How fast can a human possibly run 100 meters?
bigthink.com
bigthink.com
The heavy lifting seems to be done by the study linked in the "anatomical studies suggest peak speeds up to 15.6-17.9 m/s (35-40 mph) are achievable" line. I'm not sure where those exact numbers were pulled from - I can't find them with a cmd+f. One line in the study uses some nearby numbers:
> If, for simplicity, we assume no change in contact lengths or the minimum aerial times needed to reposition the swing limbs at top speed, the average and greatest individual top speed hopping forces (Favg) of 2.71 and 3.35 Wb would allow top running speeds of 14.0 and 19.3 m/s and of 50 and 69 km/h, respectively
But the study concludes that, even though our leg extensor muscles can produce much higher maximum forces than those generated during sprinting, the "contact length" imposes a constraint on these "hopping forces":
> Because humans have limbs of moderate length and cannot gallop, they lack similar options for prolonging periods of foot-ground force application to attain faster sprinting speeds at existing contact time minimums. Consequently, human running speeds in excess of 50 km/h are likely to be limited to the realms of science fiction and, not inconceivably, gene doping.
So the craziness of the original estimate seems to follow from on a misreading of that study.
It’s only useful for going downhill quickly which we’ve all subconsciously or perhaps even mindfully done.
From your link:
> Gallopers exerted that effort unevenly, with the front leg doing more work than the back leg. And the galloping stride, researchers saw, demanded more from the hips than running did.
This tired people out quickly. Out of 12 treadmill gallopers in the study, 4 gave up before the end of their 4-minute session, complaining of fatigue and stress in their hips and thighs.
(An intended 13th galloper couldn't figure out how to gallop on the treadmill belt in the first place.)
When researchers calculated their subjects' metabolic rates, they found that galloping was about 24% more costly than running at the same speed. In other words, galloping burns up more energy, takes more effort, and is less comfortable than running.
It's no wonder we don't usually opt for it
Yes, we don't because it's not great, but that's not the same as not being able to. (This is very pedantic sorry, it's just a stronger claim than it needs to be which bothers me).
Also, I wonder if that changes if you have very uneven leg lengths?
Mechanically it seems like the advantage would be using more muscles and being able to take advantage of your core and upper body when pushing off in addition to the legs. landing seems like it would be a challenge as fingers aren’t really made for that.
Unfortunately, a linear extrapolation implies that at some time, the bipedal 100m will take negative time…
Imagine a slinky, but more elastic and with better roll.
I followed the link and it just said
> If you're looking for the specifics to snap a piece of your skeleton, it takes about 4,000 newtons of force to break the typical human femur.
So the sprinters are already producing that much force (900 pounds) and the 1300 notion seems unsupported. Not to mention that applying the force with different amounts of torque might not break the bone, since bones are 10x stronger in compression so can withstand a lot more force longitudinally.
From your quotes, there seems to be an important difference: in the first quote they talk about "ideal human leg bones" and in the second one about a "typical human femur".
I'm certain that an elite sprinter blessed in genetics has leg bones significantly stronger than the average human. Bones also get stronger from repetitive exercise.
Even if it isn’t, there are so many ways to measure breaking strength that it’s unlikely the two cases are perfectly comparable.
I recall reading once that a pitcher's right arm had quite a bit more bone in it than his left.
Ray Williams weighed 190.4kg for his https://www.openpowerlifting.org/m/usapl/2019-03-02
Also so sorry, I got the meet wrong but the year right. It was the 2019 USAPL Arnold SBD Pro American
There you are, running your heart out, and some guy walks right past you.
I'm 60 now, but in my 40s I was a moderately good marathon-to-ultramarathon runner, and with a little bit of speedwork training, I managed to run a 5:30 track mile. That's not even fast - I had friends of the same age who could run 4:30.
It is truly remarkable what the human body can do - the world record for the marathon involves running 26.2 miles faster per mile than I could ever run 1 mile.
But if you can't sprint faster than 4mph for a few seconds, that's fine but it's not indicative of "at your age". Unless you have some actual health issue that prevents it, I would very surprised if you were incapable of hitting 6mph for a mile with some training, and a lot of people would not find it tremendously hard to hit 6.5-7mph if they had the time and motivation to train.
Say, 2:10 (130 minutes) over 26.2 miles is a 4:58 mile pace.
The current world record seems to be 2:00:35, which is like a 4:36 mile pace.
Sometimes footage of elite level long distance running events shows fans trying to follow the runners on bicycle. It looks quite astonishing and ridiculous at the same time.
Just like in the NBA many players travel all the time, but it just isn't called.
Yes, obviously it’s just a silly way to run, if “run” is “move fast on foot”.
It’s just that “race walking” is fewer words than “a silly way to run where you have to keep one foot on the ground always.”
i'm half his weight and change. yet he would be faster than me.
halftime in baseball?! :P
It seems like when the freeze is beaten, he is beaten by a hardcore amateur:
> Was the Region 6-AA Champion for finishing first in the 5k in 2010… Finished third in the state in the 5k in a time of 17:46.66 during the 2010 season.
https://ksuowls.com/sports/mens-track-and-field/roster/parke...
https://www.fox5atlanta.com/news/new-dad-atlanta-braves-supe...
At ~160m, (similar to the 200m), at-pace speed for the pro is already all-out for the average person.
Do the BOTEC yourself, you'll see.
Couldn't find the link but here is a similar video of people (mostly amateur runners) trying to match a 2h marathon time for two minutes:
That's unbelievable to imagine honestly, someone on a bike going as fast as they can and this guy sprinting past them
But it's reality
Reaching those speeds on level ground doesn't seem possible for a normal human, but level ground is rare.
I think if we're talking about how fast you can get your bike to go, flat land, still air is implied. I don't have a lot of those conditions to try, but I'm happy to cruise around 15, and maybe push it to 20 if I don't need to save my energy for a nearby hill.
I used to be a back-of-the-front-of-the-pack triathlete, with a previous history as an ultramarathon and touring cyclist. In my best shape (probably aged around 46), I was training on a flat loop course with some younger very strong but not professional cyclists where we would generally pull the group at 28mph for about between 20-60 seconds at a time.
I appreciate that there's a distance between that sort of thing and an "average person", but it's not a whole lot larger than the distance between the people who were in the group and, say, professional tour cyclists.
People like Bolt should be compared with bike sprinters, who top out at around 45mph.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/World_record_progression_track...
edit to add the Tokyo Olympics qualifiers all under 10 seconds: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cycling_at_the_2020_Summer_Oly...
It’s awe inspiring. His times are just so fast, and over hilly terrain in the heat, for day after day.
A friend of mine had a low speed crash on his bike, and knocked his front teeth out. After that, both he and I bought full face helmets.
When I ride dirt bikes, I wear a full set of armor. I look like a storm trooper. But I've crashed many times, and was unhurt. The armor is worth every penny. (The only way to learn how to ride a dirt bike is by crashing it.)
also low speed crashes can be worse than high speed because it's worse to hit and stick vs hit and slide.
Personally would argue these guys do this same sprint/distance so many times in practice/competition that they generally implicitly know when they're running a WR type time and generally don't slack off (in this video he's not in any threat of being caught but still presses on for the WR).
This is obviously dangerous, but the truck was going slow; slow enough that if it slammed on the brakes, I would have been able to react (and failing that, not get badly hurt).
It was a strange sensation. It took effort to pedal up to the tailgate, but then you feel the effort drop off, as if you went over an invisible ridge.
They are usually speed limited to below what a road bike travels at, but in bad weather they are very useful windbreaks.
Today, I regularly see e-bikes and scooters easily keeping up with traffic that is moving upward of 50 km/h.
If there are still e-things on the market today with speed limitations not related to their power capacity, people must be easily working around those limits somehow, with firmware patches or secret codes or what have you.
Most of the stuff comes from China, which is an uncontrollable entity that doesn't care about regulations in North America and elsewhere.
Where I am the max speed is 32kmh by regulation.
https://www.nzta.govt.nz/walking-cycling-and-public-transpor...
He utilizes the hex-bar deadlift.
He has his football athletes complete the concentric phase (picking up from the ground) as fast as possible.
They just drop the weight when they reach full extension at the top.
He claims that the eccentric phase (lowering) is when all of the micro-muscle tears occur. These tears cause muscle growth.
By dropping the hex-bar deadlift weight at the top, instead of lowering, you get most of the strength gain, without the muscle size growth.
This is an effort to increase leg strength (for speed) without adding additional body weight.
Getting faster by getting stronger but staying lighter.
I know Greg Nuckols from StrongerByScience believes this is mostly caused by lifters, especially untrained lifters which most of the research is on, having spent less time in eccentric phases so there is more opportunity for growth there, but it will eventually plateau.
* Can the misconception that micro-muscle tears cause growth just die? We already know since 90s that it’s the myonuclei addition driven by muscle tension.
* There is no strength gain without muscle gain. There is not a single mechanism recorded that would drive this behavior.
* This post made me angry on so many fucking levels. Hex-bar deadlift is at least a good choice for legs due to its lower load on lumbar.
* Finally, it’s the concentric that drives most of the hypertrophy. Not eccentric. It’s why you see gym bros and most IFBB pros (gear aside) disregard eccentric control and hammer the concentric. Because that’s the movement that drives the growth.
* Eccentric cause most fatigue (many types) and lowering slower on purpose would hinder recovery times (and growth as well since the relationship between the two exists)
This doesn't add up to me, it seems like it doesn't account for the impact of a "trained" nervous system vs. an "untrained" nervous system, skeletal biomechanics, and a whole host of other factors.
Maybe given an ideal muscle in a perfect vacuum, size == strength, but that is not the world we live in.
I don’t think the research stands up.
I expect it moves the estimate down by less than the 100 ms record beat, though. That's how converging to a true minimum tends to work (at least, like I said before, in the purely statistical modeling sense which is never quite as strong as a detailed micro-model).
There are probably a half dozen micro-model effects even non-experts could rattle off that have "trended" over the decades from your shoes & surfaces to various aspects of population diet, young-in-life identification / more-optimized-maturation conditions and on & on. Statisticians call this a "non-stationary sampling process" meaning the independent & identically distributed (IID) assumption is at best a weak approximation and at worst totally misleading.
Ways to measure how much evidence there is that IID / other distributional assumptions are failing do exist { such as some of the ones here: https://github.com/c-blake/fitl/blob/main/fitl/gof.nim and referenced at the bottom of https://github.com/c-blake/bu/blob/main/doc/edplot.md (at the stage where one "plots / pools together multiple data points into some kind of "sample" with a "distribution") }. Sadly, few test such assumptions (which are rarely truly comprehensive anyway) and even small departures from modeling assumptions may lead to relatively large errors in estimates. E.g., the linked to Einmahl 2009/2010 research states this as an assumption to apply the ideas, but then shows no test of that assumption on the used data.
https://www.cold-takes.com/this-cant-go-on/
And I think it is smart to prepare yourself for when the world realizes that stuffing money into stocks can’t give 10% every year forever. And all hell will break loose because that is what our whole world is currently built upon. I don’t know when that will happen, but mathematically we can prove that it must happen eventually.
> if the economy were 3*1070 times as big as today's, and could only make use of 1070 (or fewer) atoms, we'd need to be sustaining multiple economies as big as today's entire world economy per atom
What kind of argument is that? Sounds like someone had an idea and went looking for evidence to support it.
> mathematically we can prove that it must happen eventually
Please explain, and not using a reasoning comparing dollars to atoms
The rule of 72 says at 10% per year (historical returns in the stock market for the past 100 years) means you are doubling the value of the stock market every 7.2 years. Things like economies can't grow like that and if you are questioning why it's because you and I grew up in this era where they could for a brief blinking in time. Human reproduction is slowing, we've harvested all the low hanging fruit, "free" land is all taken. I feel like we are probably at the part of the 100m dash curve talked about here.
https://condellpark.com/kd/sprintlogistic.htm
At our current rate, the record of 9.48s will be reached in 500 years if you plot it. But I don't think people are going to maintain interest for 500 years to get there from 9.58 seconds.
says who?
if i were born and living in the 1500s, how could i predict the economy would soon grow 10%/year for over a century?
you're just stating things like facts which have never been predictable. nothing about our current growth was inevitable, neither is a gigantic slowdown.
i think these kinds of predictions are:
1. far more difficult than we realise
2. so difficult that there is almost no value in making them.
the writer of the article could have just as easily predicted an epic slowdown as infinite growth. that's how much evidence and reasoning they provided. it's the monkey throwing darts
Depends on the "we":
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Enhanced_Games
I do not think it is very responsible to increase the incentives even more for exploiting your own body. Also, a mindset like that might easily spill over into "normal" jobs.
I mean, what are the arguments against PEDs? I guess that they carry risks for the athletes and unfair advantages. It's conceivable that future tech will enable us to legalise and regulate drugs in much the same way as we do equipment now. If that leads to records being smashed, I think the general public will probably come round to it.
I'm not so sure this is a given. See: Barry Bonds.
https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/S22112...
Professional sports inherently come with health risks. They are unhealthy almost by definition.
If someone wants to risk their well-being for achievement, fame, big money and/or anything else (which is crazy, but people do crazy stuff) - it is more beneficial for the society if it's all transparent and goes into scientific papers and not some anti-doping agency or court papers.
It starts by saying "Other than Bolt, no human has ever run 100 meters in under 9.73 seconds" Then just below there's a table of records showing 3 other runners with sub 9.73 times.
In cycling there is also a tech, nutrition and physiology aspect to it. Obviously the tech side is much reduced in running (though clothing and shoes might get some) and Bolt’s diet was notoriously poor.
Shouldn't even be considered due to his history with doping.
People are naive about how much sports are riddled with PEDs. It certainly isn't just Tyson Gay. You only know about the ones who get caught. But there is enough info out there to suggest that getting caught is just a matter of slipping up.
Of the top men's 100m runners (in terms of times) only a few escaped the testing dragnet unscathed, one of which is Bolt. As entertaining as Bolt was to watch I have little faith that he was clean at his peak.
Stride length, and on mud, was longer than Bolt - implying faster than the 100m WR on an awful surface?
https://www.scotsman.com/news/world/prehistoric-man-faster-t...
https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/2016/oct/03/how-fas...
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A more realistic assessment
I'm surprised height was never mentioned in the article.
Usain Bolt is 6'5" (1.98m).
From what I've seen, it depends on how soon the train or plane is going to be leaving the gate . . .
“When people ask me about Bolt, I say he could be the greatest athlete of all time. But for someone to run 10.03 one year and 9.69 the next, if you don’t question that in a sport that has the reputation it has right now, you’re a fool. Period.” Carl Lewis
Just saying, these are different things.
When would you ever need to be so fast at 100m that you over train your body for one specific task?
Historically running had a very important part of humanity. You needed to run from animals for hunting, if you were a warrior you needed to fight and run, etc. It feels like this is one of those races that was historically important as a human metric but no longer has the heft of value except for nostalgia.
Art and sport are things that make the human experience the human experience. That is their value. They exist and are important for their own sake.
Is it, really? It feels like it's a business and a spectacle, a form of entertainment not fundamentally different than cinema or theater, except that it lays claim to being "about the quest for excellence". A claim that unfortunately is hard to support in view of how common is doping, for instance, or how common is violence around football matches.
Today's sport is very different than e.g. the ancient Greeks' Olympic games which were an event held in honour of a god (Apollo) that very few people still worship today. The Olympic were also a sex- and race-segregated event (only Greek free men could take part) so even for that period, maybe sport was about "excellence", maybe it was about something else. The Nazis were certainly quite ready to embrace the Olympics. A certain totalitarian, eugenicist ideology is never very far from sport.
Sports and games, and "noble competition" seems to have been a universal, though. I'm thinking for example of the Afghan national sport, Buzkashi:
A 100m sprint, as fast as humanly possible is super impressive, but the person you're replying to does have a point: this is an extremely specific and narrow activity with no purpose other than competition. You don't socialize with sprinting, and most people wouldn't use 100m sprinting as an activity to improve their fitness
At best, it's designed to test fitness, but it even fails at that really
Hundreds of millions if not billions of people may watch sprinting, or diving or any number of niche solo sports, but do they really care further than "I hope our guy wins"?
Do they care about the technical aspects of running or discus or whatever else? Not a chance
It's not even remotely close to how passionate people get about team sports. Millions of people will celebrate in the streets if their soccer team wins a medal. People will argue endlessly about the technical little details of a soccer match, the calls refs make, etc
Solo sports aren't really comparable to team sports in the social aspect, either for society or for the players on the teams
> At best, it's designed to test fitness, but it even fails at that really
> You don't socialize with sprinting, and most people wouldn't use 100m sprinting as an activity to improve their fitness
FAILS to test fitness? Really? Have you ever read anything about sports science and psychology? First, athlets don't compete singularly in the 100m sprinting event, a lot of them compete in different modalities, like the 100m, 200m, relays, etc. Sprinting 100m and specially the 400m are considered the hardest races for humans. It tests endurance, lactic acid build-up, pacing, mental toughness, strategy at the rawest level, and not to mention the mental preparation you have to have to deal with the pressure and criticism of the media, when you're on the track being viewed by millions and you have just a few seconds to prove yourself. How is that not testing someone's fitness well? You just can't isolate 100m sprinting especially as an activity. Sprinting up to your 100% max heart rate is excellent for fitness, muscle growth, and longevity. There's a lot of research on this coming out with concrete data about the benefits of sprinting vs other kinds of sports.
I'll try to explain my own vision, why I think I don't care - which, of course, is entirely subjective thing, so despite it may read as such it's not exactly meant to say "[some] pro sports are nonsense" but rather more of "[some] pro sports don't make sense for me".
Say, Olympic games. I can watch the opening ceremony (it can be visually or aesthetically impressive), but I don't care about the actual event. Yea, some folks do some impressive things, that... utterly fail to impress me. I'll try to explain why, and I wonder how others are different in this regard.
I can understand watching sports that have a significant strategy component to them. I would've probably watched Go or chess if I would be able to understand what's going on there (I don't), but I occasionally watch e-sports and those can impress me with how people think outside of the box, doing things that no one thought of - but that are so obvious in the hindsight. For those kind of sports, when I understand the game mechanics and when those feel interesting to me, I can relate and feel engaged.
I have a suspicion that a number of people watch it (among other reasons) for the "this is our athlete(s) doing it" vibe. This is something that doesn't click with me. Never really did when I was a kid (the country I was born in doesn't exist - and good riddance), and since then I've immigrated a few times, so - long story short - save for obligatory subconscious biases, I don't care about other folks' flags and passports. But even though this is not commonplace (I guess), this doesn't feel like a reason why I have no feelings for the Olympics. Back to the e-sports example, I watch international events, and people from different bubbles bringing their different strategies and play styles makes watching fun, as the games are more diverse.
So, when someone's running, jumping, lifting, throwing, shooting, spinning, or alike... I honestly don't get what impresses so many viewers so much everyone and their dog seem to be glued to the screens. Please don't get me wrong, I don't want to diminish athletes' personal (or team) achievements. What they're doing is objectively impressive, but subjectively it's in some... detached, unrelated way. Also, as someone raised on sci-fi I can't shake off the feeling of it being sort of unimportant or meaningless on a global scale - I suppose I'm gonna give post-/trans-human Olympics a try, if I'll live to the day, maybe I'll find something to cheer for. Not sure.
Either way, in the modern day, personally, I don't feel any engagement as I fail to relate with the athlete, leading to the total lack of the entertainment value for me. Best I can do is "uh, that looks fast/heavy/far/...", but 9s, 9.5s, or 12s are all the same for me - just "fast" - nothing in my brain fires off, as I don't have any experience of such speeds/levels of exertion anyway. So I wonder, does it for others, do they subconsciously tighten their muscles watching, do they feel connected or something? Maybe not, because people also watch races and I suppose they don't associate with horses?
As you can see, with all this blabbering and guessing (sorry!) - I'm really confused here. I realize that even if someone explains it to me, I still won't feel that way, but what I'm missing is the idea - I only have guesses, and I have no clue how accurate they are. And I'm curious to understand others, even if a tiniest bit better.
====> tl;dr: If y'all watch the professional sports (esp. if aren't an athlete yourself), what makes you engaged and entertained watching it?
Thanks!
> [You] occasionally watch e-sports and those can impress me with how people think outside of the box, doing things that no one thought of - but that are so obvious in the hindsight
This happens literally all the time in professional athletics. Strategy, and the creativity required, is absolutely at the core of any team sport - what else do you think coaches (who are paid in excess of $10m in many sports) exist at all if not for coming up with out of the box strategy? Football strategy is a constantly evolving thing, from one week to the next. There are other sports (like tennis) where strategy can change within a singular point, let alone across the whole match.
The human connection element of sports is also very real, following an individual because you like their personality or style of play is just being a fan and is based in admiration - something that is seemingly inherently human.
> I honestly don't get what impresses so many viewers so much
I mean this statement about olympic sports just begs for the reciprocal (and much more common) question of what about e-sports impresses anyone? The literal exact same arguments can be made. "uh, that looks complicated/fast-paced..." but games are all the same to me, it's all just pressing buttons - nothing in my brain fires off.
And because the same arguments can be made, maybe just assume that for as passionately as you would defend e-sports for it's creativity or strategy or whatever else, that exists in essentially the same form mirrored over in the sports world. It's the same "argument" happening, just mirrored.
> raised on sci-fi I can't shake off the feeling of it being sort of unimportant or meaningless on a global scale
There's maybe a whole separate conversation about how fantasy over-emphasizes things like the fate of humanity or how it depicts unachievable utopias under the guise of like... here's what societal advancement could look like unencumbered by the realities of actual society? There's a reason sports/games have existed since prehistoric times - I'd put all my money in on betting that there's no Star Trek future that doesn't have sports. It's just that important. You don't have to "get" it, but surely looking at the widespread popularity makes it obvious that's true?
> It sounds like you already sort of know the answer.
Maybe, but I'm also sort of stupid. Which prompted me to write all this, so maybe I'll figure it out for myself (and, hopefully, others too - surely, I'm not unique in this regard).
> where you need to recognize (which you already seem to) that you hold a minority opinion.
Yea... I had this assumption as a possible truth, but I have no idea how true is it ("am I sure?"), and what exactly is different ("why?").
> Strategy, and the creativity required, is absolutely at the core of any team sport
For sure, although I originally thought more about individual disciplines, like the 100m sprints (the primary topic here), which surely have some strategy to them as well, but I would be very surprised if it's something complex.
So I'm not even sure if people are watching sports because they relate with the athletes. Certainly not universally, and I have no idea how much it is the case.
Even with the team sports, I'm confused:
> "uh, that looks complicated/fast-paced..." but games are all the same to me, it's all just pressing buttons - nothing in my brain fires off.
Thank you for this. It totally makes sense to me, but this is also one thing that makes me question the "minority opinion" hypothesis. I haven't explicitly went into details and just barely touched that with "I don't have experience running fast so I cannot relate with runners - no clue what they're doing" idea, but I thought about it and it confused me.
I brought e-sports to the picture, because it's relatively (compared to pro non-e-sports) niche thing. I believe they are interesting to me because I can actually understand what's going on there. Just like that chess example (I don't watch chess because I don't play it) - I can watch a football or basketball or tennis match and have no idea on what the players are doing out there even if I know the rules. So I made a logical conclusion that to watch sports, one must likely understand it. And for understanding something, surely one needs to have some experience in the matter (at amateur level)? This all definitely feels true for e-sports - while one may not perform at the level - anyone can try things out (and save for extra-complex micro-level mechanics that require physical dexterity can even make it work... occasionally).
And this is where it doesn't click. I always had an assumption that e-sports are niche because player base is low (compared to the overall population numbers). Folks who play $game may watch $game tournaments, some may not play but watch with friends (rarely) - and I guess that's about it. So I tried to find the numbers, comparing involvement with engagement.
And I found a statement that about 72% of Americans watch American football, and a statement that only 5-6M people are playing it. So, there are drastically more viewers than players. For comparison, I looked up stats for Dota 2 and found that TI10 (the Super Bowl equivalent) had 2.7M peak viewer count, and there is around 14M MAU. I looked up other games and it all seems that viewer count << MAU for e-sports, while the inverse is true for non-e-sports.
Which seem to invalidate my hypothesis of "should play to watch". And that generates a lot of questions (from "why is it so different", though "am I actually right assuming that people understand what they're watching?" to "if you don't play, why learn the game?" and so on).
And the same (back to the original topic of individual disciplines) applies to the 100m sprints. Can't find the breakdowns, but it seems that there are still drastically more viewers than people who run in any capacity. Here I'm back to "our athlete vs others", as I don't have any better ideas how to explain it.
I sort of feel that the answer that makes sense is somewhere out there, really close - yet I'm still honestly confused and can't really grasp it. Sorry.
> I'd put all my money in on betting that there's no Star Trek future that doesn't have sports
Haha, no, I won't take that bet. The idea of sports may change depending on what kind of future is out there, but competition is deeply ingrained in our human nature. But the modern idea sports may not survive, especially as more people start to debate what's "natural" and what's "doping".
Then again, there's the problem of how thousands of kids drop out of school to become pro athletes, and don't even reach college level, and the problem of colleges admitting illiterate athletes and letting them graduate illiterate for "prestige".
2014. Finals of 4x400m female relay for the European Women's Championship.[0]
The last French runner, Floria Gueï, gets the baton passed to her in a distant 4th place, well behind the top 3 favorites for the race: Russia, Ukraine and UK.
In her own 400m solo race she was eliminated in the semifinals, a titanic disappointment. And now she is so far behind in the relay race, the French TV commentators are focusing on watching the battle unfold at the front and writing her off as a lost cause.
That day, she performed one of the most impressive comebacks in the history of the sport to finish in first place.
I would say that there is way more catharsis and inspiration in watching someone beat their own limits and rise above the odds, than you can find in most of fiction entertainment. I certainly don't find Rocky or Die Hard to be more impressive or inspirational as this 2-minute video.
I'm an amateur runner and I get immense inspiration from watching pro athletes run, I'll never get half as good but it gives me a huge push to keep working towards my own goals.
"You get no getting new insight, catharsis or inspiration from watching someone run."
Applies to all of them?
I barely understand the sport itself, I'm not a team sports guy, but to deny the excitement, inspiration, and sheer joy seems ridiculous under the crushing weight of the energy sports can bring people. People use it to better themselves, not just trying to get more pro sports, and that's a goal I think every person should strive towards. We are thinking things, but we're also masses of tissue, and it's important to celebrate that connection and that part of us.
Why do people paint? Or make music? Or play football (whatever version of it)?
Because we like to do it.
Bonus points if you express this as a proportion of total human population and economic activity