Sport Performance is Finite

"These traits [the athletic motto: 'faster, higher, stronger'] no longer increase, despite further continuous nutritional, medical and scientific progress."
"This suggests that modern societies have allowed our species to reach its limits. We are the first generation to become aware of this."
"The current declines in human capacities we can see today are a sign that environmental changes, including climate, are already contributing to the increasing constraints we now have to consider." 
"Now that we know the limits of the human species, this can act as a clear goal for nations to ensure that human capacities reach their highest possible values for most of the population. With escalating environmental constraints, this may cost increasingly more energy and investment in order to balance the rising ecosystem pressures. However, if successful, we then should observe an incremental rise in mean values of height, lifespan and most human biomarkers."
Professor Jean-Francois Toussaint, Paris Descartes University

There appears to be a plateau in the maximum biological limits for humans' height, age and physical abilities, and we seem to have reached it. Credit: © ChiccoDodiFC / Fotolia

"[The advances by superior athletes in running, swimming, jumping, cycling, weight-lifting, skiing and skating performances] considerably progressed, until the end of the 20th Century."
"[However, more recent data suggest] a trend toward a plateau during the last three decades for both sexes."
"Raising false hopes without taking into account that human beings are already extremely 'optimized' for lifespan seems inappropriate."
"The utmost challenge is now to maintain these indices at high levels."
French research team study

A study of 120 years worth of historical data suggest we've reached the biological limits of height, life expectancy and sporting performance     (Credit: vverve/Depositphotos)

Climate change, according to a recently published study, may be recognized as a factor leading to limitations of greater benefits in human health as well as in advancing athletic performances. The authors point to the fact that in some countries on the African continent there has been over the last decade a height decline in children, leaving the impression these countries have been incapable of providing sufficient nourishment to children. It would be interesting to determine whether those countries correlate with the African countries mired in endless conflict.

The 20th Century, point out the study's authors, life expectancy was seen to steadily rise by about 30 years in most high-income countries, attributable for the most part to a reduction in child mortality rates resulting from improved nutrition, hygiene, vaccination and related medical advances. However, according to the authors, improvements in medical outcomes may have reached their zenith, and they predict that additional increased expectations now have no basis in likely outcomes for the foreseeable future.

Organizers of sport events such as the Olympics might have to resort to other means to continue the impression that supreme athletes still break barriers in faster, higher, stronger -- in the creation of new record categories or the alteration of rules relating to various events. The plateau in impressive human endeavours in sport may in fact have already peaked without being realized because doping and technological improvements succeeded in leaving the impression that forward momentum was continuing, while it was really attributable to artificially advanced improvements.

As for increasing longevity, that too appears to have stalled, and has been addressed in other, earlier research results, though it remains a topic that many feel they have cause to disagree with. Yet it is a fact that the oldest person ever on record was France's Jeanne Calment who lived to 122. Since her death in 1977, no other person has lived beyond 120 years of age. The report's authors conclude that the effort to run faster and live longer may of practical necessity have to be abandoned and humankind will have to be satisfied with maintaining current levels of achievement and longevity.

There will, then, be no more events where outsized athletic performances will be enabled, to smash existing records.The study authors are firm in their conviction that their research which examined athletic performance, height and life expectancy throughout the past century (one hundred and twenty years) confirms the conclusion they reached through perusing historical records. Humans, it seems now confirmed, have reached their maximum horizon for height, age and physical capabilities.

Published in the journal Frontiers in Physiology, where the advances seen by Olympic athletes in various sports were judged against the findings that critical indices are now static, the study will no doubt dismay many who believe otherwise; no less the ambitious among high-achieving athletes hoping by their extreme prowess in athletic excellence, to lend their names to achieving astonishing new records. It is, evidently, not to be.

Weightlifters working out. / Reuters