Hi, I'm Anne Strangeamps.

It's to the best of our knowledge.

And if you're one of the millions of people watching the Rio Olympics, then you've seen

some performances that look practically superhuman.

Michael Phelps, Simone Biles, Usain Bolt.

You watch these people and you think today's athletes are just better, faster, stronger than anyone else who ever came before.

But maybe that's not quite fair.

Jesse Owens ran on a track made of cinders.

He didn't have starting blocks.

They would dig holes to put their feet in at the start.

It's not hard to imagine that Jesse Owens would have run much faster than he did in 1936 today,

that maybe he would have been as fast as Usain Bolt is today if he'd had the advantages that Bolt had,

where billions of people around the world will see him run live in real time

on a track surface engineered for speed using cleats that have

been designed for his unique biomechanics as he runs with a training regimen that's been

planned down to the day on how to get the absolute peak performance in that one moment.

This is Wired Magazine's Mark McCleskey.

He's the author of Faster, Higher, Stronger, the new science of creating super athletes.

And he argues that the kind of peak performances we see today are not necessarily because athletes are better, but because science and technology are.

I'm saying that, yeah, I'm saying that a huge factor in how athletes are able to perform at these different levels is through science and technology.

Things like interval training, which is a concept that even most recreational athletes are familiar with, right?

That instead of like you just go out and sort of like do a run or a bike ride,

...