What do you see in the plot?
An ever-improving linear progression of sprint timings? Then what is your forecast, say, in the year 2200 or the year 2800?
It was what happened in 2004 when a group of researchers published in the prestigious science journal nature. The article was titled, Momentous Sprint at the 2156 Olympics?: Women Sprinters are Closing the Gap on Men and May One Day Overtake Them! The study plotted men’s and women’s winning timings in Olympic 100-sprints and extrapolated to the future, similar to what I reproduced below:
And the result? A mockery of a publication in the most coveted journal in science.
The Straight Line Instinct
It is an example of what is known as the straight-line instinct, a term coined in the book Factfulness by Hans Rosling. Rosling talks about the general tendency of people to extrapolate things linearly without any regard to actual physics (or biology). Straight-line thinking is very natural to human beings. That is how we escape from a stone thrown straight at us or avoid hitting a pedestrian crossing the road ahead of us while driving.
What is Wrong with the Analysis?
First, they should have done a sanity check, especially after seeing the outcome. Some alarm bells ought to have rung not just after seeing women sprinters crossing men in the future, but more importantly at the prospect of humans crossing the 100-metre mark in zero time on extrapolating the graph even further.
Second, they did the crime of collecting a few data covering about 100 years and extrapolated over another 200. Third, they ignored the science of athletic training, early improvements and subsequent plateauing of human performance. It is like a baby in the growing phase. If you look closely, the women’s event in the Olympics started about 25 years after the men’s. So, the massive early improvements in timing lagged for many years.
Before we close, let us have a final look at the data updated to the latest Olympics that happened in 2021.
Will they meet in future? Do you care?
Tatem et. al.: Momentous sprint at the 2156 Olympics?
Hans Rosling: Factfulness
