The Olympic Games have their ori­gins in antiq­ui­ty, but their mod­ern revival has also been going on longer than any of us has been here. Even the fifth Sum­mer Olympics, which took place in Stock­holm in 1912, has passed out of liv­ing mem­o­ry. But thanks to the tech­nol­o­gy of the twen­ty-first cen­tu­ry, we can call up sur­pris­ing­ly crisp footage of its com­pe­ti­tions any time we like, much as we’re doing with that of the cur­rent­ly ongo­ing thir­ty-third Sum­mer Olympics in Paris. One espe­cial­ly fas­ci­nat­ing use of these resources, for those invest­ed in sport­ing his­to­ry, is to com­pare the per­for­mances of Olympic ath­letes over time: we know they’ve improved, but it’s one thing to see the num­bers, and quite anoth­er to see a side-by-side com­par­i­son.

Take the ven­er­a­ble men’s 100 meters, whose 1912 and 2020 finals both appear in the video above. 112 years ago, the Unit­ed States of Amer­i­ca’s Ralph Craig won the day (after sev­en false starts, and arguably an eighth as well) with a time of 10.8 sec­onds. Three years ago (Tokyo 2020 hav­ing been delayed by COVID-19 to 2021), the vic­tor of that same event was Italy’s Mar­cell Jacobs, who crossed the fin­ish line at 9.8 sec­onds. 

An even greater evo­lu­tion man­i­fests in the javelin throw, in which the Swedish Eric Lem­ming’s 60.64 meters in 1912 becomes Neer­aj Chopra’s 87.58 meters in 2020. (Nor has Chopra fin­ished set­ting records, at least judg­ing by the media fan­fare in his home­land that attend­ed his recent arrival in Paris’ Olympic vil­lage.)

Pole vault­ing, too, has under­gone a great leap for­ward, or rather, upward. Just above, you can see the 1912 record of 3.95 meters set by Hen­ry S. Bab­cock of the Unit­ed States, then the 2020 record of 6.02 meters set by Armand “Mon­do” Duplan­tis of Swe­den — or tech­ni­cal­ly, of both Swe­den and the U.S., hav­ing been born and raised in the lat­ter, but able to rep­re­sent the for­mer due to his moth­er’s being Swedish. In recent decades, such cas­es of nation­al­ly mixed parent­age (the Amer­i­can-born Ital­ian Jacobs being anoth­er) have become more com­mon in the Olympics, which in that and oth­er respects has long reflect­ed changes in the wider world. And though whether human­i­ty is improv­ing on the whole remains a mat­ter of heat­ed debate, we’ve unde­ni­ably been get­ting a lot bet­ter at run­ning, throw­ing, and jump­ing with the aid of big sticks.

Relat­ed con­tent:

The Sci­ence of the Olympic Flame; Ancient Style Meets Mod­ern Tech­nol­o­gy

The Sto­ry Behind the Icon­ic Black Pow­er Salute Pho­to at the 1968 Olympics in Mex­i­co City

Did Joe Strum­mer, Front­man of The Clash, Run the Paris and Lon­don Marathons?

Based in Seoul, Col­in Marshall writes and broad­casts on cities, lan­guage, and cul­ture. His projects include the Sub­stack newslet­ter Books on Cities and the book The State­less City: a Walk through 21st-Cen­tu­ry Los Ange­les. Fol­low him on Twit­ter at @colinmarshall or on Face­book.