No Envelope Left To Push

ALEXANDER THE GREAT wept when there were no new worlds for him to conquer. And as Lovie Smith and Tony Dungy become the first black coaches to take their teams to the Super Bowl, we move a step closer to our own Alexander moment in sports: that instant when we run out of meaningful benchmarks, of significant reasons to say, "No one's ever done that before."

In matters of race, it's a relief that we're no longer passing milestones as if they were kidney stones—which is to say, slowly and with great pain. Trouble is, in sports we may be exhausting every other way of crossing boundaries. When European tour pro Henrik Stenson stood on the wing of a parked Airbus last week and drove a golf ball a "record" 721 yards down a runway at Abu Dhabi International Airport, I wept like Alexander. Or worse: I wept like Dick Vermeil being pepper-sprayed while screening Brian's Song.

As Stenson's Swing on a Wing demonstrated, we are inventing ever-more-pointless worlds to conquer in an effort to delude ourselves that human beings are constantly pushing the envelope, when in fact, quite the opposite may be true: The envelope is pushing us. A 2005 study by sports scientists Alan Nevill and Gregory Whyte concluded that "many of the established men's and women's endurance running records are nearing their limits." The researchers predicted that men's world records in these events have as little as 1% to 3% room for improvement. They think the women's 1,500-meter world record of 3:50.46—set 14 years ago by Yunxia Qu of China—"may well have reached its limit."

All of which is a pity, not least because there is a primal joy in records for physical achievement, the marking of mankind's eternal growth chart. Other than running, there is no activity in sports that satisfies our primitive urges like hefting a large object in the manner of Atlas. This past November in Lake George, N.Y., English truck driver Andy Bolton became the first man to deadlift more than 1,000 pounds when he picked up off the ground, then held for several seconds, 1,003 pounds—the rough equivalent of Secretariat. (Indeed, that would have been an even neater trick: a superhuman record breaker schlepping a superequine one.)

And though his feat should have excited much species-wide introspection into the nature of our existence—he's Hamlet in a singlet—Bolton received little notice. That's because steroid use by others has rendered so many of our traditional yardsticks (in baseball, in weightlifting, in track and field) suspect if not laughable. Rule changes, such as hockey's desperate attempts to gin up scoring, make it harder than ever to compare records across eras. As a result, record setting, like nostalgia, ain't what it used to be.

When 49-year-old George Hood pedaled a stationary bike for a record 85 consecutive hours last week at a health club in Burr Ridge, Ill., it seemed to be, literally, another exercise in futility. And yet, anyone receiving Hood's e-mail updates—at 34 hours, 49 hours, 55 hours, 71 hours and 73 hours—couldn't help but pull for him. After the 77th hour, there ensued a long and troubling cyber silence, an interval that ended after Hood's 85th hour with the following header: SPINNING CHAMP IS WELL AT AREA HOSPITAL.

Hood (who is doing fine and was raising money for the families of fallen policemen) may have pulled off the past year's most impressive feat in a bicycle seat. When the Tour de France champion is DQ'd for failing his drug test, one has to ask, Which sport—world-class cycling or marathon spinning—is truly going nowhere fast?

When it comes to human achievement, the sky is not the limit. And even when it is, there are limits. English adventurer David Hempleman-Adams this month ascended to a world-record six miles in a hot-air balloon, dangling in an open basket in -76�F at 32,500 feet—the same height, and relative comfort level, as your last United flight.

What thrills are left, what frontiers remain, in an age when everything—even Right Guard—is considered "Xtreme"?

Our truly extreme athletes—home run king, world's fastest man—are now too often extranatural. We can at least know for certain that the kid on YouTube who takes only 10.48 seconds to solve Rubik's Cube (with its 43 quintillion combinations; that's 43 million times a million combinations) holds a record that is valid, if not worthwhile.