The New Superathlete

A little over a century ago, Baron Pierre de Coubertin, a French nobleman, began the drive for an Olympic revival with a speech at the Sorbonne, coining the Olympic motto Citius, Altius, Fortius--Swifter, Higher, Stronger. The baron had no idea how literally his motto would be taken. He did, however, live long enough to see his athletic ideal corrupted by the twin evils of professionalism and science. "Body building?" he said to an English friend in dismay after watching Olympic athletes in training. "Do we really wish to create a human thoroughbred?"

This would prove to be an unfortunate comparison. When Secretariat set the Kentucky Derby speed record in 1973, he clocked less than two seconds better than Twenty Grand had 42 years earlier. In fact, horse evolution seems to be working in reverse: 1999 winner Charismatic was nearly four full seconds behind Secretariat's mark of 26 years ago. Human progress is a much different story. Last June, Maurice Greene, the new World's Fastest Human, broke the record for the 100 meter dash by a wider margin than anyone since the advent of electronic timing in 1968.

Want something longer than 100 meters? In 1954, Roger Bannister became the most famous track star of the decade by becoming the first runner to shatter the four-minute-mile barrier. In 1997, Daniel Komen of Kenya became the first to run two miles in under eight minutes (7:58.61, to be exact).

Athletic thoroughbreds? If Baron de Coubertin could see today's athletes, he might wonder how long it would be before men were racing against horses instead of on them.

Swifter, higher, stronger. Also, better fed, better prepared, better trained and better coached, to say nothing of better equipped. Evolution in athletics is racing forward at an astonishing rate. Records in all major sports have been dropping at, well, record rates, and it's likely that the trend will continue in the next decade at a pace that will make record books obsolete as fast as they are compiled.

Dramatic advances in the science of weight training have giants such as Tim Duncan gliding down basketball courts like point guards; new methods of flexibility training have offensive linemen like the Rams' Orlando Pace moving with the kind of agility once associated only with swivel-hipped 195-pound halfbacks. And miracles in sports medicine have injured pitchers (who once would have been seeking careers as bartenders) coming back stronger than before. Toronto Blue Jays fireballer Billy Koch went out in 1997 with a torn elbow and came back in the lineup with a 100-mph fastball. The San Francisco 49ers' All Pro defensive tackle Bryant Young went down in 1998 with a devastating double break of his right tibia and fibula and last year won the NFL Comeback Player of the Year award.

Mark McGwire's shattering of Roger Maris' single-season home run record--the most famous record in American sports--gave us just a sampling of what's to come in team sports. Babe Ruth's mark of 60 stood for 34 years before Maris surpassed him in 1961 by a single homer--and not to start the asterisk argument all over again, but Maris needed eight extra games to do it. McGwire didn't just surpass Ruth's and Maris' totals, he obliterated them, and he didn't need eight extra games to do it. McGwire took a record that had stood for 37 years and was thought to be unbreakable and topped it by nine home runs.

There are those who simply can't accept such desecration when it comes to sacred numbers. They write off the boom in home runs to the decline of pitching (though today's pitcher is required to have a far more sophisticated array of pitches than in Babe Ruth's or Ted Williams' day) or "easy" ballparks (as if the Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field-style bandboxes of Ruth's day were more challenging), or even McGwire's controversial use of andro and creatine (as if McGwire, who hit 49 home runs in his rookie year, needed help to reach the fences). They are missing the point in a big way. McGwire was a good bet to break the record long before he had heard of creatine. And if he didn't break it, there are a great many others who could have. In fact, one other did--twice.

That two players, McGwire and the Chicago Cubs' Sammy Sosa, could have surpassed such a longstanding record by such wide margins is a vivid illustration of how quickly athletic performance is improving. There are those who take issue with the statement that today's athletes are better, but you can't quarrel with the fact that they're bigger. The average major league baseball player is nearly 15 pounds heavier now than his counterpart 30 years ago. The average NHL player is 18 pounds heavier. The average NBA player is 24 pounds heavier. And the average NFL player is 26 pounds bigger than his counterpart in 1969.

In other sports, the change is even more dramatic. In boxing, for instance, the Sixties began with Floyd Patterson holding the heavyweight boxing title. Patterson had won the crown in 1956 weighing in at 182 pounds. The previous champ was Rocky Marciano, who fought most of his career around 187. That was pretty consistent with the weights of fighters in boxing's biggest division: Most heavyweight champions were in the same 180-to-190 range as John L. Sullivan and James Corbett, the first two heavyweights to fight under modern rules. But the last seven men who have claimed the heavyweight title--Mike Tyson, Buster Douglas, Evander Holyfield, Michael Moorer, George Foreman, Riddick Bowe and Lennox Lewis--have averaged about 230 pounds, more than 40 pounds above the average of most men previously considered the best heavyweights ever. "If Jack Dempsey and Rocky Marciano were active today," says boxing writer Bert Randolph Sugar, "they wouldn't be heavyweight champs. They wouldn't be heavyweights at all. They'd be stuck in the cruiserweight division, boxing's limbo."

Tennis? Phenom Venus Williams outweighs former women's champ Chris Evert by almost 50 pounds. In fact, Williams nearly outweighs longtime men's champ Pete Sampras.

According to federal government statistics, the average U.S. citizen has grown nearly seven pounds heavier over the past 30 years. When it comes to professional athletics, however, evolution would seem to be on steroids. But Ball State's William Kraemer, one of the nation's leading experts on sports health and conditioning, thinks that the much-publicized use of illegal substances has little, if anything, to do with the new superathletes. "People who dwell on steroids are missing the point," says Kraemer. "Steroids are used by some athletes for a quick fix. That's not what the boom in sports performance is about. My guess is that if you got rid of every illegal steroid out there, it would have no impact on performance levels. The real point is that today's athletes are far stronger than in times past, and not just bigger but stronger pound for pound. They have also gained quickness, agility and endurance."

We all know why these athletes are bigger: Weight training has become a virtual science, with trainers and equipment tailored not only to specific sports but to individualized body types within each sport. But weights aren't the only reason today's athletes are bigger and stronger. Rich Tuten, strength and conditioning coach for the Denver Broncos, says weight training has always been a great part of professional sports, "but it didn't become a genuine science until trainers learned to combine it with flexibility and agility training. Remember the old phrase 'muscle-bound'? That's practically disappeared from the language, at least in terms of athletes. Some guys used to pump iron to the detriment of everything else; their muscles were so huge they were actually working against other muscles. They were overdeveloped. You don't see that today, at least not in pro sports. Nowadays, we stretch and pump in the same programs, and the result is athletes who are weapons."

Tuten should know. The 1998 and 1999 Super Bowl winners have one of the best offensive lines in the NFL, and they average out at 291 pounds. And (continued on page 160) (continued from page 114) that's one of the league's lighter front lines. The current NFL champion St. Louis Rams weigh in between tackle and tackle at over 300 pounds per man, and Rams strength coach Dana LeDuc predicts that within five years "every offensive line in the league will average over 300 pounds apiece." That is about 50 pounds heavier than the average NFL offensive line from the Lombardi era.

Weight training and diet have permanently changed the face of all sports. Track trainer John Smith says, "Just compare today's runners with, say, Jesse Owens. I'm not knocking the greats, who never had anything like the advantages current men and women have. Today's athletes are professionals. Sixty years ago, most athletes were part-timers. Jesse Owens might have been the greatest runner of all time, but if you plucked him out of 1936 and put him in a meet right now, he couldn't compete."

Bill Walton thinks you don't have to go back half that far to find players in his sport who couldn't make the cut today. "We just weren't that big and strong," Walton says of the previous generation of NBA players. "You didn't do weights back then. That was something football players did. Nowadays, they have weights that can make you jump higher." Walton may be referring to such miracles of modern technology as a machine used by the Chicago Bulls that enables a player to build the muscles involved in a vertical leap by carrying weights while jumping--but relieves the impact while coming down. "The stuff they have for players now," says Walton, "is like something out of 2001: A Space Odyssey. Teams that can't compete in the area of technology, training and rehab may just as well give it up."

In truth, the stuff they have for players now--whether at Ball State's Human Performance Laboratory or Dr. James Andrews' HealthSouth facility in Birmingham, Alabama or the Olympic Training Center ("the Gold Factory," as it's referred to by athletes training for the Olympics)--is far in advance of anything Stanley Kubrick envisioned.

And there seems to be no end in sight. Kraemer believes that the next frontier for athletics is identifying children's body types and determining which kids are best suited to which sports. "There's no reason," says Kraemer, "why a kid with, say, a basketball body type couldn't be helped along with training and diet specifically suited to what that sport demands." It would seem that we are a step away from being able to genetically produce our own Michael Jordans, Derek Jeters and Randy Mosses. Bill Russell once complained that today's athletes "have been on scholarships since the eighth grade." Within a decade or two, that might seem nostalgic; in another 20 years, eighth graders might be ready for the draft.

What's the limit to how fast someone can run or how much he can lift or how many home runs he can hit? As Bob Costas has said, "Two thousand years ago people were asking that question. And 2000 years from now, people will still be asking that question."

Track and Field

No area of athletics illustrates the dramatic increase in athletic proficiency better than track and field. One can argue about how much technology--e.g., fiberglass poles, athletic shoes--has helped athletes in particular sports, but what is undeniable is that current athletes have achieved feats that would have seemed unbelievable decades ago. In fact, not a single major world record established before 1980 remains unbroken. World records for events that were once thought unbreakable--for instance, Bob Beamon's famous 29' 2.5" long jump in the high, thin air of Mexico City during the 1968 Olympics--have tumbled at least once.

John Smith, who trains the World's Fastest Man, Maurice Greene, and Trevor Graham, who trains the World's Fastest Woman, Marion Jones, both predict that by the year 2010, not a single record established in track and field before 1990 will be left standing. "It used to be," says Smith, "that some records could last 20 years; now I'm seeing it shorten to near 10; I may live to see five."

Basketball

"Greatest athletes in the world," Boston Celtics coach Red Auerbach used to say when he watched his team run up and down the court. One can only wonder what he would have thought of today's giants who are, on average, 20 to 25 pounds heavier than the Auerbach Celtics and the teams they dominated. "The great players of 30 and 40 years ago were tall," says Miami coach Pat Ri-ley. "These guys today, they're big."

Actually, the great NBA stars of recent years--Charles Barkley, Hakeem Olaju-won and Karl Malone--"would have eaten up most of the guys at their positions 25 years ago," says Bob Costas.

They're also quick and versatile. "The game has never had so many huge, mul-titalented players," says Costas. "Michael Jordan and Scottie Pippen were so fast and so great on offense and defense that the Bulls didn't need that dominating guy in the center to win championships. They were too big and strong for good smaller players to handle and too quick for guys bigger than them."

What about the Twin Towers of the current NBA champs, the San Antonio Spurs?

"David Robinson and Tim Duncan are truly terrifying," says Costas. "What's scary isn't their height but how fast they are. They move like guards and forwards. In terms of all-round talent, the NBA can stop looking for the next Michael Jordan: His name is Tim Duncan."

Football

In no sport have the players changed so much in 50 years as in football. No sport is so specialized, and in no sport are bodies so customized. "Weight training goes beyond science," says Washington Redskins coach Russ Grimm. "It's more like an art." The art is called body sculpting. Different positions, from quarterback to wide receiver to linebacker, have different weight programs, conditioning programs, even diets. And unlike 30 years ago, conditioning is now considered a year-round activity. The money to be made is too great for players to show up for practice out of shape and complacent.

The result is players who are not only the most spectacular at their positions but who stay around long enough to set records. Nearly every major NFL record for quality and quantity is held by a current or recent player. Dan Marino, John Elway and Warren Moon are one, two and three in all-time passing yardage, and Jerry Rice has caught more passes for more yards and scored more touchdowns than any receiver in history. If Barry Sanders had played two more seasons and averaged about 95 yards per game, he'd have passed Walter Payton's career rushing total of 16,726 yards. And the same football factories that produced those guys have produced players--Randy Moss, Steve McNair, Eddie George--who will likely challenge and break the existing records.

Baseball

Forget the Golden Age of Baseball in the Twenties or Thirties or Fifties--the players in today's game are bigger, faster, stronger and more versatile than those in any other period in baseball history. Major league baseball's talent pool has never been larger; in the second half of the century it began drawing on black and then Latin talent and is now recruiting from Japan, Taiwan and Australia. Baseball may soon be mining Russia as well. And these athletes are, according to broadcaster and former big league catcher Tim McCarver, "in better shape now. Thirty, 40 years ago you'd see a lot of guys show up for spring training try-ing to get into shape. Now, thanks to better diets and the year-round use of home weights and exercise machines, they come to spring training already in shape. You see a lot more guys who look like they plan to make a career of it."

And what careers they make. Nearly all of the important records in baseball are held by current or recent players, including records for power (Mark McGwire's 70 home runs in one season), consistency (Pete Rose's 4256 hits), speed (Rickey Henderson's 1300-plus stolen bases) and pitching (Roger Clemens' six ERA titles, second only to Lefty Grove's nine titles, and Kerry Wood's 1998 mark of 12.6 strikeouts per nine innings). Babe Ruth's record of 714 home runs was surpassed by Hank Aaron in 1974, and Aaron's total of 755 is currently threatened by several hitters who have accumulated more home runs than Aaron by age 30 (he had 366). The best known of these, of course, is Ken Griffey Jr., who reached 350 faster than any other hitter. At his current pace, allowing for an inevitable slowdown near the end of the next decade, he'll reach 800 before he turns 40.

Today's game features more great players with more diverse talents than in any previous period. Hall of Famer Joe Morgan points to Boston's Nomar Garciaparra, Seattle's Alex Rodriguez and the Yankees' Derek Jeter, all shortstops, as examples of the new-model super baseball player. "Shortstops are supposed to be wiry, quick-moving types, the worst hitters on the team. They got jobs because they were great fielders."

But Garciaparra, Rodriguez and Jeter cover the field as well as any of the old-timers, and they hit with the power of first basemen. "It's scary because one of them might be the best ever. And we might not even know how good he'll be for another five years."