1. Historical background: top-level sports in the past and today

1.1. Structure of the body and sport

When we go out to a basketball match, we’re not surprised to see that the people playing on the pitch are very tall, and often noticeably thin. We have also become accustomed to going to swimming competitions and seeing streamlined athletes with wide shoulders and narrow hips. So we are not surprised by the different physique of athletes from different sports. In addition to the phenomenon of fundamental differences in dimensions, if we look further in a finer resolution, we can see interesting patterns. Returning to the swimmers, for example, if we were to measure their body proportions, we would be surprised that their upper body was disproportionately long, while their legs were on average shorter than those of non-swimmers. In contrast, in the case of long-distance runners, the ratio of torso to lower body length is the opposite: the upper body is relatively short and the legs are long. However, the – often very marked – differences in body size and body proportions between sports were not always so typical.

In the first half of the 20th century, according to the general opinion of sports professionals and coaches, the average athletic body shape was the most appropriate in all sports (Epstein 2013). For example, a shot putter’s body and a high-jumper’s body were no different in any way. In the second half of the century, due to a new approach, they began to deviate from this principle of equality in sports selection, and a strong body shape selection started among the representatives of various sports. Thanks to this, with a little experience, we can say with great confidence what kind of sport or sports a sportsperson can practice. Occasionally, this diversity between sports also meant genetic selection, as certain ethnic groups are clearly overrepresented in certain sports. Perhaps the most striking example is the national composition of long-distance runners, such as marathon runners. Anyone who follows the world of athletics knows that Africans are disproportionately represented in the finals of long-distance running events, but even among them, most are from the Kenyan and Ethiopian teams.

When we look at Kenyans and look more closely at the phenomenon, we can discover that this racing team does not represent the various groups in the Kenyan population in a proportional way, but almost exclusively members of the Kalenjin tribe (Epstein 2013). In this tribe, it is generally observed that their legs, especially their shins, are very thin and long compared to the average, which makes it possible to perform extraordinarily when running in the heat around the equator, as the shin has, per unit of surface area, probably one of the best indices of human heat dissipation in the world. Of course, the heat exchange surface is only one parameter in the complex parameter space, which is important during the race, so it is likely that other, for example, enzymatic, properties also help to produce this performance. However, this is currently not a sufficiently explored area in science, and for us, the example of leg shapes and body proportions may be enough to understand what fundamental effects genetic differences have on the varied results observable in top-level sports. Constitutional selectivity is also a very important factor in the fact that today’s best sporting results are generally far beyond what occurred, let us say, a hundred years ago. However, there are also two other important factors behind this phenomenon, which are the medical (legal and illegal) background support and the development of technical assistance factors in sport (Epstein 2013); let us discuss some aspects of these.

1.2. Technology and sport

1.2.1. Technology and performance

If we look at the history of the Olympics, we can witness the amazing development of winning performances. Take, for example, the final in a well-known sport, the men’s 100-meter sprint in athletics (Figure 1). The 12-second winning time of the gold medallist at the Athens Olympic Games in 1896 would not be enough to even qualify for the Olympics today, as even female athletes are running this time as juniors. On the podium, the competitors now have times below 10 seconds. In another sport and another event, the 100-meter freestyle (i.e. fast) swimming, for example, in 1922 Johnny Weissmüller, who starred in Tarzan films, became the first to finish a race in under one-minute (58.6 s) in an official competition. Today, women in butterfly, and men in the slowest event, the breaststroke, go under that time; and in freestyle swimming the new record is more than 10 seconds better than Weissmüller’s.

Why has this great development occurred? Are human athletes getting better, stronger and more skilful? Well, the answer is yes and no. There is progress in the sense that the above-mentioned body-genetic selection naturally affects the results achieved. On the other hand, however, the development is misleading, as most of the changes have been, and are, made possible by the development of technical tools (Epstein 2013).

Times recorded, Olympic Games between 1896 (Athens) and 2016 (Rio de Janeiro) Figure 1: The winning times of the last 28 Olympic Games in the men’s 100-meter sprint (source of data: https://www.olympic.org/athletics/100m-menFigure: Author’s own production.)

In the past, runners ran on ash and slag, while today they run on a specially designed rubber mat, which effectively absorbs the kinetic energy from the foot upon arrival and gives it back in the return phase. This in itself contributes an increase in speed of about one and a half percent (Epstein 2013). In contrast to running in barefoot or simple sneakers with a thin rubber sole, the high-tech, spiked running shoes designed for the particular foot type and race today will help athletes compete. In the beginning, the runners started from a hole dug into the slag; now they do it from the starting blocks.

In another popular sport, swimming, there have been three great leaps in the evolution of the athletes’ results in the modern competitive era. One of them was caused by the flip turn, introduced in 1956, which allowed competitors to save a considerable amount of time compared to the traditional hand-touch turn. Another important effect twenty years later was caused by the introduction of the water collectors on the sides of the swimming pool, with the help of which the turbulence is reduced in the pool, so that athletes can work against less drag. Lastly, there has been the development and appearance of special, low-friction swimming costumes (in 2008) (Epstein 2013). We could follow several other sports from this point of view, but perhaps this is sufficient to create a picture of how technological innovations make a significant contribution to the improvement of competition results over time.

It is understandable that there is a lot of pressure on sports technology developments. Remember, in the sport segment that we call top-level sport, the standard deviation of athletes’ performance is very small compared to the performance of other athletes in the sport; in other words, at the highest level, there is very little to choose between the performers. In such a narrow band, even a small discrepancy in absolute terms may determine the outcome of the competition.

1.2.2. The relationship between technical clothing and skin functioning

The various technical innovations and tools to help movement that have been mentioned above are, however, only one part of the repertoire of inventions that enhance athletes’ performance. The so-called “technical clothing” is a very important type of equipment. One type of technical clothing – nowadays used more and more widely – in land sports (e.g. running, cycling) is made of specially woven fabrics, usually synthetic fibres, which have high absorbency and dry very quickly. Thus, they absorb sweat produced on the body surface with great efficiency, and return it immediately to the environment. Consequently, this material is very effective in heat removal during activity in hot weather, and in winter, in cold sports, prevents the competitor from getting cold and freezing due to moisture remaining in the clothing. Regulating the body’s heat balance is an extremely important physiological task. Remembering our biological studies, we can recall that in this function, one of the major roles at the executive, organ level, is performed by our skin. The human skin, which, by the way, is the largest organ of our body, serves not only to physically connect the environment and the body and to provide protective functions; it is also, thanks to its large number of tiny blood vessels, the number one engineer of heat regulation. The blood supply it receives per minute when resting is only 5% of the cardiac output, but this can go up to 60% during intensive work. We can also recall that there are three large regions in our body that have significant blood uptake and blood release capacity. One of them is skeletal muscle, which greatly increases its blood flow when working. In addition, due to its relatively large mass and volume, it requires a substantial quantity of blood for this activity. The other is the skin, which can increase its perfusion to the extent mentioned above in the case of increased heat production. The third is the visceral area, which contributes to the maintenance of normal blood pressure – because it can operate even with minimal perfusion – by transferring the blood to those tissues that need it more, and hence it constitutes a significant circulatory reserve for the brain, and for the muscles and skin themselves.

These three areas are profoundly interesting from the point of view of sporting activity because during physical activity at high temperature, a so-called circulatory conflict can occur between the maintenance of general blood pressure, the blood supply to the muscles due to the work undertaken, and the high blood flow of the skin due to the need for heat release. Since the priority is to ensure heat loss (since our proteins would be denatured and we would then die in the case of overheating), and because perfusion in the muscles is necessarily high due to various local blood flow regulating factors, maintaining the blood pressure will suffer because of this conflict: blood pressure drops and the individual becomes unconscious (e.g. Fonyó 2014). However, if we raise this limit by making the heat dissipation more efficient, we allow a wider zone for the athlete’s performance to develop in extreme ranges. Technical clothing, because of its effective heat removal ability, enables us to achieve this goal precisely by supporting the heat transfer function of the skin. Of course, if our goal is not really to get to know our own limits until we faint – and, naturally, this is not usually the case –, technical clothing simply makes the sporting activity more enjoyable by keeping the competitor’s training in the comfort zone for a longer period, thus providing a significant motivating force to do sport regularly.