[dnackoul]

Finally, my first Hacker News comment!

In addition to equipment and rules changes, training and nutritional techniques have evolved quite a bit over the last century. NFL players, for example, used to smoke cigarettes at half time. All things equal, the modern athletes probably are better.

This is a really great topic and we have some relevant experience on our team. I'll see if I can rope one of them into giving a deeper answer or putting up a blog post.

[Someone]

Here are two changes that I would like to see discussed:

- timing method (hand-clocked times apparently were a tiny bit faster)

- elasticity of the running surface (if you wonder why they added lanes to the track but kept six sprinters in each race: you go faster on an inelastic surface, but running on it is less comfortable, to the extent that doing a 5k run is too painful. So, the innermost lane is softer)

[scruple]

Timing and timing source accuracy was the first place my mind went to after seeing the animation. I believe that when I ran cross-country and track, decades ago, that the timings were tracked by hand, even at regional and state competitions (in my experience and to my knowledge).

[z3t4]

Also there were not so much money involved, you couldn't make a living as an athlete. It was mostly for upper class who had enough free time to train.

[mattnumbe]

Your post makes me think of that old picture of guys smoking during the Tour De France.