It seems impossible that Michael Phelps’s record of winning fourteen Olympic gold medals, with more to come in London in 2012 when he will only be 27, will ever be broken. Phelps is a swimming phenomenon. He has size 14 feet which serve as flippers to propel him through water. He is 6ft 4in tall but has arms that span 6ft 7in from fingertip to fingertip. If God or nature wanted to put together a swimming machine it would look like Michael Phelps. But, much more than this, he is faster at processing lactic acid, which is what makes muscles ache and stall, than any other known human. After a race, most swimmers measure a lacticity of 10-5 millimoles per litre of blood. Phelps’s count after a world record swim was 5.6. Five thousand other international swimmers have been measured and none have been found with a post-race lacticity of under 10. Michael Phelps simply doesn’t hurt and seize up as much as the others in a race as he puts in that final effort, and his recovery time is much faster. His record seems likely to stand forever.
But in fact are there any sporting records that will last forever? It seemed that Bob Beamon’s leap out of the pit in that rarefied Mexico City air in 1968 would endure for generations as the long jump record – but it didn’t. In cricket in particular most records have insect-long lives – not a week goes by without somewhere some record being broken.
“Records are there to be broken,” Sobers observed when asked how he felt about Lara eclipsing his world record Test score of 365. Of course, some last longer than others – that famous 365, for instance, which endured so long that it became part of our mental furniture. For a while we missed its memorable ring – one run for each day of the year – until Lara’s 375, Hayden’s 380, Lara’s quickly responding 400 took over. But for how long will 400 stand? For every Test match played in 1958 ten are now played so the statistical chances of Lara’s 400 lasting even a decade are slight.
There are, perhaps, three records in cricket which I think will last forever, even though I know forever is an exceedingly long time and gives plenty of scope to would-be challengers. The three records are: Bradman’s Test average of 99.96 (with all due respect to my old friend Andy Ganteaume’s Test average of 112 made in the only innings he ever played); Laker’s 19 wickets in a single Test match; and Jack Hobbs’s 197 first class centuries, one hundred of them made after he reached the age of 40. As I think of Hobbs’s achievement it makes me wonder why great batsmen these days retire so soon.
There are also the records of those who also ran. I treasure them. We should not forget them. They are the cannon-fodder without whom war cannot be fought and gloriously won. To my shame I have forgotten the name of one of my favourite Test cricketers in all the history of the game – but it will come back to me or someone will surely find it in the records and remind me. His name deserves immortality. He was selected to play for Australia as a middle-order batsman. He went in to bat in the only innings Australia played, no doubt with thoughts of undying fame, and was out first ball, clean-bowled so he could not even say he put bat to ball. What were his thoughts as he trudged back to the silent pavilion? He did not bowl. He did not take a catch. Probably he fielded at deep fine leg and never touched a ball in the entire match. He was never selected again. That was his one Test match. But do not despise him. They also serve who stand and fail. Without the hopeless also-rans, without those who merely make up numbers, there would be no sport at all – indeed there would be no victories, no life itself. The poet Bertolt Brecht asked the right questions:
The young Alexander conquered India.
Was he alone?
Caesar beat the Gauls
Did he not even have a cook with him?
There is one record-breaking event in sporting history which, it seems, is unique. It has not made the slightest difference that the record commemorated is now hopelessly out of date, broken routinely not only by champion runners but by mere schoolboys who train hard. I am one of those who remember the event very clearly. I was preparing for final exams at Cambridge but found the time to gather with a crowd of others to watch the race on the one flickering black and white TV set we had at Clare College in the junior common room. At the Oxford sports ground Chris Brasher and Chris Chataway did the early pacing – then fell away as the man attempting the record that had remained unbroken it seemed forever raced through. I still recall the baggy long shorts and the gangling legs and the desperate pumping arms. In those days there was no stopwatch ticking away the hundredths of a second on the face of the TV screen. So we had to await the timekeeper’s announcement. He was Harold Abrahams, himself a famous Olympic gold medallist. He began to speak – “Three…” The rest was drowned in elated applause because with that one word it was already known that the young runner who sagged exhausted beyond the tape had secured his fame. Roger Bannister had broken the four-minute mile barrier.
Dr Roger Bannister, long since a distinguished physiologist and retired Master of Pembroke College, Oxford, says that you can do a simple equation to work out how much oxygen can be pumped into the human heart and that you can calculate that three-and-a-half minutes looks like the ultimate time for the mile. Bannister thinks that men will spend much of the 21st century trying to get to that ultimate time. And yet, and yet, somewhere some youngster with a lung capacity larger than Lance Armstrong’s and the ability to process lactic acid more efficiently than Michael Phelps is no doubt even now running around some school ground on his way to proving Dr Bannister wrong.
