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.

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