How to Build the Perfect Athlete - Helen Glover, Hugh Dennis, Steve Haake and Emma Ross

July 23, 2025·42 min·3 clips

A well-fitted sports bra puts a marathon runner a full mile ahead of her identically trained clone.

The gymnasium opens on shaky terms. After the BBC pre-roll and the usual comic clutter, Brian Cox and Robin Ince rename the room, promise bodies in ridiculous timeframes, and let cake wreck the whole fantasy. Then the sport science arrives. The question sounds almost too simple: how much does technology really give an athlete in running, tennis, rowing, or Formula One? This excerpt does not pretend there is a tidy percentage waiting at the end. A sports technology guest says they hit a point, after about ten years in the field, where they wondered whether the engineering work had changed results much at all. So they checked the numbers. The data starts with the first Olympic Games in Athens in 1896 and tracks top performances across about 120 years. The curve is not a clean story of heroic progress. Performances climb fast, then begin to level off, with the guest saying every sport they looked at seems to be nearing something like equilibrium. Before the kit mattered, the athletes had to be found. In 1896, competition could mean whoever showed up, sometimes with only a loose grip on the rules before setting the mark for the day. Grim, funny, and probably true. As stronger athletes were identified, globalisation widened the field, and population growth changed the pool, records improved for reasons bigger than shoes, boats, or clever materials. War dents the line too. The guest says performance dropped after the Second World War because many good athletes had been killed, then rose again later. Technology is still there: running shoes, rowing boats, sport-specific engineering, and technique changes such as the Fosbury Flop. The panel keeps the pace crooked and lively. A body joke turns into a data question, and the show trusts listeners to make the jump.

As heard by us

A sharp, funny sports-science episode about talent, technology, and why elite performance may be nearing its limits.

The Infinite Monkey Cage treats the perfect athlete less as a fantasy body plan than as a problem in selection, population size, equipment, and diminishing returns.

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Why you'd press play

For when you want a funny sports chat and a hard answer about what actually drives elite performance.

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