
2008 was a great year for sports fans, with highlights including Usain Bolt shattering both the 100m and 200m world records at the Beijing Olympics and knocking tenths of a second off each in the process. The fact is that athletes have been getting faster and faster since times have been accurately recorded, but is there an upper limit to how fast athletes can run?
American marathon runner Mark Denny, from Stanford University thought that there were and set about trying to predict what those limits were. To do so he scrutinised the running performances of humans and two other famous racing species, greyhounds and thoroughbred horses, to find how close their modern participants are to the peak performances for their species.
He has just published his predictions for their top speeds in The Journal of Experimental Biology.
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