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THE NEW WAVE IN SPORTS
If there is one sure way to be wrong about the future, it is to be conservative about the American capacity for growth. Back in 1939, for instance, the General Motors exhibit at the then New York World's Fair predicted that the number of automobiles in the U.S. would increase from 26 million to 38 million by 1960, or by almost 50%. That was considered an extravagant and fanciful forecast, but the actual number of cars in 1960 turned out to be more than 61 million—the increase alone was nine million more than the number of cars that existed in 1939. Again, in 1951 the Civil Aeronautics Administration estimated optimistically that domestic air travel would soar in nine years from nearly 10 billion to 18 billion passenger miles. The actual mileage total in 1960 was more than 30 billion.
In short, it seems almost impossible to be too far out about the future. The point is stressed because some of the forecasts that follow in this article about sports in the next decade or two may seem farfetched and even foolish. But they are based not on fantasy but on hard facts, on evident statistics, on trends already in existence.
A number of generalizations may be made about the immediate future:
•Sports will continue to boom and boom and boom and will play an increasingly larger role in American life. The simple facts are that more and more people will be earning more and more money and will have more leisure time. The population of the U.S. now stands close to 200 million. By 1980 it will be 260 million, and at the turn of the century, only 35 years from now, it will approach 350 million. As the population grows, the work week shrinks. In 1900 the standard work week was 60 hours, in 1930 it was 48 hours and in 1964 it was 39 hours. In 1976, so calculates the Bureau of Labor Statistics, it will be 36 hours and in the year 2000 only 32. By then Americans will have 500 billion more hours of leisure time than they now have. Sports is an obvious way of passing that time.
•The public purchase of sporting goods will continue to grow at a rapid rate. According to Richard E. Snyder, consulting economist to the National Sporting Goods Association and other organizations, sales of selected goods totaled a mere $167 million in 1933. By 1943, a war year, annual sales had doubled to $329 million. After World War II ended, sales more than doubled again, to $754 million in 1946. In 1964 sales reached $2.6 billion, almost four times the 1946 figure, and in another 10 years should near $4.5 billion. The average annual growth rate for sporting-goods sales is 5.3%, which is greater than that of the gross national product.
•Technological advances will widen and deepen sporting activities in the next decade. American sports grew out of the industrial boom of the late 19th century, and they have traditionally depended upon technological innovations—from gutta-percha golf balls to automatic pinspotters—for stimulus. By 1974 sports will have benefited greatly from space-age research. Indeed, space-age products are with us already. The firm of G.T. Schjeldahl in Northfield, Minn., which was awarded the contract to build the inflatable Echo satellites, has developed inflatable plastic packets the size of a rolled-up tent which can be blown up to cover and winterize an outdoor swimming pool. Texas Instruments has speculated about designing an unlosable golf ball that would contain a tiny transmitter that would send out signals from the wildest rough. It would be impossible for a golfer to damage the transmitter no matter how vicious his swing—after all, it was built for impact on the moon.
•Technological advances in communications will help foster a more intensive internationalization of sports. A prime TV attraction in a few years may well be the U.S.-U.S.S.R. track meet live from Moscow. Bill MacPhail, vice-president in charge of sports for the Columbia Broadcasting System, says the chances are 50-50 that CBS will be able to do a complete live telecast of the 1966 Carling Open in Great Britain, and by 1968 the networks will be able to deliver instant coverage of sporting events from any place on earth.
•Travel will also further internationalization. Already it is responsible for a considerable cross-fertilization of cultural interests and sports. A great number of Latin Americans are now playing in the major leagues (both the National and American league batting champions are Latins), and the San Francisco Giants had a Japanese pitcher last season. A couple of months ago the Cincinnati Reds signed an Italian infielder. The process is beginning to work in reverse. When American baseball professionals reach the end of a major league career they hop a jet to Japan and the waiting Osaka Hawks. Other sports, too, keep spreading from country to country. Judo and karate have become highly popular outside Japan, and the American games of volleyball and table tennis are the rage of Asia. ("My theory," says Sociologist Reuel N. Denney of the Institute of American Studies of the University of Hawaii's East-West Center, "is that volleyball was spread to southeast Asia by airline crews. Now people like the Indonesians want Peace Corps athletic instructors so they can build up their ability in Western athletics.")
•Participant sports will overshadow spectator sports in the next decade, and it is highly unlikely that any new major spectator sport will emerge within the foreseeable future. Baseball, the so-called national game, is likely to recede even more in relative popularity. This trend toward participant sports became apparent in the mid-1930s. In 1934 the National Recreation Association studied the leisure-time activities of a large number of Americans. Most of the people studied were sedentary. They listened to the radio, they watched games, they went to the movies, they read. But, apparently, what they really wanted to do was be active themselves. They wanted to be able to play golf, to go swimming and to sail. These desires became reality after World War II, as documented by Economist Snyder's figures. Even though attendance rose rapidly, participation in sports grew even more quickly, and as of today Americans spend 10 times as much on participant sports as they do on spectator sports. This overwhelming interest in participation is confirmed by the findings of the Outdoor Recreation Resources Review Commission, established by Congress in 1958. According to the ORRRC, participation in outdoor recreation alone will just about double itself by 1976, and then it will double itself again by the year 2000. In 1960 there were 474 million of what the ORRRC calls outdoor summer "occasions" by Americans. By 1976 there will be 825 million such occasions and by the turn of the century 1.6 billion. By contrast, attendance at outdoor sports events will reach only 416 million occasions by 2000. (Such figures, of course, exclude what one might term television occasions. But it is worth noting that the amount of money spent each year in this country on sporting goods exceeds the total annual advertising revenues of the country's three big TV networks.)
•Although participant sports will grow, some will not grow as much as others. There is remarkable agreement, for instance, that bowling may have reached its crest. Richard Snyder says, "Bowling has had its period of dramatic growth. It's holding its own, but there isn't much new to report about it." The participant sports that will grow seem to be those that combine the outdoors, the "family ethic" and excitement. Skiing and fishing, for example. More and more, family participation is playing a key role in the popularity of sports. "The American emphasis on the small family unit has created a set of strong emotional ties among its members, and thus a familism of a new type has emerged that will increase in importance in the decades to come," Columbia Sociologist William J. Goode wrote in an ORRRC study report, Trends in American Living and Outdoor Recreation. "Outdoor recreation permits family members to be together while permitting each member to synchronize only loosely with the others."
One indoor sport that seems certain of growth is billiards. It has become solidly rooted in the family ethic. According to Economist Snyder, billiard supplies and equipment have a growth rate of 14%, one of the highest in sports. In 1964 billiard sales totaled $19 million; in 1974 they should account for $47 million in expenditures.
•Sports will become safer and easier as Americans seek more and more family participation. In the next decade improved safety bindings should all but nullify the chance of broken legs in skiing (in the last decade, the broken-leg rate declined 95%), and bigger and better lifts are almost certain to make skiing all thrill and no work. Americans want excitement, but they want it without sweat. The golf-cart mentality is upon us. Already biologists at the Illinois State Natural History Survey have bred a special race of stupid fish, unable to resist a lure even when cast, one assumes, by the most stupid fisherman.
•Family interest in sports will remake living patterns. The golf-course housing project is a reality. More than 100 such developments are under construction in 26 states, and the future promises more. Similar projects, with skiing or boating or flying as the motif, are in the planning stage or already being developed.
Without doubt the greatest growth in sport in the next 10 years will come in water-based sports, such as swimming (the most popular sports activity in the country, according to the ORRRC, which counted 33 million participants), boating, skin diving, surfing, water skiing and fishing. The economic kingpin is boating. In 1964 Americans spent $650 million on boats; in 1974 they will spend $1.2 billion. In some areas ownership of a pleasure boat is no longer a gratifying luxury; it has become—as owning a TV set became a dozen years ago—a necessity.
The boat boom is everywhere. The highways of arid states like Nevada and Texas are jammed on holidays with boaters hauling their craft to the nearest navigable water. The number of artificial reservoirs and impoundments has increased prodigiously, and within a few years' time the acreage of man-made waters in the U.S. may exceed that of natural waters, including the Great Lakes. With an assist from the boat trailer, garages are fast becoming boathouses, and there is a profusion of "boatels" to aid, succor and comfort the amateur navigator. Waterfront overcrowding is inevitable, and the mooring problem afloat gives every sign of becoming as critical as the parking problem on land. Additional legislation seems inevitable to bring some order to the ultimate chaos. The likelihood now is that boats will become more and more standardized and more and more specialized. As molded plastic becomes the definitive building material, improving mass-production techniques will serve to make more and better low-cost, one-design boats. As these one-design, mass-production techniques take over, the specialized skills of the oldtime adz-wielding shipwright will become too rare and too precious for all save a few favored yachtsmen. Even now, tradition-conscious sailmakers find it unprofitable to cut a sail for one rich yachtsman when their computers can hum over the job of perfecting the curves in the identical sails of a new one-design fleet.
The sporting byproduct of standardization will be an increase in competitive boating at every level. This trend is obvious already in day-class boats like the Lightning, Comet, Snipe and Thistle, and in the near future it will spread to the open sea.
More standardization will lead, paradoxically, to greater specialization, inasmuch as there will be no such thing as the all-round boat. A boat, especially a mass-production boat, is built for a specific purpose: speed, comfort or seaworthiness. Long ago powerboats reached the point where a choice had to be made between speed and comfort. Where speed is of the essence, power will be provided by gas turbines, lightweight diesels and more efficient water jets. But the speed at which a boat can be pushed through the water is limited by physical law. To make a boat go faster, you must lift it, or most of it, right out of the water—like hydroplanes, hydrofoils and Hydroskimmers. (This raises a question of semantics: When is a boat not a boat but a plane?) The main effort in powerboating will be to make boats that will hold together under hideous punishment.
Where comfort is essential, the future will be limited only by the imagination of interior decorators and the advances in electronics. Future developments not only will provide hi-fi diversion for the bored skipper's wife but will, through sophisticated gadgetry, allow the skipper himself, even if he is the rankest novice, to navigate waters that would have befuddled a Phoenician.
Fishing is going to change drastically in the next decade. Natural trout streams will become a thing of the past, like clipper ships or plains buffalo. They will exist, but barely. And those that survive will be for fly-fishing only with all caught trout returned to the water. In brief, angling for trout will become a ceremonial ritual, like a Kabuki dance. Replacing trout in the fisherman's take-home catch—the trend is not new—are the so-called warm-water fishes, the black bass, panfish, pike and walleye. Earlier this year at the American Fisheries Society convention, Raymond E. Johnson, of the U.S. Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife told biologists to forget about trout and concentrate on bass and the like. Not enough is known of the warm-water fishes and, although water acreage will increase at a rapid rate, the catch rate must double and more for every new acre. Why? Because the number of fishermen is growing at an even faster rate than the water acreage. By the year 2000, there will be a minimum of 60 million anglers, and if they are to go home happy the total catch rate will have to jump from the current 17 to 35 pounds per acre. "As things stand now, we need a knockout to get a draw," Johnson said wistfully. To meet the vastly increased demand for fish to catch, exotic species, such as the fast-growing tropical tilapia now being stocked in the South, will be introduced. In the north, striped bass probably will be stocked in freshwater ponds and lakes. The striper may prove to be the game fish needed to replace useless pounds of dull carp and stunted panfish.
While fishing will grow, hunting will level off. Prime hunting land is disappearing. The crush of a burgeoning population is too much, and although second-growth farmland in suburban areas is conducive to deer—there are more deer in the U.S. today than there were before the white man arrived—hunting with a rifle or even a shotgun is simply too dangerous in built-up areas. It is just about impossible to hunt within a 50-mile range of New York City, though game is abundant.
Even in wild areas, more and more land is being fenced off from the public. In upper Michigan, for instance, the closure of land to public hunting increased 326% between 1929 and 1960. The ORRRC study on hunting notes, "How nearly complete the process of closure is in some [Michigan] counties is shown by the following: in Montmorency the closure is complete; in Alcona privately owned wildland is 66.4% of the total wildland and 56.2% is fenced.... Such counties have large acreages of privately owned wild-land, but only about 10 to 20% is open to the public." The trend now in hunting is toward admission-fee preserves. In addition to standard American game, the hunter is offered the chance to bag an exotic, such as an oryx or Barbary sheep.
Still and all, firearms and ammunition sales are expected to increase from the present $283 million to $325 million by 1974 because, Economist Snyder believes, of added interest in trap and skeet shooting. There is also rapidly growing interest in archery, which should swell from $38 million in sales to $87 million 10 years hence. Archers can often hunt where riflemen may not; moreover, archery has gained impetus with the opening of indoor target ranges.
Camping will continue to surge in the next 10 years. Here the family ethic is deeply involved. Sociologist Goode noted that most of the 10.4 million Americans who went camping in 1962 did so in family units. The trend in camping now is toward more luxurious equipment, and the only danger Economist Snyder sees is that camping "might be carried to the point where there is a backlash—simply because people might tire of carrying so much capital goods into the woods."
Winter sports should continue to grow. Snyder is particularly enthusiastic about hockey. "I expect a sharp increase," he says. "The game has color and speed and if you're interested in a little brutality it'll give you that, too." Skiing will change more in terms of facilities than in terms of the sport itself. As in boat hulls, no further development in ski design is anticipated, and the skis of the future will look much as they do today. The materials, however, will change. Just as hickory gave way to metals, so metals are giving way to plastic. One Austrian firm, Kneissl, has developed a plastic ski—made out of the same material, the firm says, that is used in rockets. Another plastic test ski took 28 million flexings and broke only under a one-and-a-half-ton stress.
The major changes in skiing will be the resorts themselves. The old joke about building an indoor mountain for skiing is reality—there is such a mountain in Japan, which has the world's largest ski population, and a similar project is being drawn up for southern California. Sepp Ruschp of Stowe, Vt. talks about villages springing up at the base of mountains hundreds of miles from cities, all-weather link-belt escalators carrying skiers on short lifts, huge triple-chair lifts and gondolas carrying thousands of skiers up to the peaks, dozens of trails of different kinds, huge machines that are able to till packed snow the way a farmer tills his land. That is Ruschp's conservative view of the short-range future. And, indeed, much of it is happening already. "No one can even dream what skiing will be like in 50 years," he says.
No one but Walter Schoenknecht of Mount Snow, perhaps. Schoenknecht still hopes that the Atomic Energy Commission will let him use nuclear devices to retailor the Vermont terrain. In the meantime, he is going ahead with immediate plans that smack of science fiction. Mount Snow is planning 21 double-chair lifts, six aerial tramways (some, a thousand feet above the ground, that will make peak-to-peak spans) and six gondolas. "Huge capacity is what everyone will try for," says Schoenknecht. "There will be a tremendous growth in skiing as people have more leisure time and the interstate highways are completed. The national average shows a growth of 10% or 15% yearly in the ski business, but I think that is conservative. It may be 20% a year.
"There will be more families skiing, including school-age children who will come to spend entire vacations. Winter-type chalet homes for weekends and vacations in summer are springing up, and entire villages are developing around ski areas. All kinds of supporting facilities for summer and winter recreation will develop. Golf courses, tennis courts, horseback riding, swimming, lakes—all will be developed or created." Schoenknecht is already developing six independent areas for skiing at Mount Snow. Five new hotels, complete with golf courses, are being built, and Schoenknecht is designing a "fantastic fountain" that will ice the shores of a 12-acre lake. He figures he has moved 100,000 cubic yards of earth just to improve one ski basin. More land is waiting to be moved; all he needs is that atom bomb.
Atom bomb or not, science continues to help spread the range of sport. Here the achievements of the space industry have great relevance. The Manned Spacecraft Center has devised a liquid-cooled thermal undersuit that enables the wearer to withstand extremes of temperature either in water or on land. Dr. John Billingham, who helped develop the suit, spent an hour in 27° water and emerged without a goose bump. Last July, Racing Driver Bobby Isaac wore the suit in the Daytona 400, in which he finished second to A.J. Foyt. The temperature inside the car soared to a blistering 140°, but Isaac was not in the least fatigued. The suit should reduce late-race wrecks that occur when a driver loses his alertness. Another scientist at the Manned Spacecraft Center, Matt Radnofsky, has designed a life raft for astronauts that may become the fisherman's or duck hunter's favorite. It is a one-man raft of aluminum and nylon that is just about impossible to capsize. Un-inflated, it is cigarette-pack size. This raft can be marketed commercially for less than $40. Already the creams, ointments and repellents used by NASA are available to the public. Specially developed for Project Mercury was a compact water purifier weighing only eight ounces. It is now on the market for $13.95.
Meanwhile the plastic industry has moved ahead with radical developments of its own, such as Corfam, devised by Du Pont. A man-made poromeric material with one million pores to the square inch, it has the apparent virtue of not wearing out or scuffing. Corfam shoes and other products have been so successful that Du Pont's main problem is not in finding new uses for the material but in geting enough of the stuff into production to meet the demand. Du Pont has already supplied sporting-goods manufacturers with Corfam for testing baseballs, footballs and softballs. Corfam also is being tested in golf-club and tennis-racket grips, and a "successful" jockey (not otherwise identified) used a Corfam saddle for 200 races. The jock spoke highly of Corfam's quality before sending the saddle back to the lab, where it was torn apart and analyzed. Similar analyses were conducted on Corfam baseball shoes worn by the Phillies during the 1963 season. (Bob Carpenter, the Phillies' owner, is a member of the Du Pont family.) Corfam golf shoes are on sale in shops, and they show a remarkable resistance to wetting and cracking. Their light weight is another plus. The day seems not far off when a jockey rides hell-for-Corfam, or a halfback totes the Corfam for a touchdown or a hitter belts the Corfam out of the old ball park (unless the park has a lid on it).
As man seeks to control the elements within the artificially created environment of his clothing, he will also be able to travel easily into regions that cannot now be reached by standard means of transportation. There are any number of devices already in use—ranging from the Bell Aero-systems Company's rocket belt (page 47) to Francis Rogallo's "Flying Handkerchief," developed for NASA—but the one that gives the most practical promise is the gyrocopter, the "flying motorcycle" (page 48). "It's here!" exults Igor Bensen of the Bensen Aircraft Corp., Raleigh, N.C. "It can be flown anywhere. It's the average man's flying machine." Last July 4 Bensen staged the annual meeting of the Popular Rotocraft Association, and more than 700 gyrocopter enthusiasts attended. Thirty of them had built their own machines, and officials of the Federal Aviation Agency were awed. The FAA has issued special licensing requirements for the gyrocopter, simply three takeoffs and three landings. (But the FAA also casts a dim eye on the somewhat starry-eyed notion that it can be flown anywhere. There are rules.)
"It's within the economic reach of the average citizen," says Bensen. "It costs about $3 an hour to operate our machine, about the same as an automobile. It gives you the freedom of a bird. You don't have to confine yourself to a quarter-mile strip, but you can fly all over the country and land anywhere. People can rediscover the country. Human activities tend to cling to the roads and highways, and 90% of the country hasn't yet been seen. It's a new form of hiking. A gyrocopter can be mounted on floats as well as wheels, for fishing in hard-to-reach places. A fellow in Minnesota mounted his on snow skis, and he says it's real sport. A gyrocopter can take off in as little as 300 feet, and it won't spin or stall. It just floats down like a parachute. Like any new device, it will take up to 17 years to become popular with the American public. We have been in business 11 years, the gyrocopter has been on the market six years and people are just becoming aware of it."
•Technological advances also give exciting promise to the future of stadiums, but promise is about all they give. The great Italian architect Pier Luigi Nervi, designer of the striking Palazzo and Palazzetto dello Sport in Rome, talks excitedly of domed stadiums with translucent roofs that can be quickly rolled over in case of rain. Domed stadiums for spectator sport may have immediate promise in Europe, which lags about 20 years behind the U.S. in leisure-sports activities, but the outlook here is much more dim. Two years ago Nervi sketched just such a stadium for the Boston Patriots of the American Football League, but the stadium remains nothing more than an architectural plan. Aside from the impressive new stadium that will open in Houston next spring, domed stadiums are highly unlikely in the U.S. in the next decade except to cover practice areas, miniature golf courses, tennis courts, outdoor ice rinks and the like. And in these instances inflatable materials, part of the feedback from the space program, are more likely to serve than sliding or translucent roofs. The simple reason is that the costs for inflatables are low, whereas erection of a new stadium with a special roof requires too much capital outlay. And spectator sports are reaching the point in the U.S. where TV and radio revenue are as important as the live gate.
This is not to say that spectator sports are positively on the wane, but relatively speaking they have lost ground to participant sports. For instance, major league baseball attendance seems to have stabilized at around 22 million a year, and there is no reason to expect that this figure will increase drastically in the next decade. There are any number of reasons for this: there have been too many fickle franchise shifts, the TV policy has been suicidal, the tempo of the game itself became increasingly slow at a time when the public taste was for increased action and there are too many other competing interests. All these factors show in the comparatively slow sales growth of baseball goods. In 1964 Americans spent $76 million on bats, gloves and balls, and by 1974 they are expected to spend only $114 million, not much for the "national game." Economist Snyder says, pessimistically, "I foresee the possibility that sales of baseball goods may not attain the projected figure for 1974."
Like baseball, basketball drifts. It suffers from too many weaknesses. On TV it has been "overexposed." And, as George D. Stoddard, then executive vice-president of New York University, wrote in the ORRRC report on Trends in American Living and Outdoor Recreation, "It is a game best suited to persons with glandular anomalies. It is much too easy. Through incessant scoring, basketball for the spectator involves more neck turning and listening to whistle tooting than anything else. Worst of all, no one as yet has been able to keep gamblers and gangsters out of organized basketball; the game is highly vulnerable to manipulation." To many people the gap between the end of the football season and the beginning of baseball is Dullsville—except for hockey. Basketball is so incapable of filling it on TV that, says Bill MacPhail, "last year we talked very seriously of starting a ski league, in which you'd have something like Aspen vs. Sugarbush."
Horse racing, which offers an outlet for gambling, will continue to burgeon, and football grows as both a spectator and participant sport. NYU's Stoddard sees alumni pressures and the huge capital investment in existing stadiums as basic supports for college football. "What endures," he writes, "is the mighty Saturday spectacle of 'the great game.' For many, football is the spectator sport par excellence.... I do not quarrel with this view; in fact, considering the few colorful spectacles remaining on the American scene, I am inclined to share it."
In professional football, sponsor pressure ultimately will force a championship game between the NFL and AFL. There is sponsor pressure on the NFL right now to go to the two-point conversion. It adds excitement; therefore the sponsors want it. It is highly unlikely that the networks will lose control of pro ball to pay-TV. Pay-TV, which was just outlawed in California, is still at least five years away. That is the trouble with pay-TV: it always has been "five years away." On the field itself pro players will be even bigger. Within 10 years defensive lines should average about 290 pounds. (The defensive line of the 1940 Chicago Bears averaged 220 pounds; today the L.A. Rams have a line that averages 50 pounds more than that and stands 6 feet 5 inches tall. It appears that football, too, is becoming a game for glandular anomalies.) In years past there have been any number of predictions, some of them supposedly solidly based on sociological studies of the American character, that soccer, lacrosse and perhaps even Rugby would be likely to become popular spectator sports. Any such thinking now is highly unrealistic, since the hunger for spectator sports has reached the saturation point. What's more, these sports are unfamiliar to Americans and thus lack the sense of immediacy and identification that spectators demand of a contest. For the last five years various sports spectaculars have been televised, and it is worth noting which sports shows draw the best and worst Nielsen ratings. The lacrosse program, a savage rouser between Army and Navy, ranked 73rd out of 75 sports spectaculars. Soccer and Rugby were 74th and 75th. As a result, there are no plans for these sports for at least the next couple of years. Although one program may seem a flimsy basis for such long-range non-planning, that is the way TV operates. By contrast, the sports spectaculars which did so well, such as auto racing, fishing, track and field and surfing, will be programmed more and more. Indeed, CBS is thinking of a regular program on surfing.
Finally, the immediate future will see an intensive application of science to competitive sports, to the athlete in competition. Consider track and field. Shotputters, discus throwers and pole vaulters discuss their specialties like physicists; thrust, propellant, trajectory are terms as much in use on the infield of a track meet as they are at an experimental missile site. Runners have become physiologists, fascinated by blood chemistry, oxygen debt, adrenaline supply. Ten years ago Roger Bannister conducted experiments in fatigue by running in place on a treadmill; now the Russians have developed an electronic device to study swimmers in action, and presumably its application (and that of similar devices) will spread to other sports. The relation of diet to performance, especially among track athletes, is being studied more and more carefully. Since, historically, track-and-field records improve about 4% every 16 years, today's world records will be as obsolete by the end of the next decade as Gunder Hagg's astounding performances of the 1940s are today. By 1980 an as yet unknown Robert Hayes will have run 100 yards in 8.9 seconds, and some 4-year-old toddler who paid no attention at all to the 1964 Olympic Games will be a 20-year-old speedster running the mile in 3:47. These are both conservative projections. Indeed, as we look back 10 or 20 years from now at the early '60s it will seem as though we lived in Victorian times. The true modern age of sport is only beginning.
