The World’s Fittest Humans
Chapter 1: The Search Is On
Back in the 1970s East Germany and the USSR were juggernauts of sport. The US was the incumbent albeit complacent powerhouse, a fat and lazy 800-pound gorilla, a senescent silverback. The next best thing to saber-rattling with nuclear weapons was brandishing athletic superiority to the point of full-spectrum dominance. Pre-dating that, prior to the 1936 Berlin Olympics Games, Hitler invested heavily in a political power play to show the world the superiority of the Aryan “master race”. During the Cold War, the Eastern Bloc countries invested heavily in the discovery of young athletic talent, performance-enhancing drugs, recovery techniques and training methodologies. They were the father of periodized training methods and these included quadrennial Olympic plans and even lifetime plans. All of this was as top secret as making wickeder nukes and weaponized viruses. Political power and validating communism were joined at the hip with international sports performance and sacrificial, heroic athletes serving as the tip of the spear. A mother’s highest calling was to birth a medalist.
Let’s flash forward to now. Déjà vu all over again but now there are new players crowding the table. China gets it and gets in. Australia see the light too. China and the US already have large organizations for Olympic athletic development with Australia, the UK, and Russia not far behind. The driving force was international prestige at the sovereign-level but was excruciatingly missing the magnetic ingredient: who is the world’s fittest, baddest athlete and from what country of origin? In the Olympics there is no medal for the world’s fittest: decathlon is at best a measure of frontend prowess and Olympic triathlon is too backend. In both the summer and winter Olympic games there are no ultra-endurance events: the marathon, Olympic triathlon and 50 km cross-country skiing are the longest events and are in the 2-hour range. There is a men’s 50 km walk that is just under 4 hours. The men’s road race in cycling can be close to 6 hours but energy can be conserved by drafting in the pack, it is not a time trial. There is nothing even close to an individual sport that encompasses a range of surgically-defined events from Olympic weightlifting to bona fide ultra-distance with every meaningful physiological benchmark in-between. No pro sport even remotely qualifies: soccer, football, hockey, basketball, baseball — nada. The Phenomic Games — a metabolic and biomechanical pentathlon — is just that, precisely that: a quantitative benchmark system to determine the world’s fittest human. The Turin Phenomic Games showcased to the world the view from the top of the ultimate podium: the Olympics is no longer the only game in town, not from the perch of international prestige with political teeth. Yes, medal count matters but you can’t put a face to that, can you? A personality trumps a number: The Phenomic Games puts a incontestable signature face on the body that showcases badass fitness. It just begs the question in every language: who is it? The Phenomic Games is the only sport that coins a global icon at the final finish line.
China already knew the ropes on finding and developing talent to win at the highest level in illustrious Olympic venues. They did it in men’s and women’s gymnastics, men’s and women’s weightlifting, men’s and women’s diving, and women’s swimming. China’s Achilles heel was a dearth of viable endurance candidates that could also be competitive at the frontend. Despite a billion Chinese riding bicycles, they had no cycling program. Last year Ji shocked the world with a second place finish in Turin but he was not a product of state discovery and sponsorship; Ji hoofed it alone to an amazing second place finish. He was a mystery man. China wants a process — a turnkey machine — not reliance on luck, or mystery. China’s ace in the hole is tapping into the long tail, a dragon tail of over 1.3 billion Chinese citizens. China’s key to phenomic success is playing the numbers game, that and recruiting the best coaches in the world, Chinese or not. Only India has a similar asset but they lack China’s organization and vision.
Australia’s population is small, minuscule compared to China’s, but it is the mouse that roars. The Australian Institute of Sport is one of the most intelligently-operated, sovereign-level sports development programs in the world. Despite a small population, its citizen-base is genetically diverse and has a proven track record throughout most of the human-power spectrum. Australia has instituted very effective athletic development for track cycling including sprints, the kilometer, and the 4000 meter pursuit; rowing; road stage cycling; and triathlon at all distances from sprint to Ironman. Australia may not have the weightlifting chops but they do have world-class rugby and those blokes are better suited to endurance than world-class weightlifters or field athletes like shot putters and discus throwers. Australia has the expertise and athlete base to be lethal in a just a few years. Down under they trail blaze by thinking creatively whereas China follows the leaders but with brute numbers, the Chinese math of “quantity has a quality all of its own”, a quote complements to Stalin — not Mao — but Mao’s successors get to run with it.
Russia may just be a shadow of its former self politically but not so in terms of potential athletic performance and program building. Russia still has a powerful presence in strength sports from field events like discus, shot put, and hammer throw along with weightlifting and their wrestling program is still world-class. Russia is not too far off the mark in mountain biking and road cycling. Their track cycling program has fallen a long way from the USSR’s glory days of legends like Sergei Kopylov and Viatcheslav Ekimov, but could rise again. Russia, including their dominance in long-distance Nordic skiing and a strong presence in elite, high-altitude mountain climbing, has a broad and cavernous strength and endurance pool to draw from. Putin is a 5th-degree black belt in judo and 9th dan in taekwondo; he has a deep respect for the importance of timing and strategy in dominant outcomes for sports performance. Watch out for Mother Russia.
Germany is now the German Unified Team from the former factions East and West Germany and on paper is a rival of the US and China. But that’s on paper. The East German sports machine is defunct and nothing at the elite level has filled the vacuum. But Germany still projects dominance in men’s and women’s rowing, field events in track and field, and road and track cycling. No, Germany is not what it was but its strengths are aligned with potential elite phenomic candidates. The German Olympic Sports Federation has the resources and competence to pose serious competition to all comers. Germany is dangerous and committed so beware.
The United Kingdom, like Australia, is a small country population-wise but has a diverse pool of athletes to select from along with a very intelligent development program: the English Institute of Sport and UK Sport. At the 2012 London Olympiad, the Brits were stellar in road and track cycling, rowing, and triathlon. Through nine sports centers the national organization provides expertise in sports medicine, biomechanical and performance analysis, physical therapy and rehabilitation, nutrition, performance psychology, sports medicine, and strength and conditioning. China, Australia, and the UK have a similar strategy: since discovery of phenomic-caliber talent is the most rare, evaluate potential for the Phenomic Games with the highest priority first and then from there you can determine aptitude better suited for other high value but one-dimensional sports. The biggest challenge was designing training programs to develop athletes capable of a high-performance level across the entire power spectrum. This has never been faced before. Is it possible to develop this expertise from a top-down, multi-disciplinary approach? A big question that will reveal some clues over the next season.
Yes, big countries wanted to take over the Phenomic Games for projection of political power. But not so fast. China may have a long tail but it is a stubby compared to the rest of the world. Next season’s heroes could come from anywhere out of nowhere. Last year there were no truly state-sponsored athletes. Ivan was state-sponsored in Olympic weightlifting but he went rogue and trained for the games by himself and chose to represent Russia. There were a couple of ex-Olympic, ex-national team rowers. All the athletes on the podiums were independents that chose to represent their countries of primary citizenship. The question here was not can these same people repeat by beating a wave of state-sponsored competitors but can they beat them and a wave of independents wanting to remain unattached to the state. Next year’s purse is US$5 million with $1 million each going to the victors. In any case, with that much blood in the water the number of viable, hungry competitors entering the arena next season will be unwieldy.
The Olympics notoriously has been plagued by inane rules and corruption at the state-level such as flagrant nepotism in the National team selection process; such malpractices destroy the purity of true meritocracy, crippling the process of selecting the best athletes to compete in the Olympics. The Phenomic Games is not going to go down that road and offer carte blanche for the national team selection process. Instead, the Phenomic Games’ primary directive is to assure that the most highly-conditioned competitors are present at the World Championships and to enforce this directive anyone in the world has the option to be unattached just like the rare cases in the Olympics where an athlete no longer is a citizen due to a country no longer being internationally recognized as a sovereign state. This will differ in a fundamental way: anyone for any reason can chose to be unattached and will just display the Phenomic Games logo on their jersey. The actual determination of competitive status is the ranking: only the most highly ranked competitors are eligible to compete in the World Championship and ranking is earned purely by demonstrated performance in a sanctioned Phenomic Games event. The top 10 men and women from the previous World Championship automatically are qualified for the next World Championship, a significant but earned advantage for the incumbents. Since the World Championship is an annual, not a quadrennial event, this is both logical and justifiable. Everyone on earth gets a chance and everyone watching the World Championship will know they are seeing only the world’s fittest competitors vie for the gold.
By structuring the eligibility and unattached status in this manner, the fans know that only the best are competing and states know that resource allocation is best served to the competitors with the most promise to succeed. The Phenomic Games only bears allegiance to the longest and strongest and is oblivious to all else. These are Nature’s rules, as Darwin would say. All comments are muzzled from the peanut gallery.
Are state-sponsored athletes going to dominate in a few years? Do they provide insurmountable advantages over independent training? Will Airi and Lake be the last of the Mohicans? Complex questions. Hybrid solutions become possible because the mandate of state sponsorship and their resources is to win representing the state; anything else is failure. This arrangement puts athletes in the driver’s seat because the critical element is the talented competitor; a Phenomics Games’ medalist is an extreme rarity, as scarce as Michael Jordan, Wayne Gretzky, and Roger Federer. If you are talented enough the state is not in a position to dictate terms; a competitor can be selective of what resources he or she wants to run with. The athlete is the boss, not the other way around like in the Olympics.
What determines whether a child has phenomic potential? Looking at it through a metabolic lens a couple things surface right away: the probability of a world-class strength athlete or a world-class ultra-endurance athlete winning the Phenomic Games is quite remote. The two extremes are genetic freaks that will win the extreme front or backend event and do well at the next closest event but will be progressively poorer in the other three events.
Looking at it through a biomechanical lens the extremely tall with long arms and the extremely short with short arms will perform substandardly overall and overall is all that matters: long and strong. Biomechanically a short-limbed person will be relatively superior in the Clean and Jerk and be inferior in The Erg. However, if they are not too short, a good performance is possible in The Burn, The Climb, and Nemesis. A long-limbed person will be relatively superior in The Erg and be inferior in the Clean and Jerk. High performance is possible in the other three events depending on their genetics of muscle fiber type populations — the relative contributions of slow and fast twitch fibers in conjunction with nervous system architectures.
There is much more leeway with extreme biomechanical factors than with extreme metabolic factors. The selection process of state sponsors know this and will screen potential athletes early to focus resources on better suited candidates: let weightlifters become weightlifters and let ultra-endurance freaks blossom into ultra-endurance champions. After a few years of training, mental capabilities will emerge and further judgments can be ascertained: weak minds will be culled quickly. To be the Phenomics Games’ champion is an astronomically rare possibility: the genetic constitution, the training protocol, the micro/macronutrition, the management of injuries, keeping the head on straight, the tolerance of pain, the discipline and motivation, and execution of proper recovery are all eggs to juggle simultaneously. All of this has to be meticulously managed for years on a level not seen for any other sport because no other sports poses such broad and counteracting demands: like two porcupines making love, there is zero margin of error. Any and all weaknesses of mind or body are ruthlessly exposed. What kind of person — given they have the genetic potential and resources — can do this? The search is on.
Dr. John Beasley is a genetics researcher in the sub-discipline of phenomics. He grew up in British Columbia, Canada just a few klicks south of Whistler, the home of the 2010 Winter Olympics. He cross-country and alpine skied every winter from the time he was in kindergarten. In the summer he hiked and mountain biked. He had the physical background of a phenomic athlete but unfortunately lacked the talent. In school he took a liking to dissecting whatever he could get his hands on: grasshoppers, frogs, fish, birds. His father was a theoretical physics professor at the University of British Columbia in Vancouver and his mother taught yoga and was a personal trainer. His dad gave him a microscope for Christmas when John was 10 and his inquisitive mind devoured the entrails of dissections in the same passionate manner other kids took apart old spring-loaded clocks and machinic gadgets like transistor radios. He knew his biology, meaning the visceral parts from the cell, tissue, and organ levels scaling all the way up to the teaming pacific maritime ecosystem of southwestern coastal Canada. His father had a deep, analytical, quantitatively-driven mind and imposed his worldview on young John by drilling mathematics, equations, and algorithms into his head in sadistic doses for years. By the time he was a junior in high school the gestating brew of qualitative, hands-on biology; quantitative analysis; a balance of theory and practice; and diverse physical activities coalesced into a delicious mental stew of understanding biological systems and their environmental contexts on an extraordinary, multi-dimensional level. This was a recipe for greatness but in something that didn’t exist in the 1990s; he was Chopin sans piano.
But then his future was invented. Given his upbringing, it was hard to imagine someone better suited to explaining to the world in understandable terms what the Phenomic Games really are. He had a bachelor’s degree in biology with a minor in ancient Greek literature to go with a masters degree in neurobiology from the University of California at San Diego, a marquee place for neuro anything or genetics. Torrey Pines Road — home of the Salk Institute for Biological Studies — is, after all, the Silicon Valley of genetics and UC San Diego is its mother hen that has laid innumerable golden eggs. Then at Duke University he completed his PhD dissertation in Biological Information Sciences in 2012 focusing on the nascent sub-field of phenomics: “Topological Mapping of a Theoretical Phenome as a Function of Progressive Stress Profiles in the Sprague Dawley Rat Model.” After graduating he went back to his roots and performed research in human phenomics at the Center for Systems Biology in Seattle, Washington for two years trying to develop a model for drug intervention in diabetes progression. But his heart was not into studying diseases, there was a steadfast mental headwind facing his efforts. Mystically, or maybe serendipitously, John heard about the Phenomic Games and the whole idea lit him up in that inspirational moment of discovering your calling, that intracranial tsunamic aftermath of a black hole traversing a wormhole, that instant your dormant, Rumplestiltskinesque, third-eye opens up and sees a vision of the future in a single cosmic glimpse. Granted, there is no physics or equation to back that up but that’s exactly how it feels to be fully alive. His life now had a typhoonic tailwind married to a steadfast compass bearing.
He pitched the London Herald — an international digital newspaper and webazine renowned for sophisticated journalism — on the idea of a weekly, in-depth livestream on promising athletes globally for next season’s Phenomic Games. They bit down hard with an emphatic yes! and they had the gravitas to open doors to just about any program anywhere. It would be nonpareil scientific journalism: background stories of athlete’s trials and tribulations, their philosophical approach to training, and a kaleidoscopic landscape of their hopes, beliefs, fears, expectations, milestones and dreams. This was a global phenomenon and Dr. Beasley was on the bleeding edge armed with the technical background to reveal its inner clockworks to an international, growing fan base.
His mission is to somehow explain in a cool way a very intricate, multi-disciplinary body of knowledge collectively known as biological information science in a context of athletic events that push the human organism into unexplored biological and psychological territory. People have been hearing about DNA, mapping the genome, tidbits about the proteome, microbiome, and maybe even the physiome for at least 15 years. Anything in biology with an “-ome” at the end was a piece of the jigsaw puzzle called biological information science and there a lot of “-omes” slithering about in cyberspace. Genotype and phenotype are very vanilla terms in Biology 101 that describe a mapping between your genetic code and the expression of your physical form given environmental conditions.
Just because you have great genetics doesn’t mean it will be expressed. Einstein could have focused all his efforts on being a point guard in the NBA while Shaq tackled atomic physics. When you water or fertilize a plant, put it in direct sunlight or in complete darkness, or monkey with the humidity, its physical form changes. Same genotype, it is the phenotype that changes. Macronutrition, micronutrition, sleep, mental conditioning, flexibility work, and strength and endurance training are some of the tools that modify the phenotype: your body’s structure and function changes relative to the sum of all environmental stress your organism is exposed to. This is adaptive response: adapt or die. Once again, Nature’s rules and silence from the peanut gallery.
The phenome is the set of all possible phenotypes. If the genome is a seed’s DNA, then its phenome is every possible physical expression of that seed during its development from seed to plant given every possible environmental context. Applied to humans, this includes the extreme expressions like rare disease states and the even more rare ones emerging from phenomic training regimens. The organism just adapts to whatever you throw at it so choose carefully because it doesn’t care — as you sow and fertilize and condition and…, so shall ye reap. This is as reliable as death and taxes.
Every human has a phenome and the species has a collective human phenome. Einstein had one genotype but had potential phenomic expressions as a scientist, bodybuilder, gardener, or basketball player. The challenges presented by the design of the Phenomic Games is such that the elite competitors will pioneer and embody physical human expressions that have never existed; these emergent phenotypes will display superpowers and the global audience intuitively will feel profound inspiration that will touch every soul having a pulse.
Yes, people were excited about The Phenomics Games but were clueless about the deeper meaning of the phenome. What does it mean to train phenomically? John seized the opportunity to become the globetrotting insider and voice of the Phenomics Games, wouldn’t you? The search is on to discover those outlying specimens wielding superpowers, their training niches and to dissect their élan vitale.
The World’s Fittest Humans ©2015 James Autio. All rights reserved.
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OK, Chapter 1, “The Search Is On”, has set the stage to get to know the competitors on a deep level and to acquire clues as to the quality of the resources required and the difficulties of establishing support teams to assemble viable training approaches to the Phenomic Games. Remember, these athletes are redefining the edge of the envelope of the human phenome, taking it beyond where it has ever been in the history of our species. The end result are actual, in-the-flesh people possessing superpowers but not cartoon comic book characters. Folks, the story is fiction but this is very real, so get ready to feel a sustained g force sensation like being sucked-in near a blackhole event horizon.
Dr. John Beasley gets busy with the dream job of traveling the entire globe to get into the heads of these extremely rare talents to find out what makes them tick. In the next chapter you get the opportunity to travel to a remote island off the coast of Finland to get know Airi, the 34st fittest human and fittest female in the world along with her coaches. Does she have what it takes to gain traction on the men while defending her title? I have seen her train and it is wild. Time to explore the limits of human female potential, mentally and physically. Are you ready?
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PHENOMIC GAMES and PHENOMIC 5 are trademarks of James Autio.
James Autio | doctorgo@gmail.com
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