The 100 metres, the queen of athletics and the Games as a whole, fascinates not only television viewers. Scientists, too, scrutinise these spectacular races closely, to understand how a human being is able to speed like the wind, and how far the body of this biped, naturally not very favoured for running, could go in terms of speed.
Many scientific studies have been devoted to sprinting. But we should not take too literally the predictions drawn from mathematical and/or statistical models for analyzing reference times. On August 16, 2009, in Berlin, Usain Bolt smashed the men’s world record for the third time by covering the distance in 9.58 seconds. “Before this date, the probability of running 100 m in 9.58 seconds was estimated at 0.64%,” recalls, with a hint of irony, CNRS researcher Amandine Aftalion, author of “Pourquoi est-on penché dans les virages? – Le sport expliqué par les sciences en 40 questions” (CNRS Editions).