Q. Every time there’s an Olympics or big global sports competition, world records fall. Is there a limit to how fast humans can be?
A. “In my opinion there are no limits,” says Tim Gattenby, a faculty associate in kinesiology at UW-Madison. “People said that no one could break the four-minute mile, and then someone did. People said no one could get more gold medals than Mark Spitz (who won seven in the 1972 Olympics), but records are a carrot that stimulates people to go out and break them.”