The Ultimate Athlete

Alberto Salazar was near death. That sounded a bit melodramatic, even for athletes, whose lives can often seem like B movies. But the rumor persisted as hundreds lingered in the cavernous Prudential Center after last April's Boston Marathon. There was just this morbid buzz, the kind of grim expectancy that follows the classic moments of athletic horror: the scythed matador; the driver flipped on a turn; the fighter who can't be revived; the hitter who takes a 95-mile-an-hour fastball in the ear.

By its nature, the marathon bears no relation to blood sport. Yet Salazar, the runner with the whiplike body of a cursorial animal, had spit in the eye of danger, had made an offering to the mythical figure of Ulysses, the archetype of exploit who can never abide a leash, or even death, and who refuses to be driven about by the whims of gods. He drives himself.

In Boston, Salazar had taken all his craft into the unknown, ever-changing algebra of time, mind, body and weather. He had fought off a ferocious, draining challenge by Dick Beardsley, who lost by a couple of strides, and he finished (continued on page 128)Ultimate Athlete(continued from page 125) by setting a new course record of 2:08.51. Salazar had been there before, escaping without trouble when he set a world record (2:08.13) at the New York Marathon a few months earlier. Even so, no two marathons are ever the same, and now the bright sun, low humidity and crisp breeze along the 26-mile, 385-yard course had cunningly lured him over a metabolic edge--then swacked him. By the time he was helped to his recovery cot, he was in a whirlpool of dark trouble.

Salazar had, once more, gone nose to nose with the limits. While his father talked about how his driven son might one day kill himself, the greatest long-distance runner of our time was being intravenously fed a dextrose-and-sodium-chloride solution for dehydration. His eyes were vacant, his black hair soaked, his body trembling and his legs paralyzed with cramps. The attending physician recorded his body temperature at 88 degrees; you can't go closer to hell and get back.

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Who among us has never asked himself: What on earth am I doing here? The men who climb mountains have always asked that question, and so do athletes like Salazar, who prepare to take their bodies and minds to new extremes. But where are the limits? How fast can a man run? How high and far can he jump? Is there a limit to what muscles can endure under stress? Is there a point when the skeletal structure must collapse, when the cardiovascular system might sigh?

Human beings have spent their entire history trying to conquer a triad of limitations imposed on them by fate, by God or by sheer biological accident. The late psychoanalyst Robert Lindner conceived of human limits as an iron triangle composed of the medium in which we must live, the equipment we have or can fashion with which to live and the relentless fact of our mortality; those three sides form a prison cell.

Like so many before him, Salazar, in his own way, had flung himself against the triangle, spending three and a half quarts of fluid and all his will for a race and a record. Why he punished himself--indeed, had been doing so for some time--seems incidental compared with the side of human character that he so typifies: those who have always traveled the blade of limits, the species that wants no part of a prison cell.

Personal glory and obsession aside, their slashing at the bars is an attack on mortality. The Greek poet Homer did his best to clarify that drive with his story of Odysseus. Ever since, men have sought the limits on the crags of mountains, in the dark of ocean depths or in the loneliness of a singlehanded vessel at sea. The Ulysses factor is what it was called by J.R.L. Anderson, who first applied it to such explorers and adventurers as Sir Robert Scott. Ulysses implies that there is some factor in man, some form of special adaptation, that prompts a few individuals to exploits that may seem purposeless but are ultimately of value to the survival of the race. Desire and incomparable will lead a compendium of qualities essential to such individuals.

Though less romantic than the iron men of whom Anderson wrote, the modern athlete who reaches for the limits communes with his own sense of adventure: How far can a mind and body under stress and pain be pushed? The results are best measured in the pure sports that pit man against himself, and they come in the form of records, which hang for an instant, then get lost amid the swamp of agate type in books for trivialists and statistics collectors. The figures mark only the perimeter of the limits, not the gritty core of the assaults--the interminable hours of painful training, those moments of disbelief, that shock of recognition of the physiological leap forward.

Numbers are inadequate in the burning light of Bob Beamon's long jump of 29'2-1/2" in the Mexico City Olympics of 1968. In an event whose records had been chipped away only in small fractions over the years, Beamon surpassed the previous limit, the world record, by almost two feet. It was a physical achievement so stunning that analysis failed, leaving only slack jaws and poised pencils. How can numbers reflect the desire behind the steady erosion of marathon records, first by Bill Rodgers, now by Salazar, until the two-hour marathon may be seen before the turn of the century?

It may be seen, yes, but only through a Palomar telescope, an educated body of dissenters say. Still, there are those who lean toward William Blake's words: "What is now proved was once only imagined." Those words from the 18th Century have since been repeatedly supported and often in sports--by Roger Bannister's dramatic bench-mark mile of four minutes (a theretofore-much-derided prospect), for example, and more recently by the stirring international duels between milers Steve Ovett and Sebastian Coe, who seemed as if they were going to stomp the event into shards.

Salazar, for one, is clearly of Blake's persuasion. By the year 2050, he told Runner's World magazine, there would be a two-hour marathon. If he is right, how is it that we have come so far in the marathon and the mile, reached the point that would hardly have seemed possible as recently as 1965? Trying to hook up the intricate connections, big and small, is like trying to locate our precise breakout toward the moon landing. Did putting a man on the moon become a real possibility when the Wright brothers lifted off at Kitty Hawk or when Wernher von Braun began work on the German V-2 rocket?

The evolution of the new disciplines of biomechanics and sports biochemistry, as well as the sheer numbers of people newly aware of fitness, is at the fulcrum of athletic progress. The marathon--and jogging for health--led the way and seemed to create an atmosphere that detonated research. The age of the sports laboratory, of athletic enlightenment, was upon us.

Ovett and Coe appear to have fastened attention and sharpened focus on human limits at a time when Americans have never before been so preoccupied with their bodies. People seem angry at death and look expectantly toward medical technology while at the same time being apprehensive about the ominous dawn of the robotic age. Records used to fascinate, then fade. But now--with the advent of sports medicine and biomechanics--the breakthroughs support those who take for granted that perfectibility of the human body is out there waiting for the right generation to inherit or to seize it.

Questions provoke only other questions. If Mark Spitz, who took a gold medal in the 100-meter freestyle in Munich in 1972, were still swimming at the same pace today, he could not even qualify for the Olympics in that event. How, in just 11 years, has a superman apparently become a relic?

To find the answers, scientists all over the world are experimenting in labs full of strong young men and women, gazing at muscle tissue, poking at conformation and examining the physiological mechanisms of those athletes who convert food into energy better than others--a vital element of physical excellence. Given the unpredictable nature of athletic contests and the caution of science, answers tend to resist concrete form. "The real labs for limits," says Dr. Ernst Jokl of the University of Kentucky, "are world competitions." That is where the dice of body and mind are thrown.

Yet there can be no doubt that a great deal of knowledge from sports science has helped world-class athletes get where they are today. For one thing, the labs have yielded useful information about muscles and how they function.

Pre-eminent as a human-performance (continued on page 194)Ultimate Athlete(continued from page 128) scientist, Dr. David Costill of Ball State University was among the first to segregate certain properties of muscles that are crucial to athletic performance. Dr. Costill found that some muscle fibers contract rapidly and with great force but are quickly fatigued; those fast-twitch muscles are dominant among sprinters. Costill also discovered slow-twitch fibers that can't generate as much instantaneous force but can contract for a longer time before they're exhausted; those he found dominant among long-distance runners. (The average person has about half of each type.) Salazar, for instance, has 92 percent slow-twitch muscles, which helps account for his extraordinary endurance. Bob Hayes, the fastest man ever to run 100 yards, was gifted with a high proportion of fast-twitch muscles; no matter how long or hard he might have trained, world-class times in distance events would always be out of his reach. Today, through simple biopsy, Costill can tell an athlete what proportions of fast- and slow-twitch muscles he has. By implication, any athlete can determine the events for which he is genetically best suited and the events that would force him to struggle against his natural limits.

Looking further, scientists learned a great deal about the chemistry of muscle contraction that has practical applications for athletes. They discovered, for instance, that muscles store enzymes that help produce kinetic energy. With training, the level of those enzymes in the muscles can be tripled--but that's where it stops; it is a pure physical limitation, this ultimate budget of power. Similarly, the amount of the complex sugar glycogen--the body's primary fuel--that is stored in the muscles can be increased through a program of training and diet called carbohydrate loading, which has become a part of the modern athlete's everyday consciousness. Although it has lately become a point of controversy, sports doctors have long believed that when the body runs short of glycogen or fails to burn it efficiently, the result is a build-up of lactic acid in the muscles--the "supersludge" that can slow an athlete down.

In a recent article, Dr. Jim Wilkerson, a physiologist, focused even more tightly on that picture of muscular chemistry and the goal of running faster. "The source of all energy," Dr. Wilkerson wrote, "is a molecule called adenosine triphospate, better known as A.T.P. A.T.P. is just about the only thing that matters as far as energy is concerned. If you don't produce it, you don't have muscle contraction; and if you don't have any muscle contraction, you won't go anywhere. It's that simple. The body produces this energy of movement--A.T.P.--two basic ways. Either it uses oxygen [aerobic] or it doesn't use oxygen [anaerobic]."

Those terms--aerobic and anaerobic--probably represent the cornerstone of contemporary sports science. If there was a single advance, one moment of luminous insight over the years that cleared the way for the modern athlete's assault on his limits, it was the understanding that the energy for short-duration, high-intensity exercise--a 100-meter sprint, say, or a long jump--is produced without oxygen, while the energy for feats of athletic endurance requires a continuous delivery of oxygen to the muscles. Ninety to 95 percent of the energy needed to complete a marathon, for instance, is produced aerobically, while a sprinter can run 100 meters without ever taking a breath. Aerobic training--the most ubiquitous form of which is jogging, of course--aims to increase oxygen supply by strengthening the heart and lungs, enlarging arteries and accelerating the rate at which enzymes in the muscles can absorb oxygen from the blood. Anaerobic conditioning, such as wind sprints or weight training, improves the body's ability to deliver short, powerful bursts of energy.

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Complex as much of it is, research on muscles, training and diet has slowly filtered down to the athlete through good coaches and doctors such as Wilkerson and Costill. The result has been a trend toward over-all "body management" among athletes, a physical self-awareness that can provide a sharp edge in competition. Along with technological advances, such awareness suggests that the phrase human limits may soon be archaic.

Still, most scientists believe, guardedly, that there are physical limits, though they say so with one eye bolted on genetics, on the mysterious force of human desire and on modern pharmaceutical wonders. Dr. Gideon Ariel, a biomechanist with labs on both coasts, says, "Yes, there are definite limits. For one thing, among other factors, our bone structure can stand only so much pressure. Beyond a certain point--and this tends to vary depending on the points of pressure--the bones simply splinter." Dr. Ariel believes that Beamon nearly exceeded that point in Mexico City. "That long jump may see marginal improvement," he says, "but very little." Dr. Jokl is less equivocal, saying that "Beamon's feat was the greatest single feat in the recorded history of athletics. It is unlikely that it will ever be surpassed."

Houston University's Carl Lewis, the superb sprinter and long-jumper, agreed with Jokl for a long time. "I was like everybody else--a victim," says Lewis about his awe of Beamon's mark. The magnitude of the record seemed to intimidate him until last year, at the National Sports Festival, when Lewis set a new sea-level record with a jump of 28'9". But it wasn't the record itself that was most intriguing; it was what Lewis had to say about his four previous foul-ridden attempts that day. "On one of them, I know I jumped 30 feet," he stated flatly. While eyes in most of the track world popped, Ariel remained skeptical.

"I don't believe he jumped 30 feet," he says. "We are talking about a force obstacle here. The pressure on the hip joint is enormous--well over 1700 pounds. To jump that far is impossible. The femoral bones would shatter. The ligaments connecting the femorals and the tibial bones, between knee and ankle, would be torn. The body just cannot hold up under that kind of pressure."

Clearly, when scientists try to envision the precise limits in various events, their estimates differ--as do those of the Russians, who have been in the vanguard of what's come to be called human engineering. While projecting a sub-two-hour marathon, Ariel also sees a high jump of nearly nine feet (compared with the current mark of 7'8-3/4") and "perhaps a 9.5 in the 100 meters," which would cut the world record by half a second. Jokl sees an eight-foot high jump and probably a 9.8 sprint. The Russians, who select their athletes by specifications of weight, age and height, foresee a 9.75 for the 100 meters by 1990 and a high jump of 8'2". But when it comes to the glory event, the mile, there are those who feel sure that the Russians will meet a definite impasse with their "horses for courses" program.

Marvin Clein, president of Sport Science Associates and an expert on athletic conformation, believes that the Russian approach is insufficient when it comes to mile limits. The villain thwarting dramatic progress there is the heart. Evolution will have to produce a heart larger than the existing one in order to pump more than 36 quarts of blood per minute, which is possible today. Such a heart would mean bigger men, whose apparatus--a large, tough spine, plus bigger lungs and rib cages--would also have to evolve to meet the demands of that heart. That kind of heart would require more weight, thus more energy, to propel the body forward. According to Clein and University of Denver graduate student John Keefe's calculations, the existing organ is theoretically capable of sustaining only a 3:34 mile, which is 13.33 seconds faster than Coe's current record.

Clein believes that swimming is the one sport that is not on the brink of its limits. Gravity takes its toll in running and jumping, but its effects (and the consequent strain on the heart) are lessened by a body's buoyancy in water. And body heat--always dangerous to athletes--is vented in a pool. Clein's model swimmer has slim hips to facilitate swift passage, big hands to paddle the water and broad shoulders to sustain the necessary muscle mass. Women have a special advantage here: With more body fat and more buoyancy, all their energy is directed toward propulsion rather than toward staying afloat. Clein sees the gap between men's and women's swimming records narrowing considerably in the coming years.

If the accent here ignores the large spectator sports--football and baseball, for instance--it is because they are fettered with equipment and do not fit purely into the equation of man against himself. Football is a collision sport of speed and weight, plus force, plus diabolical equipment. Baseball is a finesse game; how far one hits a ball is of no consequence as long as it is hit far enough.

Ariel does think, however, that an 80-yard field goal is possible, as is a 150-mile-an-hour fast ball. "But can it be aimed?" he asks, "and who could catch it?" The superathletes capable of playing in that league remain--at least temporarily--figments of the scientific imagination. But the work of Clein and his colleagues is finding no lack of practical application.

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It's been said that Neanderthal man, dependent on speed for his food and survival, could sprint faster than any athlete today. It is amusing to speculate about what he would be like if he'd had access to the wonders of biomechanics. Besides helping the infirm, the new science of biomechanics is baring the secrets of motion, eliminating the waste and awkwardness of movement. Torque, load, stress, lift and drag are part of the field's vocabulary. Computers can lay naked an old man's step or a difficult movement in ballet. The body as a human machine can be sweepingly brought into relief. No athlete or coach can sensibly ignore the work being done in the labs and hope to continue competing on a high level.

Place electrodes on a pitcher's fingers and you can see a fast ball being corrupted into a languid curve just because of an instant slip of one digit on the pitching hand. Models of the human hand, accurate down to the pores, are being put into moving water to test optimal positions in swimming. Ariel is designing what he calls the world's first computerized footwear, a running shoe with a microchip nestled in its sole. Recording impact and stride, the device can be plugged into a home computer after a workout and the runner will know how far he ran, his average speed, how many calories he burned and how much weight he lost.

"In order to do something best," says Ariel, "you must find the best way to do it." To that end, Ariel uses high-speed film of athletes in action and feeds each frame into a computer. The computer can isolate the physical requirements for a certain event and tell whether a given athlete's form is efficient or inefficient. Ariel also spends time in the area of "muscle recruitment": training an athlete to use muscles that he would not ordinarily use for his event. Those muscles are isolated, and the athlete, by means of weight training or specific exercises, develops them until he is able to call on them at will.

Although biomechanics promises and delivers much to modern sports, Peter Coe, the father of Sebastian, views the tinkering of science with dark humor. Long a smart advisor to his son, the elder Coe gave this cutout to Runner's World: "Imagine the great coach Svengali McTwist applying the extra signal or stimulus as the runners enter the final curve in the big race. Nonsense, you say? Too obvious to hide? But have you thought about microplants? Can you envision all competitors having to be screened as they enter the track through airportlike security?

"Now, what price progress? 'Back, back!' you cry, yearning for long johns, tights and handlebar mustaches. What lunatics from the land of silicon chips will home in on the sport? We jam each other's propaganda broadcasts. Why not jam each other's athletes at the Olympics?"

Ariel, for one, does not believe that such flights of fancy are farfetched. "Human engineers," he says, "will one day replace ex-athletes as coaches." If he is correct--and there seems to be much more macabre evidence up ahead--then we are about to enter the era of the athlete as robot, the totally processed athlete. The natural athlete, up against human limits as we know them, will be only a quaint memory.

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Microplants and demented coaches seem almost frivolous alongside the current landscape. We live in a time when talk of artificial brains and human hybrids is commonplace, when sperm banks in California are a reality for the genetically gifted in science as well as in athletics. But the incursion of new drugs into sports summons up an otherworldly atmosphere that once again puts a glowing finish on the crown of the prophetic H. G. Wells.

Long ago, the far-seeing Wells created two characters named Mr. Bensington and Professor Redwood in a novel called The Food of the Gods. They discover Herakleophorbia IV, a compound that becomes responsible for a breed of gigantic children who want a new civilization and prepare to engage in war with the "pygmy" world (that's us). At first, incredulity greets that scenario when it is transferred to modern athletics; then the mind pauses over the idea: drugs and athletes; ham and eggs.

Dr. Gabe Mirkin once conducted a poll of more than 100 world-class runners. The question was: "If I could give you a pill that could make you an Olympic champion and also kill you in a year, would you take it?" More than half the answers were affirmative. Nor are drugs and what they can do to an athlete and his performance of less than grave concern to Dr. William Taylor, author of Anabolic Steroids and the Athlete. The Wellsian new man is not mere fantasy to Dr. Taylor.

"How far can athletes go?" he asks. "Eventually, you get to the point where genetics are the key to performance--genetics or drugs. We have gone so far in terms of training and nutrition that now it is only a question of locating athletes who are genetically suited to the task at hand. That will happen over a period of years, or drugs will alter the body. Already, drugs have accounted for not a few current records, and in years to come, they will account for more. The best athletes have, and will have, the best pharmacists."

Already, steroids--biological amplifiers--are vital to success in track-and-field events. Derived from the male hormone testosterone, steroids can synthesize protein and can alter the shape of the athlete's body as well as his attitude. According to Ariel, steroids are "more of a key" to success than the essential training and vitamins. "You would not enter international competition," he says, "without taking steroids. There should be two Olympics: one for those who take steroids and one for those who don't." An athlete can be trained to a razor edge, but he cannot hope "to make a final without steroids, especially in such events as the discus, the shot and the javelin." It would be like entering a greyhound in the Belmont Stakes.

"People often close their eyes and say that anabolic steroids have only a placebo effect," says Ariel. "This is wrong. From tests we have made, we have determined that anabolic steroids will add 20 feet to the discus, four feet to the shot and ten feet to the javelin. Not only do they make an athlete stronger physically, they make him more obsessed. An athlete on steroids, for example, does not merely want to throw the discus--he wants to kill it."

Ariel's research should not be taken to mean that the use of steroids is confined to track and field. A weight lifter, a football player or any other athlete who wants to "bulk up" can generally find a cooperative pharmacist or physician willing to supply the drugs.

"For 15 years now, the average size of N.F.L. players has not really changed," says Taylor. "But compared with the players today, those back in 1960 were underdeveloped. Then, anabolic steroids were introduced and the bulk of the players increased dramatically. Now, with the impending introduction of synthetic growth hormones, the day may come when we have 350-to-375-pound athletes, eight to nine feet in height."

With injections of the hormone, the potential for physical growth is immense, according to Taylor. Used extensively in the treatment of growth deficiencies, these polypeptide hormones are commonly extracted from the pituitary glands of cadavers, but the process is expensive ($10,000 a year for treatments). Now the hormone has been synthetically reproduced and is expected to be approved by the FDA; it will soon become widely available. Fully expecting that the drug will be abused, just as anabolic steroids are, Taylor says that he is already getting inquiries about hormone treatments from the zealous parents of high school athletes.

The possibilities horrify him. "Unless this medication is strictly controlled," he says, "we may have a serious problem on our hands. To allow this medication to become popularized the way steroids have would be like opening Pandora's box. The parents who call me say that price is no object. They have read or heard that the hormone can add three inches a year to growth, and they want it for their children."

Taylor says that the time may come--and very soon--when a high school athlete will be forced to recognize that if he wants to succeed, he will have to resort to drugs. Athletes today, he says, are different from those of 30 years ago; the avenues to success are now precisely defined. "Back then, athletes would merely suck it up. Now they know that drugs are the key to success and that they cannot hope to compete without them."

Ethics will have to be examined and the door locked, and it must be opened only when needed. If the drug is popularized, Taylor sees sports becoming ludicrous, records and limits obsolete. The geometry and balance of such games as baseball and basketball will have to be altered, with baskets set higher and the pitcher's mound moved back. For the unreconstructed, the era of the pseudo athlete, of H. G. Wells's athlete, will seem shorn of all that is human--the perfect fit for a robotic world.

The robots may add something to life, but they will surely signal the final end of the handmade, the dissolution of craft. Hardly a fiery-eyed zealot, Taylor wants athletics and those who play them to remain biologically pure, and he does not want records or broken limits that are devoid of any current frame of reference. The Ulysses impulse--and the kind of man who must go see what's over the hill--argues strenuously for his concern: If that impulse is displaced by a daily dose of hormones, then there will be no sport as we have learned to feel it; the desire and will of the heroic athlete will belong to folklore.

Those qualities were best caught by the effort of Salazar in Boston, when his legs felt as if they were on fire. One tries to freeze his face at that finish line; it was a rubber mask of pain, yet something terribly human was there. It was poignant and startling, but somewhere in that awful contortion, it seemed that an old promise was being renewed once more. Salazar is an action poet, and his face spoke eloquently for the Ulysses man and for all that he represents: the last line of defense against the processed athlete and against artificiality in all aspects of our lives. Man's continuing adaptation is the ongoing need for those same qualities. All the perceptive men behind the scenes of athletics recognize this: that desire and will are, and should remain, the most elemental linchpins to real excellence.

" 'The real labs for limits are world competitions,' where the dice of mind and body are thrown."

"Bob Beamon's record-setting jump was 'the greatest single feat in the recorded history of athletics.' "