve reached the limit,
somebody else goes out and breaks a record,” says Carl Foster at the University
of Wisconsin in La Crosse.