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.