The Guardian: How fast can we go? The science of the 100m sprint
By: Simon UsborneThe greatest race in the Olympics is the simplest. Eight runners, eight straight lines. A bang, an explosion of muscle and, less than ten seconds later, a winner. And all they do is run. No bikes, boats, vaults or horses – just one foot in front of the other. Yet, in those three dozen blinks of an eye, sprinters in the 100m perform physical feats so advanced that scientists are still trying to understand them. “On one level you’d think we would have pieced it together a long time ago,” says Peter Weyand, one of the world’s leading students of running and professor of applied physiology and biomechanics at the South Methodist University in Dallas, Texas. “Newton figured...