The just-concluded 2024 Paris Olympics were a huge success and a welcome respite from the drumbeat of a more anxious news cycle (wars, inflation, politics, etc.). Great athletes like Katie Ledecky, Simone Biles, Steph Curry, and so many more were fun and inspiring to watch. Many of these performances seemed superhuman, including the non-mainstream sports like break dancing and artistic swimming. But it also got us thinking about the improvements we have seen over time. Our slightly older clients might remember the remarkable performance of swimmer Mark Spitz at the 1972 Olympics. He won seven gold medals in seven events…all of them world records (including two relay teams). But get this—more recent Olympic swimmers like Michael Phelps and Frenchman Lean Marchand can both swim the 200 meters butterfly nearly 9 seconds faster than Spitz swam 52 years ago, this is a staggering difference in a sport where places are sometimes determined by hundreds of seconds. And how about the great Jesse Owens (and Ohio native), who was unmatched in his day, winning four gold medals and setting four world records in the 1936 Olympics. His 100-meter race was remarkable at the time, but today’s video shows he would be 14 meters behind today’s sprinters like U.S. Olympian and gold medalist Noah Lyles.

What’s caused the drastic improvement from the feats of Jesse Owens and Mark Spitz?

Consider that Spitz never wore goggles or a swim cap. Today’s sprinters take their mark with blocks designed to give them an optimal start and run on scientifically designed tracks that don’t steal the energy from their legs like the cinder tracks that Owens ran on. He and his fellow competitors used a garden trowel to dig small holes to set their feet in at the start. But the marked improvement in swimming and track isn’t just due to better equipment. The technique used by modern swimmers and runners is vastly more efficient and honed with countless hours of video research, refined training methodologies and countless resources devoted to the science of nutrition, plyometrics, and even sleep. Also contributing to this is the sheer number of people competing, which deepens the pool of competition (pun intended). These vast improvements extend to nearly all sports.

And we posit that this is relevant to engineering, healthcare, business, and commerce. Humans (and companies) are inexorably getting better and finding new ways to improve. It especially applies to our long-held thesis that this progress is moving us forward collectively through technology and human ingenuity, and supporting our long-term bullish outlook about the future!

We hope the rest of your summer is golden!

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