Century donning with hope holds the promise of a new era in sports and the
birth of a more productive and powerful athlete. The ultimate specimen of the
human body. The human machine is the most complex machine on earth. Just as racing
engineers squeeze the smallest advantage from high-performance machines, so to our
scientists refining ways for humans to run faster, jump higher, endure longer.
In this hour, you will experience the cycle of life for an athlete in the
21st century, beginning before birth with science close to unleashing the power of
the genetic code. I think sometime in the future there will be ways to engineer
very super athletes that will make Michael Jordan look just fabulous.
How will such players reach their potential? Three current pro-athletes
sampled for us the futuristic training designed to shape the better body.
You have to find new ways to excel. Nothing stays the same. With this new
training, how far can we push human performance? The baseball I'm sure we can
go 130 miles an hour. And injuries in this brave new future may require not
rehab as much as a trip to the lab. Nunees? Sure. Grandma trees.
In the global era of sports, this new century means a new hotbed of elite
athletic talent. The amount of tall athletic people in that country with
abilities, it's awesome. TD's six million dollar man. How good would he be as a
professional athlete? It is entirely possible we may find out in the 21st
century. My daughter's lifetime, she will see man and machine completely welded
together. The future will be bigger, stronger, faster. Tonight, outside the
lines, the athlete of the 21st century.
If it is true at the beginning of the century that mankind has never had it
better, it's also obvious that athletes have never been faster or stronger, more
skilled or more prepared. And it's only going to get better. Now that's not a
prediction, that is fact based on science. And it's also food for a vigorous fan
debate. Sports is about stars and numbers. And we begin with Greg Garber
considering just how much better the best athletes can make those numbers
here in the 21st century. Today, Michael Johnson is one of track and field's
leading lights. He's the world record holder and the 200 meters at 19.32
seconds. But a century from now? 200 meters will be low 19, though. You know,
maybe 19, 2, maybe 19, 3. And what about Johnson's 400 meter world record of 43.18?
I think the 400 meters, I think, will be down to 42 flat. Well, I hate to tell
Michael this, but somebody will probably be under 40 seconds for that
competition, maybe 39, 38 seconds. Ray Stephanie is a sports statistical analyst
who specializes in track and field. He believes records will continue to fall
some dramatically in the next 100 years, including the 9.79 100 meter world
record of Maury Screen, the world's fastest human. I think it's very possible
it would be around nine seconds. It is the sweet curse of humanity to aspire
beyond our limits. Nowhere is this drive more clearly defined than in the bare
numbers of the athletic arena. But when does athletic possibility meet
physiological reality? Dr. Gideon Ariak, a leading expert in human performance,
insists there are finite limits. If you take a bone and you hang so much weight
on the bone, it will crack at some point. If you take a tendon or ligaments and you
pull it hard enough at one point, it will tear up. You cannot improve the
structural limitation of the DNA. If you put too many cars on the
broken bridge, at one point it will collapse. Ariel believes we've come close
to our limits in track and field. But in baseball, the baseball I think you
control, I'm sure that we can go 130 miles an hour. Come on harder. You can do
better. Come on harder, Ana. At Ball State University's Human Performance Lab,
Dr. Jeff Volek and Dr. Robert Newton study the limits of performance. No one
on his planet really can understand the full potential of the human body because
right now we have no computers despite our technology or robots or anything
that even comes close to the complexity of the human body. Individual performance
encompasses far more than mere flesh and blood. There are four essential
components to athletic achievement. First, the ever-expanding pool of athletes.
Look at how rapidly women's records improved as women came into the athletic
environment between the 50s and 70s and became socially acceptable for women to
be athletes. There may be people out there who have the potential to run
faster than the fastest man on earth. They've just never been discovered. The
second component is training and coaching. Fine-tuning the machine. Bob
Percy trains world-class athletes. Good athlete want to be trained properly, good
coach want to make sure an athlete is properly trained. But I have a model that
you got to be willing to pull every muscle in your body to win a gold medal.
The third element is technique, the ongoing search for perfection. How many
of these mistakes can I eliminate? So, you know, if you're hitting 100% of
everything perfect throughout that race, then who knows how much more you're
going to get from your performance? Who knows how much faster you're going to run?
The fourth is equipment, higher, faster, stronger by design. Think about the
track surfaces, the shoes that they have, swimming outfits, the lack of splash in
the pool. When all four components peak at the same moment, they can produce the
unprecedented. When Bob Beaman leaped 29 feet two and one-half inches in 1968,
he shattered the world record by nearly two feet. Unbelievable. No one ever
thought that that was going to happen in their lifetime. And as we like to say,
the person who breaks this world record, their parents haven't even been born
yet. That's being an ask. And yet, 23 years later, Mike Powell surpassed the
unsurpassable. Outjumping Beaman. I have no problems with saying the probably is
almost zero of outrageous things like a 50-foot pole vault or a 40-foot long
job. We can say the probability is between, oh, oh, oh, oh, one or some such
thing as that. But it's very dangerous to say zero. We are still an evolving
species and then all animals on the earth continue to evolve. I mean, who
knows where we'll be in a thousand years, what our form will be like. I don't
believe we've ever used our entire ability as human being. I think we're
probably not even within a 50 percentile ratio. You can't really
quantify that in terms of, you know, how much is left. No one knows how much is
left. We only know where we've been. Nobody knows where we're going.
Pushing the human body in this new century will require new technology. Next,
several of today's pro-athletes sample the training techniques of tomorrow.