RECORD BREAKERS.

Shannon News, 4 May 1928, Page 3

RECORD BREAKERS.

SOME GREAT PERFORMANCES. Scientists have set a certain limit to the possibility of human physical achievement. So far some of their expectations have not been fulfilled, while other theories have been upset (writes P. A. M. Webster, the well-known athletic expert,'in the London Daily Mail). Some mathematicians have said that it is possible for a man travelling at a speed of ten yards a second to jurhp to a distance of over twenty-seven feet if there is no check between the run and the spring. But thirty years ago C. B. Fry’s world’s record of twentythree feet six inches and a-half at Oxford was' regarded as the last word in long jump achievement. Last year de Hart Hubbard, a thirty-four-ycar-old American negro, reached twenty-six feet two inches and a-half, but had his record disallowed because the take-off was an inch higher than the surface of the sand nit. That a jump of 26 feet is humanly possible has recently been placed beyond doubt by S. J. M. Atkinson, of South Africa, clearing 26 feet and | of an inch. It seems possible that the 27 feet limit set by seien-c tists may be reached at the forthcoming ninth Olympiad at Amsterdam. What is, it that makes a record-breaker? The causes are mysterious. It might be thought that among jumpers the tall man would have the better chance, but de Hart Hubbard stands only five feet six inches, whereas Atkinson is jus J . over six feet. " On the track’ it is the fire within that tells first, but there are many other factors to be considered. Not least of these is environment. Performances are possible, to sprinters in the rarefied air of California and South Africa which cannot be accomplished elsewhere; and a perfectly surfaced track shut in from all winds, like that at Stockholm, where Nurmi performed his wonderful mile in 4min. 10 2-ssec., is simply built for recordbreaking. Men like Nurmi and Newton, the hero of the Bath and Brighton roads, are, of course, a law unto themselves. Nurmi, for example, has thought nothing of running two or three miles as a means of limbering up for a ten-mile race, to say nothing of eating an apple 1 between events; while Newton never bothers about diet, and has been known to smoke a pipe both before and immediately after one of his amazing fifty-mile runs. There is, however, a point of similarity about the beginnings of both these recordbreakers. As a youngster Nurmi ran eight miles t@ and from school daily, doing the journeys on skis in winter; while Newton, when a boy at Bedford School, was well accustomed to a weekly jaunt of twenty miles. In both cases such early training has made these men almost immune from exhaustion.