为什么田径纪录比游泳更难被打破
Which Records Get Shattered?

IT’S swimming that makes the biggest splash at the Olympics these days — especially here in the United States, where we will be disappointed if Michael Phelps and Ryan Lochte fail to return from London with more gold medals and more world records.

最近这几天，游泳是奥林匹克运动会上最引人关注的比赛项目——尤其是在美国，如果迈克尔·菲尔普斯(Michael Phelps)和瑞安·罗切特(Ryan Lochte)不能赢得更多金牌，打破更多世界纪录，从伦敦载誉归来的话，美国人一定会大失所望。

I’m partial to track and field, however. It’s at the Olympic Stadium in London where we’ll see athletes competing not just against one another, but against the intrinsic barriers of human achievement. The runners and jumpers and javelin-throwers will set fewer world records than the swimmers do. But the ones they set are more likely to survive the test of time.

然而，我却更偏爱田径比赛。在伦敦的奥林匹克主体育场(Olympic Stadium)，我们看到那些田径运动员不是在和彼此竞赛，而是在挑战人类成就的固有极限。和游泳运动员比起来，赛跑运动员、跳高运动员和标枪运动员不会创造那么多的世界纪录。然而他们创下的世界纪录可能更能够承受住时间的考验。

鲍勃·比蒙在1968年墨西哥城奥运会上打破了跳远项目的世界记录。

Consider the men’s long jump, for instance. The Olympic record in that discipline was set more than 40 years ago, in Mexico City, by the American Bob Beamon. About nine months before a man landed on the moon, Beamon made a giant leap — 29 feet two and a half inches — that has yet to be surpassed at the Olympic Games. (Mike Lowell beat Beamon’s record at a non-Olympic meet in Tokyo in 1991, a record which itself is now more than 20 years old.)

就拿男子跳远来说。40多年前，美国的鲍勃·比蒙(Bob Beamon)在墨西哥城创造了该项目的奥运会记录。就在人类登上月球的9个月前，比蒙做出了惊人一跃——8米90——这项纪录至今无人在奥运会上打破。迈克·洛厄尔(Mike Lowell)1991年在东京举行的一场非奥运赛事上打破了比蒙的的跳远纪录，而这一纪录至今也已经保持了20多年。

In another prestigious event, the women’s 100-meter dash, the world record of 10.49 seconds was set in 1988, at the Olympic trials in Indianapolis, by Florence Griffith-Joyner. She also set the Olympic record, 10.54 seconds, later that year in Seoul. No other woman has come within 0.2 of a second of her Olympic mark.

而在另一著名比赛项目，女子100米短跑，1998年，弗罗伦斯·格里菲斯·乔依娜(Florence Griffith-Joyner)在印第安纳波利斯举行的奥运选拔赛中以10.49秒的成绩创下世界纪录。后来，在同年的首尔奥运会上，她还以10.54秒的成绩创造了该运动项目的奥运记录。迄今，还没有任何其他女选手能跑进格里菲斯·乔依娜奥运记录的0.2秒以内。

Those cases are not as exceptional as you might think. Only five track and field world records were broken at the Beijing games in 2008 out of 47 events. And it was actually a relatively productive Olympics by that standard: only seven world records had been established at the prior four games combined.

这些例子并不是你想的那么特殊。在2008年奥运会的47个田径项目中，仅5项赛事破了纪录。但按照以上标准，这次奥运会算得上收获颇丰：在此前四次奥运会上，田径项目上总共只创造了7个世界纪录。

By contrast, 25 world records were set in the swimming competition in Beijing — out of just 34 events. The longest-standing world record in any swimming discipline is barely more than 10 years old. It was set by Grant Hackett in the 1,500-meter freestyle at the Australian Championships in 2001.

而相比之下，北京奥运会游泳赛事创造了25项世界记录，而游泳项目总数仅为34个。所有游泳项目中保持最长的世界纪录不过10年出头而已。该记录由格兰特·哈克特(Grant Hackett)2001年参加澳大利亚全国游泳锦标赛(Australian Championships)1500米自由泳比赛时创造。

In fact, the progress in swimming has followed a predictable and almost eerie regularity, with the winning times in most events improving at virtually every Summer Games.

事实上，游泳项目按照一个可预测的、几近怪异的规律在向前突破，几乎每届奥运会上，大多数游泳项目的比赛成绩都被刷新。

I have developed a statistical method to measure the amount of improvement in medal-winning times in Olympic competition between the 1968 games in Mexico City and the 2008 games in Beijing. The method looks at the overall trend-line in each discipline — not just the record-setting performances, which could conceivably be outliers.

我研究出一种统计方法，比较自1968年的墨西哥城奥运会至2008年北京奥运会，奥运赛事上获奖成绩提高的幅度。这种方法研究每个比赛项目的总体趋势——而不是仅关注破纪录的表现，因为它们很可能是离群数据。

In all 28 swimming events that have been contested continuously since 1968, the rate of progress has been almost exactly the same. In each discipline, times have fallen by somewhere between 8.2 percent (in the women’s 200-meter freestyle) and 12.5 percent (the women’s 200-meter breaststroke) over the 40-year period.

自1968年就持续作为奥运赛事出现的28个游泳项目，其成绩刷新率一直以来几乎是保持不变的。在过去四十年中，各个项目比赛用时的下降幅度在8.2%（女子200米自由泳项目）和12.5%（女子200米蛙泳项目）之间徘徊。

Track and field athletes have made nowhere near such consistent progress — with the exception of a few relatively obscure events like racewalking. In short-distance running events, for instance, medal-winning times have fallen by only about 2 percent over the 40-year period. Long-distance runners have made slightly more progress — about a 6 percent improvement since 1968 — but still much less than the swimmers.

田径运动员远没有取得这么持续稳定的突破——除非是一些相对界限模糊的如竞走这样的项目。例如，在短跑比赛中，在40年的时间里，获奖牌选手所用的时间仅下降了2%。长跑比赛选手进步稍大些——自1968年，获奖成绩提高了6%——但这仍然大大逊色于游泳选手。

The field events that make up the other half of the athletics completion have been a mixed bag. Although there has been a lot of progress in the high jump and the pole vault, the trend has actually been negative in some other competitions. The woman who won the shot-put competition in Beijing, Valerie Vili of New Zealand, would not, with her tosses, have won even a bronze medal at the 1976 Olympics in Montreal.

构成田径运动的田赛项目的情况则一直有好有坏。尽管跳高和撑杆跳高项目取得了很大突破，其他一些比赛项目却呈现了下降的发展趋势。在北京奥运会赢得女子铅球比赛金牌的女运动员，来自新西兰的瓦莱丽·维利(Valerie Vili)， 如果把自己的投掷成绩拿到1976年的蒙特利尔奥运会上，甚至连铜牌也赢不了。 What accounts for those differences?

是什么造成了这些不同呢？

Part of the answer is simply that swimmers have benefited more from technology, in the form of everything from sleeker, computer-designed Speedos to deeper (and, for the swimmer, less turbulent) pools. But there is little a short-distance runner can wear to help improve her performance much, although the Nike and Reebok commercials might suggest otherwise.

一方面只是因为游泳选手更多地受益于科技发展，包括更平滑的、电脑设计的Speedo泳衣和更深（对于游泳选手来说，意味着水流更稳 ）的泳池，科技的好处以各种形式呈现。然而一名短跑运动员却不能通过穿戴装备而获得更好的表现，尽管耐克和锐步的广告可能并不认同这一点。

Another factor: an athlete with the perfect swimmer’s build and a world-class work ethic would still stand little chance of competing in this year’s games if he happened to be born in a poor nation like Cameroon or Panama — he might never have gotten into a pool, let alone an Olympic-size one. But running, especially over short distances, can be practiced virtually anywhere and anytime.

另外一个因素：一名有着完美游泳运动员体型和一流职业精神的运动员，如果他刚好出生在一个像喀麦隆或者巴拿马这样的穷国家，他也不会有太多机会参加今年的奥运会——他可能从来没有进过游泳池，更不用说奥运会规模的泳池了。但是，跑步运动，尤其是短跑，却几乎能在任何时候或者任何地点进行。

Which leads to this: As Stephen Jay Gould noted, the more open to competition a sport is, the harder it may be to break records or to post extraordinary statistics. The .400 hitter disappeared in baseball once the color barrier was broken, and black Americans and players from Latin America were allowed to compete in the major leagues. This raised the average level of performance — but also made it harder for any one athlete to stand out quite as much relative to his peers.

这就导致以下情况：正如斯蒂芬·杰伊·古尔德(Stephen Jay Gould)所说，一个比赛的开放程度越高，在该赛事上打破记录或者创造出非凡成绩的难度越大。在棒球运动中，种族障碍被打破后，美国黑人和来自拉丁美洲的运动员能够参加主要的联盟比赛，随之，那位拥有四成击打率的击球手便在棒球运动中销声匿迹。这提高了比赛的平均水平——不过同时，这也使得任何一位运动员要在同伴中脱颖而出变得更加困难。

In the track and field events, it is more likely that an athlete has already come close to what Gould called the “right wall” of human performance, simply because the human being who possessed the ideal build and work ethic is more likely actually to have competed in the Olympic Games.

在田径比赛中， 一个运动员更可能已接近古尔德所说的人类表现的“极限墙”，仅仅因为那个拥有完美体格和最高职业精神的人非常可能已经参加了奥运会。

This is not to diminish the accomplishments of Phelps or Lochte — and I’ll be rooting for them. But whatever records they set may well be broken in Rio in 2016, if not sooner. I wouldn’t put money on anyone out-jumping Beamon or outrunning Griffith-Joyner any time soon, however.

这不是在贬低菲尔普斯或者罗切特的成就——我会为他们加油。但是他们创造的世界纪录，不论有多么惊人，很可能将在2016年的里约热内卢奥运被打破，如果不是更早的话。然而，我不会拿钱下注，去赌近期会有任何一人能比比蒙跳的更远，或者比格里菲斯·乔依娜跑得更快。

Nate Silver是博客FiveThirtyEight的编辑，长期从事体育数据的分析工作。

翻译：谷菁璐