[sethherr]

It would be a huge blowout. We didn’t know how to train or eat and athletes smoked and drank substantially more. Meanwhile, the gear evolutions make significant difference.

But take distance running - prior to 1954, nobody had done a sub 4 minute mile. After that was known to be possible multiple people sub 4 minute miled in the following decade. If you sent a top runner back a hundred years they would be able to run a sub 4 minute mile, even with 1920s equipment - and the world record in 1923 was 4:10

[kaffekaka]

As far as I know the progression into sub 4 minute miles was quite linear and not some kind of sudden breach once everybody understood it was at all possible.

The story of a sudden breach is perhaps more attractive though.

[sethherr]

From wikipedia's 4 minute mile article - https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Four-minute_mile

> The four-minute barrier was first broken on 6 May 1954 at Oxford University's Iffley Road Track, by British athlete Roger Bannister

> On 21 June 1954, at an international meet at Turku, Finland, Australia's John Landy became the second man, after Bannister, to achieve a sub-four-minute mile.

In 1955 Laszlo Tabori was the third person to break the 4 minute barrier. Then, in 1956, three runners broke the four-minute barrier in a single race.

This matches what I described, multiple people attained it once it was understood to be possible. It was linear up to the 4 minute mark, but the point is that records that used to be impossible are now humdrum once achieved.

[kaffekaka]

I read this one: https://www.scienceofrunning.com/2017/05/the-roger-bannister...

With for example: "What this shows us is that the issue wasn’t massively psychological. If it was, we would have seen athletes running 1,500m races much faster than their corresponding mile time. Instead, we see that the progression matches up nicely. People were stuck on 4 minutes at the same time they were stuck on 3:43. Do we really think that runners were stuck on a mythical 3:43.0 barrier?"

In case you don't want to read it, it says that other distances had similar "breakthroughs" but they were not associated with a mental barrier like "4 minute mile". Rather, the article argues, the development may have been related to WW2.

Edit: it just so happened that for mile running, the stagnation after WW2 occured just around the four minute mark. You need to look at other distances and perhaps even other sports to see the pattern.

Indeed, my country Sweden won the olympic football/soccer in 1948 - a result widely regarded as being due to other countries have sent all their young men to the war while Sweden stayed neutral/did not fight the germans.

[yread]

> even with 1920s equipment

Are you sure about that? Can you post a result where someone ran with leather shoes on asphalt?

[hilux]

Zola Budd, a woman, ran a barefoot mile in 4:17.57, which is about 10 seconds slower than the current women's WR.

The men's mile WR is about 24 seconds faster than the women's. Presumably plenty of barefoot African dudes could run a mile a lot faster than Budd did.

With the exception of the new "energy return" shoes, there's no evidence that shoes help runners run faster - probably the opposite.