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Comment by dnackoul | Hacker News Reader

Finally, my first Hacker News comment!

In addition to equipment and rules changes, training and nutritional techniques have evolved quite a bit over the last century. NFL players, for example, used to smoke cigarettes at half time. All things equal, the modern athletes probably are better.

This is a really great topic and we have some relevant experience on our team. I'll see if I can rope one of them into giving a deeper answer or putting up a blog post.

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Here are two changes that I would like to see discussed:

- timing method (hand-clocked times apparently were a tiny bit faster)

- elasticity of the running surface (if you wonder why they added lanes to the track but kept six sprinters in each race: you go faster on an inelastic surface, but running on it is less comfortable, to the extent that doing a 5k run is too painful. So, the innermost lane is softer)

Timing and timing source accuracy was the first place my mind went to after seeing the animation. I believe that when I ran cross-country and track, decades ago, that the timings were tracked by hand, even at regional and state competitions (in my experience and to my knowledge).

Also there were not so much money involved, you couldn't make a living as an athlete. It was mostly for upper class who had enough free time to train.

Your post makes me think of that old picture of guys smoking during the Tour De France.

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