The worst winning time on record for the Olympic marathon — nearly 3½ hours — was set at the 1904 St. Louis Olympic Games. Today, both men and women come in closer to the two-hour mark. The men's Olympic record is 2 hours and 6 minutes; the women's, 2 hours and 23 minutes.
The 1904 marathon went exceptionally poorly — one runner was chased off course by wild dogs, another fell asleep in an orchard, and the first man to cross the finish line was disqualified for riding more than 10 miles of the course in an automobile. However, even in the best of conditions, athletes of the past could only dream of achieving the times, heights, and distances that today's competitors consistently reach.
Includes events that had men's and women's competitions in at least five Olympics.
Track and field, one of the original sports categories at the Olympics, is one of the easiest to measure. In a sport that scores its competitors in points, like volleyball or gymnastics, it's tougher to show how the standard of competition has changed through the years. But in track and field — which includes events like races, shot put and high jump — the improvement is clear in historical Olympic results.
Both men and women have significantly improved their scores in most events. Marathon times have been cut by nearly an hour compared with 1896. In the 100m, times have gone from around 12 seconds to under 10 (for men) and under 11 (for women). High jumps are a foot and a half higher (nearly two feet higher for men), and javelins have been thrown more than 100 feet further than they were at the first Olympic games in which they appeared.
One of the reasons for the world's athletic improvement is innovations in technology and, along with it, technique. For example, in the early years of the Olympic high jump, athletes landed in pits filled with sawdust or sand. Competitors focused on jumping as high as possible while still allowing for a safe landing.
However, by the 1960s, foam mats had come into use. American Dick Fosbury developed a new technique — going over the bar backwards, headfirst, and landing on his back, which was possible only because of the foam cushion. He won the high jump event at the 1968 Olympics with this technique, which came to be known as the "Fosbury Flop."
Today, the Fosbury Flop is used by most Olympians as they hurl themselves over the high jump bar onto the mat, setting new Olympic records in the process.
Improvements in technology have impacted other events as well. Sprinters use starting blocks instead of digging holes to position their feet before a race, for example. The fabrics used for swimsuits today create less drag in the water than what was used a century ago.
Former sports journalist David Epstein, author of "The Sports Gene," posited in a 2014 TED talk that it's not only technology that's pushing athletes further. Athletes' bodies, he says, are now generally more suited to their specific sport.
"As sports scientists and coaches realized that rather than the average body type, you want highly specialized bodies that fit into certain athletic niches, a form of artificial selection took place, a self-sorting for bodies that fit certain sports, and athletes' bodies became more different from one another," Epstein said in the talk. "Today, rather than the same size as the average elite high jumper, the average elite shot-putter is two and a half inches taller and 130 pounds heavier."
This process may have been accelerated by the rise of sports media coverage, which raises people's awareness of and in theory participation in different sports.
"Statistically speaking," one 2008 study on world records said, "this [broadened participation] has contextually increased the chance that ‘extreme outliers’ will occur in a normal distribution of athletes, and may partly account for an improvement in records."
Epstein also argued that the mindset of athletes has changed over time. When an athlete conquers one feat of endurance or speed, it becomes easier for others to imagine achieving the same.
Olympians represent the best of the world's athletic achievement, and their improvement is a testament to how far innovation, dedication and hard work have taken us over the past century.
In swimming events, which also provide a simple comparison for improvements over time, the trends are similar to track and field. Since the 1896 Olympics, in which competitors swam in a bay, men and women have been speeding up.
Includes events which had men's and women's competitions in at least five Olympics.
Athletes don't necessarily set new records every year, but in most cases the record for a given event is more likely to have been a recent occurrence.
This year, keep an eye on potential Olympic record-setters Caeleb Dressel and Katie Ledecky in swimming. In track and field events, Sydney McLaughlin is poised to set a new Olympic record for the 400m hurdles, and hurdler Grant Holloway's time at the Olympic trials was within one one-hundredth of a second of the current record for the 110m hurdle event.
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