Olympian sites

Natural History, July-August, 2004 by Robert Anderson

The Olympic Games are rooted in something far more ancient than the first footraces held at Olympia in the eighth century B.C. Many people, it seems, are naturally drawn to physical superlatives--strongest, fastest, fittest. Independently, ancient cultures evolved formal competitions to show off these attributes. A thousand years earlier, Egyptian athletes swam in the Nile and played tug of war and gymnastics (see www.touregypt.net/historical essays/ancsportsindex.htm). In the New World, Mesoamericans competed in ballgames--often to the death--as early as 1500 B.C. (see www.ballgame.org).

Yet it is the Greek tradition of competition we celebrate. To search the Internet for information about the first Olympic Games, start at Rodney Polasky's site (www.archaeolink.com). Click on "Ancient Civilizations" and search the list of specialized topics for "Ancient Olympic Games." Polasky, an archaeologist and Web publisher, presents an impressive register of Olympic-related links.

First on the list is a link to a page from a special exhibit posted at "The Perseus Digital Library," at Tufts University. Among other things, the page describes all the ancient sports in detail, including chariot racing and the pancration (a combination of boxing and wrestling, spelled pankration on the Web site). [See "With Hands and Swift Feet," by David C. Young, page 24]

When you're tired of tuning in to the remote past, you can fast-forward to the 2004 games (www.athens2004. com) and preview this summer's events and venues in and around Athens.

Since the revival of the games in 1896, science has played an ever-larger role in helping athletes gain a critical competitive edge. In 1996, when the summer games were held in Atlanta, a site known as "The Why Files," maintained by the University of Wisconsin-Madison, addressed the subject with what is still the best general introduction to the topic. On the site is a special fourteen-page section called "Sport science meets the Olympics" (whyfiles.org/019olympic).

Today's professional athletes can combine the latest innovations in science and technology to scrutinize their own performances and find out what it takes to win. To see one example of how it's done, go to the site of the pioneering sports biomechanist Gideon B. Ariel (www.sportsci.com). A former discus thrower and member of the Israeli Olympics team, Ariel owns a company specializing in computerized performance-enhancement products. Take a look at the site's collection of video segments (www.sportsci.com/ media). They include "The Perfect Jump," a glimpse of Bob Beamon's world-record-shattering long jump in 1968, and Carl Lewis's quest to beat it in the 1984 Olympics. (Lewis never did, but Mike Powell outjumped Beamon by two inches in 1991.)

How do athletes--even the ones with access to the latest techniques and technology--stack up against the rest of the animal kingdom? You can find world and Olympic records for people on a page of the official Olympics site (www.olympic. org); just enter "Olympic records" or "world records" on the site's search engine. And Petra H. Lenz, a neurobiologist at the University of Hawai'i in Honolulu, has tracked animal Olympians (www.pbrc.hawaii.edu/~Epe tra/animal_olympians.html). On her site I learned that human beings don't even hold the record for being the fastest primates; that title belongs to the patas monkeys, which can sustain running speeds as fast as thirty-four miles an hour. (Compare that with the speeds of the fastest human runners: sprinters have reached a speed--albeit for only an instant--of just over 26.5 miles an hour; the fastest average speed clocks in at a little more than twenty-three miles an hour.)

"OceanLink" (oceanlink.island.net/ records.html), maintained by the Bamfield Marine Sciences Centre in Bamfield, British Columbia, has data for many marine-animal record breakers, in a number of categories: the fastest fish, the Indo-Pacific sailfish, has been clocked at 68.18 miles an hour, whereas the sea horse ambles along at about one foot per minute (0.01 miles an hour).

At "The University of Florida Book of Insect Records 2003" (ufbir. ifas.ufl.edu), investigators have tracked the medal winners in the six-legged category--from the fastest flyers and runners to the insect with the shortest reproductive life. A species of Australian tiger beetle wins the gold for running speed, at 5.6 miles an hour.

If any of these sites pique your interest for the latest experiments in animal locomotion, check out a site maintained by Robert J. Full, a biologist at the University of California, Berkeley (polypedal.berkeley.edu). To hear Full's lecture on his experiments with giant cockroaches and centipedes, and to watch the insects running on a treadmill, click on "Intro to Bob Full's Projects" and then on the "locomotion" icon.

ROBERT ANDERSON is a freelance science writer living in Los Angeles.