Usain Bolt broke the world records in the 100-meter and 200-meter seemingly so easily and by so much that you may feel like they’ll never be broken again. But they will, given enough time. Likely, all the current world records will be broken, even the ones like Jarmila Kratochvílová’s 800-meter record, which has stood for over 40 years.
If it happened once before, it will happen again out of sheer statistical randomness. Usain Bolt and other record holders are outliers, but given an infinite or near infinite sample size, we’ll have other outliers that we can expect to perform at least at the same level.
The current rate of world record progression can’t continue forever. To give a few specific examples, over the past 125 years, the men’s world record in the 100-meter has improved by over a second, while the women’s high jump record improved by nearly 70 centimeters in 100 years. The idea that the world records will be under 8.60 seconds and over 2.80 meters, respectively, a century from now is so ludicrous it’s not even worth considering.
How close are we to reaching our genetic limits and technological limits? There are many ways to consider this. We could take the biomechanical approach and look at human gait patterns and tissue limitations. Or we could take a mathematician’s viewpoint and create formulas to estimate plateaus based on previous performances.
For this article, let’s keep things simple and examine year by year how many records have been broken to see if we can observe any general trends with some very casual data analysis.
In the tables below, we include all the events that will be contested at the 2025 World Athletics Championships, including the marathon. We are not including the relays.
Total Athletics World Records by Year
The biggest boom of records seems to be roughly between 1960 and 1990. Many factors likely contribute, including:
- Increases in technology and surfaces
- Improved training methodology
- More cost-efficient travel to competitions around the world
- Political motivations, such as during the Cold War period
- Increased overall sports participation
- Performance-enhancing drug development (unfortunately, tainting some of the current records)
If we change our view to only look from 1960 to the present, we can see there has been a general downward trajectory in the number of records set each year, albeit with an increase in recent years. However, keep in mind that this might be biased by a handful of events being broken repeatedly. For example, Mondo Duplantis seems to be trying his best to single-handedly ruin our dataset by breaking the pole vault record 12 times. But in all fairness, Sergey Bubka also broke the outdoor records 17 times in the 1980s and 1990s.
There are also more events currently being contested than in previous World Championships, giving more opportunities for records to be broken.
For example, World Athletics has only been ratifying the marathon record since 2003. The women’s 3000-meter steeplechase wasn’t added to the World Championship program until 2005, and women’s hammer and pole vault didn’t debut until the late 1990s.
Number of Male and Female Athletics Records by Year
What happens if we separate men’s and women’s records?
For starters, female records weren’t ratified until 1922 (originally by the International Women’s Sports Federation), and participation for the most part was low in the early years of the sport.
Not surprisingly, the biggest booms in the number of records seem to correlate with the periods of recent history with the greatest advances in women’s civil rights and freedoms.
After the 1920s, both the number of male and female records seems to be on a general downward trajectory from the 1960s.
Total Number of Sprint and Jumps Records by Year
The rate of record progression in the sprints and jumps seems to have drastically slowed in recent years. If we take away Duplantis’ 12 pole vault records, there would be very little change in the record books over the past 30 years in the jumps.
Number of Throws Records by Year
The throws seem to reach their greatest record frequency peak in the 1980s, and many of the active records are still persistent from this period.
Since 2006, there’s only been one year (2016) where more than one throwing record was broken.
Middle and Long Distance Records Broken by Year
The middle- and long-distance races seem to continue to have the steadiest rate of progression. This might be partially due to the logistics of the events relative to the sprints.
Even breaking the 10,000-meter record by 0.01 seconds counts, so it’s relatively easy to have small but continuous improvements in records. Also, championship races are often tactical, meaning that runners are not always running their fastest times when they’re in their best shape.
Are We Reaching the Limits of Human Performance?
Are we reaching the limits of human performance?
It seems like we’re trending in that direction, but there’s still a healthy number of records broken overall each year. The jumps seem to be at the biggest risk of reaching a plateau.
Once Duplantis stops breaking the world record in the pole vault every other weekend, there may be a long period of no records, especially if the men’s triple jump record is broken in the near future and Yaroslava Mahuchikh tacks on to her high jump record.
This is just my own speculation, but it’s possible that if the lull continues in these events, World Athletics might be encouraged to “juice” some of the elevated runways that have been used at competitions such as the European Championships last summer to give the athletes a little extra bounce.
So overall, we may be nearing our limits, but we can likely expect small but continuous improvements in most events at least during our lifetimes.
