Ready, set — go break a record!
As elite athletes compete in the 2024 Summer Olympics in Paris, they’ll likely break at least a few world records. But no one has set a new record in more than a decade for two of the Olympics’ fastest events — the 100-meter dash and the 50-meter freestyle swim. The plateau in top speed for these races raises a curious question. Just how much faster can humans move on land or through the water?
The 100-meter dash is a sprint to the finish. Usain Bolt of Jamaica set the current men’s record in 2009. He ran it in just 9.58 seconds, with a top speed of nearly 45 kilometers (28 miles) per hour. American sprinter Florence Griffith Joyner set the women’s record for this race in 1988. She ran it in 10.49 seconds.
Human gait and muscle strength could let people go faster. Research suggests that people might be able to run as fast as roughly 60 kilometers (37 miles) per hour. That’s 100 meters in 5.625 seconds. But sprinting speed largely depends on technique, says Ross Miller. He studies biomechanics at the University of Maryland in College Park.
“A sprint should be ‘as hard as you can’ every step,” Miller says. Top speed depends on how little time our feet touch the ground while still applying the force necessary to propel us forward.
Maybe no one has yet run at top human speed because no one has come along with the physical ability, Miller says. Or maybe the right person hasn’t had access to the training. It’s also possible, he notes, that the right person with the right training simply hasn’t “put it all together yet in the perfect race.” In the past century, the fastest time for the 100-meter dash has shrunk in women by about three seconds. In men, it dropped by only one second.
It’s much harder for humans to go fast in water. The men’s record for the 50-meter freestyle belongs to César Cielo Filho. This Brazilian athlete swam 50 meters in 20.91 seconds in 2009. That was about four times slower than Bolt’s record-setting average running speed. In 2023, Swedish swimmer Sarah Sjöström earned the women’s record for 50-meter freestyle by swimming the race in 23.61 seconds.
Both top times are roughly three seconds faster than the first records set in the 1970s.
Swimming is slower than running largely because water is far denser than air, explains Timothy Wei. He studies fluid dynamics at Northwestern University in Evanston, Ill. But also, “we all have this bowling ball between our shoulders,” Wei says. (He’s talking about the head.) “This thing creates a huge amount of drag.”
No one knows just how much faster swimmers can get. But swimming with the body parallel to the water’s surface can help reduce drag. Superfast freestyle swimmers also raise their elbows as high as possible above the water. Then, they plunge their arms close to straight down into the water to pull themselves forward.
“If you get your technique right, and you can get your stroke rate as high as possible,” Wei says, “that combination is what’s going to get you to go as fast as you can.”
