Olympic Games: Is it getting harder to break records?
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00:00Careers are also getting longer and longer.
00:02I mean, we've got LeBron James, who's in Lille, 39 years old.
00:06Many other athletes as well.
00:08And there's something that I'm wondering is,
00:11for those of you who've been covering, of course,
00:13so many events and games,
00:18these records, can we still break them?
00:20Because some of them are holding up for a long time.
00:23If you take a look at, for example,
00:24the 100 meter sprints here,
00:26it's gonna be, if I'm correct,
00:28around 16 years now for Usain Bolt.
00:32That is getting on quite a little bit.
00:35Ayodhya, you know quite a bit about your sprints.
00:38I'm not sure someone's gonna beat his record this year.
00:42And Griffey Joyner, it's gonna be really hard to beat it too.
00:46But we're still gonna have some amazing performances.
00:49I think about the 200 meters,
00:51the women with Sherika Jackson,
00:54and the American, too.
00:57We're getting quite close to those all-time records.
01:00They might beat the records in the 200 meters, I think.
01:03Noah Lye is on the 200 meters.
01:05He is getting closer to the Usain Bolt record.
01:08But on the 100 meters, for men and women,
01:12it's gonna be harder, I think.
01:14There's a study that say that for the 100 meters,
01:16we couldn't go below 9.44 seconds.
01:20But we've got new track spikes.
01:22With carbon, so maybe.
01:24And with the purple track,
01:27and they said that's gonna be really fast, so maybe.
01:29Is the purple track gonna speed up the athletes?
01:31I didn't taste it, but maybe.
01:33Maybe just the French athletes.
01:35Not only the French ones, everyone.
01:37I'll tread on your turf here just for a second, James.
01:39At the marathon, they used to say
01:41the two-hour barrier was impossible, right?
01:43And obviously, Elliot Kipchoge,
01:45he did it under non-world record official conditions,
01:49but he broke the two-hour barrier.
01:51And we had the very sadly deceased Kevin Kipthum,
01:56and Earl, who was killed in a car crash earlier this year.
01:59What did he get to, 2.01.09 or something?
02:03Or 2.01, I mean, no, two hours, 35 seconds
02:07in an official classification.
02:09So it's not the 100 meter sprint, it's the marathon.
02:11But it just shows these things that you used to think
02:13were beyond human possibility are now seen as,
02:19perhaps, just a matter of a few months, a couple of years.
02:22But we talk about the technology being so important.
02:25James, of course, in the swimming,
02:26it's surely only so much technology
02:28that you can take into account there.
02:30Well, no, well, they had all the suit crisis
02:32in the mid-2000s, 2007, 2008, 2009,
02:36and then they banned the performance suits
02:38because it turned into a battle
02:41between suit manufacturers, and it works.
02:43The suits made athletes faster.
02:47And the most amazing world championships was 2009
02:50because nobody, including the athletes themselves,
02:52had any idea, A, how fast they were gonna go,
02:54or who was gonna win the medals.
02:56It was a fascinating experiment, but technology works,
03:00so they got rid of it.
03:02So in swimming, no, now we're back to smaller suits.
03:06And the records were always gonna be broken.
03:12We thought no one's gonna go faster than the suit era.
03:14Only took a few years,
03:15and we learned what the suits did for the athletes,
03:18and then you train for those benefits,
03:21and then sport moves forward.
03:23Sport moves forward,
03:23so these records are all gonna go eventually.
03:25Some will last longer than others,
03:27but they're all gonna go.
03:28Do you agree, Shane?
03:29Well, you know, there's other ways
03:30of making the record books as well,
03:31like if Kipchoge can win a third marathon.
03:34Doesn't maybe beat two minutes,
03:35but it's still an incredible standard.
03:37Or take the case of Nikki Hiltz,
03:39the runner from the United States in the 1500,
03:42a non-binary athlete in the Olympics
03:44when it's very difficult to be a trans athlete.
03:46They've made it difficult in world athletics.
03:48It should be said to be a trans athlete,
03:50and so they could be the first trans athlete
03:52to win a medal.
03:53So there's other ways of also making the record book
03:55in this Olympics,
03:55and I'll be really interested to see there.
03:57And we gotta say Simone Biles,
03:59anybody that's seen Simone Biles in the qualifiers,
04:02Biles is making up new moves as we go here.
04:04I mean, the judges don't even know what to do with it,
04:05now that she's off the charts.
04:07And so it'll be really interesting to see what she does,
04:10especially because she showed us at Tokyo
04:13that there are some things
04:14that are more important than sport,
04:15such as mental health.
04:17And now here she is back,
04:18it's hard for me not to root for her.