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AS ADVANCES IN TRAINING, TECHNOLOGY AND TECHNIQUE CONTINUE, HOW CLOSE ARE WE TO
SETTING RECORDS THAT ARE IMPOSSIBLE TO BREAK?

By Adam Kilgore

and Emily Giambalvo

July 26, 2024 at 2:00 a.m.

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On a Saturday morning last month inside a hotel ballroom in Manhattan, Noah
Lyles opened the calculator app on his phone and reduced the outer boundary of
our species’ athletic performance to arithmetic.

Of the billions and billions of ambulatory human beings to grace this planet
over the past several millennia, Lyles has sprinted faster than all but two. He
is adamant that number will soon be zero. He typed in the number of seconds it
took Jamaica’s Usain Bolt to cover the first half of his world’s fastest
200-meter race. Lyles added his own time from the second half of his best 200.

“Why can’t I?” Lyles said. “Your body doesn’t know the history of the world.
Your mind knows that. If you turn your mind off and let your body just run, you
see amazing things happen.”

Noah Lyles hopes to break Usain Bolt’s record in the 200 meters. (Patrick
Smith/Getty Images)

At the Paris Olympics over the next three weeks, thousands of athletes will
compete to win medals and stand on podiums. A select handful, such as Lyles,
will be striving for something even greater. The Olympics are not only a
spectacle for determining the world’s best athletes. They are a quadrennial
window into the limits of human performance.

A Washington Post analysis of the progression of records in swimming and track
and field events illustrates the varying degrees technology, training and talent
have influenced both sports. It also shows what Lyles is up against: While
swimmers continue splashing through perceived boundaries, track records —
especially in short sprints — may be approaching the razor’s edge of
possibility.

Improved olympic records by men

How the times of Olympic champions have changed

In the men's sprint events in track, gold medal-winning times have plateaued.
Compared to 1972, none of the top marks in Tokyo was more than 4 percent faster.
In the men's 100-meter swimming races, winning times continue to improve.

+5%

Slower times

0%

400 meters

200 meters

100 meters

−5%

Backstroke

Freestyle

Butterfly

−10%

Breaststroke

Faster times

−15%

1970

'80

'90

'00

'10

'20

How the times of Olympic champions have changed

In the men's sprint events in track, gold medal-winning times have plateaued.
Compared to 1972, none of the top marks in Tokyo was more than 4 percent faster.
In the men's 100-meter swimming races, winning times continue to improve.

+5%

Slower times

0%

400 meters

200 meters

100 meters

−5%

Backstroke

Freestyle

Butterfly

−10%

Breaststroke

Faster times

−15%

1970

'80

'90

'00

'10

'20

How the times of Olympic champions have changed

In the men's sprint events in track, gold medal-winning times have plateaued.
Compared to 1972, none of the top marks in Tokyo was more than 4 percent faster.
In the men's 100-meter swimming races, winning times continue to improve.

+5%

Slower times

±0%

400 meters

200 meters

100 meters

−5%

Backstroke

Freestyle

Butterfly

−10%

Breaststroke

Faster times

−15%

1975

'80

'85

'90

'95

'00

'05

'10

'15

'20

Improved olympic marks by women

The improvement in winning times in the women's swimming 100-meter races is
particularly stark compared to the relatively stagnant times in the women's
sprint events in track.

+5%

Slower times

0%

200 meters

100 meters

−5%

400 meters

−10%

Freestyle

Breaststroke

Butterfly

Faster times

Backstroke

−15%

1970

'80

'90

'00

'10

'20

Source: Olympedia

The improvement in winning times in the women's swimming 100-meter races is
particularly stark compared to the relatively stagnant times in the women's
sprint events in track.

+5%

Slower times

0%

200 meters

100 meters

−5%

400 meters

−10%

Freestyle

Breaststroke

Butterfly

Faster times

Backstroke

−15%

1970

'80

'90

'00

'10

'20

Source: Olympedia

The improvement in winning times in the women's swimming 100-meter races is
particularly stark compared to the relatively stagnant times in the women's
sprint events in track.

+5%

Slower times

0%

200 meters

100 meters

−5%

400 meters

−10%

Freestyle

Breaststroke

Butterfly

Faster times

Backstroke

−15%

1975

'80

'85

'90

'95

'00

'05

'10

'15

'20

Source: Olympedia

The pursuit of peak athleticism has obsessed competitors, riveted fans and
fascinated scientists. The imperative to extend human progress is embedded in
the Olympic motto: “Faster, higher, stronger,” not fastest, highest, strongest.
“The record stands as a symbolic message of human greatness and infinite
possibility,” Norwegian philosopher Sigmund Loland wrote in a 1998 paper.

The possibilities will be infinite for only so long. In sports measured by a
clock, there is a logical threshold. Because it is categorically unfeasible for
a human to run 100 meters in less than one second, the limit exists somewhere
between there and Bolt’s current 9.58-second record. Researchers have studied,
speculated and theorized about the boundary humans cannot surpass — and how
close we may be to it.

“I don’t know what the threshold is,” said retired swimmer Janet Evans, a
four-time Olympic gold medalist. “That’s why we’re so intrigued with all of
this. How fast can someone run the 100 meters? How fast can someone swim the 50
meter? Let’s see how far we can go. It’s kind of why we do it.”

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The answer depends not only on physiology but also sociology and technology.
Compared with decades ago, more potentially elite athletes from more corners of
the globe are receiving the opportunities and resources to compete at an elite
level. Experience and the connective power of the internet have created massive
leaps in coaching and the selection of athletes to sports that best suit their
skills and body types. Specialization and optimization reign.

Setting aside the specter of performance-enhancing drugs, athletes have pushed
limits through advances in equipment and training science. Jesse Owens ran on a
cinder track and used a garden tool to dig holes to place his feet at the start
of a race. Mark Spitz swam without goggles. Athletes have evolved alongside
innovation.

“It’s part of who we are as a species to push limits and to push beyond what we
think we’re capable of doing,” University of Oregon physiology professor Brad
Wilkins said. “It’s probably part of why our species survived as a species —
because we were driven to go further and build things and do things our
Neanderthal counterparts weren’t able to do. I do believe a human is limited.
But humans are not.”

History is littered with cases of humanity applying, and then exceeding,
artificial restrictions.

Swimmers shattered records in 2008 and 2009 while wearing suits the sport’s
governing body banned soon thereafter. “I thought maybe we were pushing the
limits,” legendary coach Bob Bowman said. “Maybe that was it.” But many of those
records have since fallen, and in three-quarters of swimming events, the gold
medal-winning time in Tokyo in 2021 was faster than it was at the Beijing Games
in 2008. Similarly, in the 1950s, people predicted a runner would die if he ran
a mile in four minutes before Roger Bannister broke the barrier. Today, top high
school runners routinely clock four-minute miles, and the world record is 3
minutes 43.13 seconds.

“It’s taken 70 years to get there,” British physiology professor Andrew Jones
said. “I don’t imagine we’ll be 17 seconds faster again in another 70 years. The
rate of progression must naturally slow down. It’s as much as for an artist as a
scientist to imagine what that limitation might be.”

Sha'Carri Richardson runs in the 100 meters at the U.S. Olympic trials. (Patrick
Smith/Getty Images)


SEARCHING FOR THE UNBREAKABLE BARRIER

In its December 2008 issue, Journal of Experimental Biology published an article
with this title: “Limits to running speed in dogs, horses and humans.” It was
written by a Stanford marine biologist named Mark Denny who had set out to test
a theory. He expected to find the rate of world records correlated with human
population. “In my lifetime, human population has more than tripled,” Denny
said. Breaking barriers, he assumed, was strictly a matter of probability.

“Well,” Denny said, “the stats don’t show that.”

Denny took a novel approach. He mined data on thoroughbred horses and racing
greyhound dogs. Starting in the 1960s and ’70s, he said, their performance had
plateaued. As breeders pushed for greater speed, the traits that made the
animals faster also made them too fragile.


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“They just break,” Denny said. “At some point, humans are going to run into the
same thing.”

Denny paired the data from racing animals with reams of track and field official
records. With no consideration for mechanics or physiology, he created a model
that predicted when the curve for humans would match the animals’ speed plateau.
For every major track distance, both men and women, he affixed what he asserted
were the fastest times humans would ever be able to run.

The absolute 100 meters, his analysis showed, was 9.48 seconds. The women’s 800?
It would never be run faster than 1:50.83. In the more than 15 years since
Denny’s paper was published, just one of his absolute records has been
surpassed: Four women, led by Tigst Assefa’s 2:11:53 in 2023, have run a
marathon faster than 2:14:57. Denny pointed at a relative dearth of data from
the era when competitive women’s marathons were rarely held.

“Things that on two legs versus four legs, things that weigh half a ton versus
things that weigh 30 to 40 pounds, it says that there’s something going on here
that is universal, at least among mammals,” Denny said. “It confirmed that
humans just aren’t exceptional when it comes to athletic performance.”

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Denny roots for athletes to break the absolute records, and he acknowledged his
consideration of statistics alone made the article, sophisticated as it may be,
mostly “fun with numbers.”

The physiological approach to determining a limit is multifaceted. At the
highest level, even physics constrains humans. “The faster you go, the greater
is the retarding force of the air resistance,” Jones said. “If you can improve
your power by a couple of percent, that doesn’t mean you go a couple of percent
faster.”

Peter Weyand, the director of Texas Christian University’s Locomotor Performance
Laboratory, specializes in studying sprint speed. He refers to sprinters as
“force application machines.” For something we do without thinking about,
locomotion is remarkably complex, a tangle of bodily systems working in unison.
What speed distills down to is how hard a sprinter can strike the ground
relative to his weight.


Sydney McLaughlin-Levrone set a world record in the women’s 400-meter hurdles
during the final day of the U.S. Olympic trials. (Photos by Patrick Smith/Getty
Images and Christian Petersen/Getty Images)

Sprinters control two variables: the time their foot stays on the ground and the
force their muscles apply to the ground. The only way to shrink that time is to
apply greater force. If Weyand knows a sprinter’s contact time and the length of
his leg, he can predict with uncanny accuracy how fast he is running. He is
hesitant, though, to place a number on the fastest possible combination.

“Is it faster than the current world record? Of course it is,” Weyand said.
“Bolt already did that, and there’s no such thing as a perfect race. Bolt on his
perfect day could have run faster than 9.58. How much faster? I don’t know.”

The factors that limit sprinters differ from those that limit distance runners.
Endurance performance is fundamentally governed by an athlete’s maximal oxygen
uptake, called VO2 max — how much oxygen a person can use during exercise. An
athlete’s VO2 max is analogous to a car’s engine size. Training can improve it —
but only to a point. The highest VO2 max, which measures milliliters of oxygen
consumed per minute per kilogram, ever recorded for a man is 97.5.

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“It’s hard to imagine how or why we would have higher values than that in 10 or
20 years, at least naturally,” Jones said.

In a 1991 paper, Michael Joyner studied elite distance runners and determined
the best possible VO2 max, lactate threshold and running economy. If a runner
could achieve all three at the same time, he stated, the fastest possible
marathon would be 1:57:58. Joyner, an expert in human performance at the Mayo
Clinic, still sticks to his calculation, with the actual record currently at
2:00:35.

“Right now, we’re seeing a lot of world records being set or broken primarily
due to technology first, sociology second,” Joyner said. “And I don’t think the
athletes are physically better than they were 20 years ago.”

Swimmers prepare for the 800-meter freestyle final at the U.S. Olympic trials in
June. (Grace Hollars/IndyStar/USA Today Network)


FINDING BETTER WAYS TO BE FASTER

In analyzing the progression of athletic achievement, two sports that use a
clock, fixed distances and minimal equipment beg for comparison. The data makes
it clear: Top performances in running have plateaued compared with swimming. In
the past decade, swimming world records have been broken 43 percent more often
per event than in individual Olympic track races.

The best Olympic performances highlight faster progress in swimming. In
individual track races, none of the Tokyo Olympic champions in 2021 won with a
time more than 6 percent faster than the 1972 Olympic champion. Meanwhile, every
individual swimming gold medalist in Tokyo posted a time at least 7 percent
faster than the 1972 champions; in 10 events, they were at least 10 percent
faster.

Swimmers, like runners and throwers, have benefited from technological advances:
better suits, improved pool gutters that reduce turbulence, deeper pools that
allow faster swims. But experts see the difference between the sports lying in
the utilization of technique.



“Swimming is such an unnatural thing for humans — land-based creatures — that
I’d say humans in water are still evolving,” American Swimming Coaches
Association adviser Russell Mark said. “We’re still learning. We’re still
figuring out best practices and best things to do. Running has evolved ever
since people have existed. We’ve had a lot of time to perfect it.”

At last year’s world championships, Frenchman Leon Marchand shattered the last
record Michael Phelps held, a 400-meter individual medley time that had stood
since 2008. Marchand weaponized underwater kicking, which Bowman said is the
feature “that’s probably having the most impact now” in swimming technique.
“That’s Leon’s thing. That’s something we’re just starting really to
understand.”

It’s not that individual runners can’t improve their form — Lyles’s rigorous
work on his starting technique has enabled him to take aim at Bolt. But today’s
runners can’t reinvent form the way Marchand has.

“If you can find people who have freakish genetics, that’s great,” Jones said.
“On the nurture side, I’m not sure there’s much more we can do in terms of
training.”



Swimming’s capacity for improvement may only grow as data-tracking technology
improves. Track coaches already use motion-capture sensors that send immediate,
granular data — the angles of joints, velocity out of the blocks, foot contact
time on the ground — to a coach’s iPad. Swimming is scratching the surface of
how similar devices could help athletes, for exactly the reason one would
expect.

“Water is undefeated,” said Mike Levine, the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic
Committee’s director of performance innovation. “Sensors come off. They’re
permeated by water, so they just break.”

Regan Smith waves to the crowd after setting a world record in the 100-meter
backstroke at the U.S. Olympic trials in Indianapolis. (Grace
Hollars/IndyStar/USA Today Network)


IT’S GOTTA BE THE SHOES? WELL …

The idea that technology is pushing forward human performance is not new. “I’ll
tell you why men are running 100 yards faster today than they did years ago,”
Jim Thorpe wrote in an article published in the Rotarian in 1940. “It’s not that
one human body is more perfect than the other. It is the outside factors.”

It is not difficult to find experts who believe that human performance on its
own has peaked and that improvements have derived from technology that supports
performance, whether in competition or training.

“If you were to put that group of people from the ’50s and put them in the
conditions with the technology and the time that the other athletes have been at
this today, and the strategies they’ve been using throughout their careers, I
think we would see the same times,” said Wilkins, the Oregon physiology
professor. “I don’t think humans in particular have adapted in any way between
the 1950s and now to have some fundamental changes in their physiology.”

In a 2014 speech, author David Epstein described a biomechanical study designed
by sports scientist Ross Tucker. Based on the speed of Owens’s joints, the study
showed that if Owens — with the training and nutrition available in 1936 — ran
on the same track as Bolt, he would have finished a single stride behind Bolt on
the day of his world record 100-meter sprint. In 1981, without modern suit
technology, modern pool design or even goggles, Mary T. Meagher swam the
200-meter butterfly in 2:05.96, a time that would have advanced her to the
Olympics at this year’s U.S. trials.

Is Jamaica's Usain Bolt, bottom, a superior runner to Jesse Owens, top, or is
the gap between their times illustrative of differences in equipment and
training? (Photos by Keystone/Hulton Archive/Getty Images and Fabrice
Coffrini/Agence France-Presse/Getty Images)

“People have been training as hard as possible, at least some of them, since the
1950s and certainly since the ’60s,” Joyner said. “Their lab values show that
they’re not any different from what we see today. So what’s happened? The races
happen at the best times. The tracks are way, way better. People have longer
careers — remember, it was amateur hour.

“Go watch Bob Hayes run 10 flat on a dirt track. And he was 21 years old, and he
was playing football. What do you think Bob Hayes could do if he was training
full time for track, not getting beat up in the fall?”

If humans have been capable of running the same times for generations, it raises
a thorny set of questions with no clear answers. Is a world record a celebration
of human achievement or a marker in the progress of human innovation? Is it a
feat of physical prowess or scientific advancement? Do technological advances
allow athletes to express the full extent of their talent, or do they enable
performances that, even if fully ethical, humans could not naturally access? Is
technology a platform or a crutch?

One pursuit explored and exposed those questions: the Breaking2 project, Nike’s
attempt to engineer a marathon completed in less than two hours.

In 2016, Nike signed world record Kenyan marathoner Eliud Kipchoge and two
others to contracts that made them the hub of a performance experiment. A team
of engineers, scientists and physiologists — including Wilkins and Jones —
designed ideal conditions for a private race with the goal of breaking a
two-hour marathon.

Eliud Kipchoge is a generational marathon runner, but his shoe, the Nike
Vaporfly, changed distance running forever. (Photos by Pier Marco Tacca/Getty
Images)

Breaking2 implemented a dividing line: Any technology that introduced energy
into the runners’ system would be prohibited. Technology that prevented the
dissipation of energy within their system would be permitted.

“Technologies that remove barriers and allow us to reach our true potential, I
do not consider doping,” Wilkins said. “I consider that our natural way of
performing and optimizing our own true potential.”

Runners ran around Kipchoge in an arrowhead formation to reduce wind resistance.
A car drove in front of the runners with a clock mounted on the roof, keeping a
constant pace.

The most lasting effect came from the shoes Kipchoge wore. The Nike Vaporfly
would change distance running forever. The combination of a thick foam sole and
a carbon plate created a springlike effect and made runners naturally more
economical. Wearing the shoe reduced runners’ energy costs by 4 percent, Jones
said, a remarkable gain in efficiency.

Middle-distance and distance records have been rearranged. In the women’s 5,000
meters, as one example, Ethiopian Tirunesh Dibaba’s 2008 record of 14:11.15
lasted more than 12 years. Since 2020, four runners have surpassed her time,
with countrywoman Gudaf Tsegay lowering the record last year to 14.00.21 — an
11-second plummet in three years after a dozen years of stagnancy.

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In swimming, high-tech suits that increased buoyancy and reduced drag upended
records in 2008 and 2009 before the sport’s governing bodies banned them. They
still show how technology can be powerful even when it can’t be used in
competition. In 2016, as Phelps prepared for the Rio de Janeiro Olympics, he
struggled with his underwater kicking technique. Nothing solved the problem
until Bowman unearthed a banned full-body suit that Phelps had worn in 2008.

“As soon as he did a fast thing in that suit, he was like, ‘Now I remember,’”
Bowman said. “It really impacted his swimming when he took the suit off. He
could really get a feel for what it was like to be that fast and have that
motion. The suit gave him that proprioception.”

At the conclusion of the Breaking2 project, Kipchoge finished the race in
2:00:25, falling less than half a minute short. In a similar exhibition in 2019,
he broke the two-hour barrier.

At the 2023 Chicago Marathon, Kenyan Kelvin Kiptum reset the official record to
2:00:35, just 10 seconds slower than Kipchoge’s first sub-two-hour attempt. That
time, many who worked on the Breaking2 project believe, was made possible by
Kipchoge showing what could be done.

“It’s not your legs that run,” Kipchoge once told Wired magazine. “It’s your
heart and your mind.”

Noah Lyles has dreamed of pushing limits since his high school days. (Jonathan
Newton/The Washington Post)


ALL RECORDS START WITH A VISION

Lyles first decided he could sprint 200 meters faster than anyone ever when he
was a freshman at T.C. Williams (now Alexandria City) High. At a district meet
at Lake Braddock High, Lyles won the 200 in 21.2 seconds. The time fulfilled his
goal of shaving one second each year. His mother had also been a sprinter, and
one of her old track coaches called Lyles and asked, “Do you realize that the
time you just ran was the exact time Usain was running at your age?”

“I didn’t realize this goal I had set was such a high standard compared to
everything else and everybody else that has gone on this path before me,” Lyles
said. “At that moment it was like, ‘Okay, if I’m going after this goal, I’m
going to have to get myself into the mindset that I’m going to have to attempt
things from this age on that nobody has ever seen or even done.’”

For those with the physiological baseline necessary, trying to extend human
performance also demands a psychological requirement. Lyles inspires himself
through outlandish bombast. Phelps focused on the granular.

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In 2003, Phelps muddled through the first two days of a midseason meet in Santa
Clara, Calif., not even bothering to shave his leg hair. On the final day,
Bowman sensed him perk up. As Phelps warmed up, Bowman gave Phelps target times
for each leg of the 200-meter individual medley. Phelps started doing the math.

“That’s faster than the world record,” Phelps told him.

“So?” Bowman replied.

Phelps swam the race in 1:57.94, which broke a record that had stood for nearly
nine years.

“It’s more a focus on maximizing what they can bring to the table,” Bowman said.
“If they have talent and they’re well-trained and all these other things happen,
that pushes them past these records. The records are kind of a nice milestone
and a nice validation of the process.”

Before he first broke the shot put world record, Ryan Crouser had been throwing
past the mark in practice for three years. At least five times, he arrived at a
track meet certain that “the world record was in the bag,” he said. “And then I
would get there. I would get a little bit tight. I wasn’t relaxed. You get a
little bit of tension, you don’t hit those same positions.”

For Ryan Crouser, breaking the shot put world record was a mental barrier as
much as a physical one. (Photos by Patrick Smith/Getty Images and Charlie
Neibergall/AP)

At the 2021 U.S. Olympic trials, Crouser surpassed a mark that had stood for 31
years. With that weight lifted, Crouser broke it again in 2023, at a midseason
meet. The men’s discus record stood for nearly 38 years until it fell this
spring, and no man has broken a world record in the javelin since 1996 or the
hammer throw since 1986. Apart from Swedish pole vaulter Mondo Duplantis, who
has upped the world record by a centimeter eight different times (which
maximizes financial bonuses), men’s jumps have had a similar dearth in records.

Humans can be confounding creatures. In the 100-meter final of the 2008
Olympics, as he left his competitors in his wake, Bolt peeked over his shoulder
and spread his arms in celebration with roughly 20 meters left. He lowered the
world record to 9.69 seconds, but Denny believes he could have matched — if not
beaten — 9.48 seconds.

“It’s so many little things like that that are going to set these things — not
just performance but mental behavior as well,” Denny said”

Lyles rejected the very idea of a limit. Presented with the premise that a
sprinter will never run 100 meters in, say, five seconds, Lyles wondered what
humans could accomplish an eon from now. He was then asked how much further
Bolt’s 200-meter record could be pushed.

“I plan to run 18.6 by the time I leave,” Lyles said. “Or at least that’s the
idea I’m going to have in my head. I just want it to be so that it’s not going
to be broken for 1,000 years.”

Lyles had not read Denny’s article. If he had, he would have seen the
scientist’s prediction produced for the fastest possible 200-meter race: 18.63
seconds.

Zach Ziemek wins the decathlon 100 meters during U.S. Olympic trials. (Patrick
Smith/Getty Images)


FOR ATHLETES, IT’S ABOUT THE CHASE

When Denny’s paper was published, the prevailing response he received was anger
at the notion of a human limit.

“People were upset with the thought that you could watch the Olympics and nobody
was going to break the world record,” Denny said. “With things that are
measurable, I think people just have it in their head that records were meant to
be broken, and they will always be broken. Logically, that can’t be true.”

Extended to the logical extreme, humans reaching their limit warps the nature of
competition. First one human would reach the limit, then another and then
another. Over enough generations, the 100-meter final at the Olympics would end
up consisting of nine sprinters who run the same speed with no realistic chance
to run faster.

Even in such a dystopian scenario, the act of training and competing would
remain profoundly human. When the first Breaking2 project ended, Wilkins left
with a changed perspective. It had nothing to do with training or technology. It
was about how Kipchoge lived.

Kipchoge, a multimillionaire with access to cutting-edge training science, lived
away from his family for months with his partners in a minimalist house. They
did their own cooking, washed their own shoes and took turns cleaning the camp.
They didn’t use the GPS watches they were given.

“Eliud almost put himself in a condition where he had to suffer because he knew
that suffering was the path to becoming more mentally prepared and more
physically prepared to perform these really amazing feats,” Wilkins said. “In my
mind — maybe this is just a story I tell myself — it’s all about suffering and
knowing that’s the way you’re going to be better.”

Unsettling as an end point to human performance may be, the futile effort to
advance beyond it confers a certain honor. To struggle against inevitability,
after all, is merely a feature of the human condition. The real point is to try.

Alaysha Johnson looks skyward after placing second in the 100-meter hurdles at
the U.S. Olympic trials. (Patrick Smith/Getty Images)
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By the Numbers: The Post at the Paris Olympics

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ABOUT THIS STORY

Graphics by Álvaro Valiño and Emily Giambalvo. Design and development by Tyler
Remmel. Photo editing by Toni L. Sandys. Graphics editing by Samuel Granados.
Design editing by Madison Walls and Virginia Singarayar. Editing by Matt Rennie,
Meghan Hoyer and Joe Tone. Copy editing by Ella Brockway. Project editing by
Lori McCue.

Photos at top by Patrick Smith/Getty Images, Michael Conroy/Associated Press and
Al Bello/Getty Images.

METHODOLOGY

The Post analyzed Olympic results from olympedia.org. Historical world record
data for track and field is from World Athletics, and the same data for
swimming, as well as the all-time top performances lists, is from USA Swimming.
In general, only individual events that will be contested at the Paris Olympics
were included in the analysis. The Post’s analysis is current as of July 15.

Analysis of swimming performances does not include open water events. In the
women’s 100 meters at the 2000 Olympics, the gold medalist admitted to using
performance-enhancing drugs, but her gold medal was not awarded to the
second-place finisher. The bronze medalist was elevated to silver, so there are
two silver medalists. The Post’s analysis of gold medal-winning times includes
the best mark of the two silver medalists.

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156 Comments
Adam KilgoreAdam Kilgore covers national sports for The Washington Post.
Previously, he served as The Post's Washington Nationals beat writer from 2010
to 2014.@adamkilgorewp
Emily GiambalvoEmily Giambalvo is a sports reporter focusing on data-driven
projects with the enterprise and investigations team.@EmilyGiam


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