Can We 'Solve' Sports?

18:51Hannah Fry:Hang on a second. Lauren, our producer, has just sent a message in the chat. People have come up with exactly this idea. It's called the enhanced games. Controversial, understandably. they're going to be in May 2026 in Vegas. Of course, it's going to be in Vegas. And they are going to allow performance enhancing drugs. Okay, so you're still not allowed to have cocaine, right? You're still not allowed to have heroin. There's still some limits. Also, any drug that you take has to be FDA approved. But beyond that, knock yourself out. Off you go.

19:24Michael Stevens:I mean, obviously, it sounds like there could be some pretty unsafe things where people feel like they're now required to use drugs and techniques that have been banned for maybe rightful suspicion of danger. But it'll be interesting to see what they're able to accomplish. What they're going to run against is a problem where some of the more talented athletes don't want to put themselves through that. And they're happy to not be enhanced. So you get more of like mid-tier athletes who actually do the enhanced games. But the enhancements don't get them up to the level of the naturally talented athletes.

20:08Michael Stevens:So you don't actually see the best of what's possible for a human.

20:13Hannah Fry:I think it taps into something else, which is a sort of central idea of this episode, which is the idea that when you have competing incentives for the individuals who are taking part, they're going to have to balance the incentive of winning with the incentive of their own health, perhaps in certain circumstances. And I think that, you know, for the games overall, it's like the incentives of creating something fun versus the incentives of winning as a team or as a group or an individual. Anyway, it'll be interesting to see how it turns out. I strongly suspect they may not last that long.

20:47Michael Stevens:That's exactly how I feel. I think it's not going to be as cool as it sounds. I think that ultimately we're going to run against what Bernard Suits described as the definition of games. I love this quote. He said, a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. And when you start removing the unnecessary obstacles and you say there's no obstacles. It's less fun. At the end of the day, a game is about unnecessary obstacles. Like that sentence was for you for that brief second. Yes, yes, yes. Yeah. Even this podcast is a game. I've got obstacles here. Like you have to speak in a normal way.

21:30Michael Stevens:And if I, if I take a pause because I forgot the word, then I'm losing the game. Right. But that is what makes all this stuff fun. I am going to give you a point score at the end, Michael. That's important for you to know that. And again, we're not there yet, but there are concerns that if we're not careful, we can figure out strategies that are so optimal that there's no reason a team wouldn't choose them and we're going to have to change the rules to not allow the thing that helps you win, but is boring.

21:59Hannah Fry:And that's actually, I mean, that is precisely what happened in Formula One, right? With the introduction of Eridan.

22:06Michael Stevens:Yeah, why is it called dirty air? Let's revisit this.

22:08Hannah Fry:Dirty air. Okay, so in the 1990s, this massive revolution, I worked as an aerodynamicist, by the way, in Formula One. This is like my sort of specialist subject. This is all very close to my heart. This guy, Adrian Newey, he came in, he designed this car. It was phenomenal. I mean, it just blew everybody away because he had worked out that if you want the car to take corners at incredible high speeds, you need to stick it down to the road as much as you possibly can. And you can do that by essentially turning the car into an upside down airplane wing. The problem is that when you do that, if you are driving through clean air, right, nice and still, no one's gone before you, you get what's called laminar flow.

22:52Hannah Fry:You get this incredibly neat, slick streamlines that flow off your car. And then behind you, it's just a junky old mess. It's like this low pressure area. It's just turbulence all over the place, which means that as a car comes behind you, as a car tries to overtake you in particular, the moment when you should really be at the, for the spectator anyway, this is like the most critical moment, the moment of an overtake where you have a faster car following a slower one and they, you know, you want them to be able to take them particularly on a corner. You want them to be able to have more grip, more ability to take them on a corner.

23:27Hannah Fry:But because these cars over from the 90s onwards were so perfectly optimized for aerodynamic performance, it meant that when you're following in this turbulent air, you can't get the same performance, right? You can't get the same slick, laminar, streamlined flow over your car. and there are some analysis that show that these modern modern formula one cars their downforce drops somewhere between 20 and 60 depending on the track in the corner when they're following

23:59Michael Stevens:a car in front of them oh wow okay so dirty air refers not to pollution in the air but the turbulence of it and turbulence of it we're now building formula one cars that just can't achieve the potential that they're built for if the air is dirty but the air is only dirty because the ones in front of them are also optimized.

24:18Hannah Fry:And this is, it's the opposite of Mario Kart. You know, Mario Kart, when you're behind, you get an advantage. That's the thing that makes it exciting. That's the thing that makes it just fun to play, fun to watch, fun to be around. But in Formula One, for many years, it was the opposite, where actually, if you were ahead, you had the advantage. What they have tried to do over the years is they've tried to sort of shake things up over and over again. So the regulators will bring in a whole new redesign of the car. They'll say, okay, get rid of all of the aerodynamic devices that you've previously had.

24:50Hannah Fry:You need to redesign brand new ones. They need to fit into this shape. They need to have these dimensions. Off you go. And then it becomes basically a race off the track, an aerodynamics race of who can optimize their aerodynamics the quickest. There was a big thing about a double diffuser where you hide an aerodynamic device under the car to sort of stick it to the road and get around the regulations. Ross Braun did that and had a real era of dominance as a result of it. But again and again and again, you know, there's only so many times that you can do this. So in 2022, they were like, this is, we've got to, we've got to do something here.

25:21Hannah Fry:So they had a massive overhaul. They redesigned the car so that it was the underneath the car where the main aerodynamic devices would be to try and mitigate this problem of dirty air. They added these deflectors on the wheels that would allow the air to not go back to the car behind them, but to go up in the air, sort of like a rooster tail um and it made a bit of a difference it did make a bit of a difference but you know it's like it's the incentives are wrong the incentives for the for the regulators is to make racing more exciting the incentives for the individual team is to make it so the guy behind can't get anywhere near you so you know you constantly have this like this battle between the two so this year 2026 this is the first year where they have they've effectively put in a boost button The fans are, I don't know, divided, shall we say, about this, where when you are following someone on a straight, the output of the electric engine is artificially limited for the leader.

26:18Hannah Fry:And if you are within one second, within one second of the car in front, you basically have literally a boost button where you get an extra in order to try and flip this dynamic upside down. Wow. That's a bold change. Isn't it? Isn't it? Yeah, we're good to see how it plays out. They've tried things like this before. They have DRS, which is basically a little flap on the tail of the car that would flip up and reduce the drag, drag reduction system. It's sort of like a mushroom boost in Mario Kart, right? So they have had those before using aerodynamic devices. That still remains, actually. The aerodynamics devices that they have on the cars now are not sort of static across the entire course of the track.

27:03Hannah Fry:They can change depending on when you're straight in a corner, etc. It is this constant battleground. And, you know, I said right at the very beginning that Formula One, it used to have... Wait, tell me your definition of games again.

27:15Michael Stevens:It was a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles. Yeah.

27:21Hannah Fry:And I think that, you know, there is a certain group of people who follow racing and love it very dearly, who look back at the old days when you had so many more unnecessary obstacles. You know, you had like refueling, you had, there was one point where the drivers were using like an H pattern gearbox, you know, the engines would blow up. It was just like so many more things that would be thrown into the mix. And I think when you combine all of those things together, of course, it's brilliant for the team, especially the ones who come up with this in the first place and race ahead of everybody else.

27:55Hannah Fry:They find this little tweak of an advantage. But there does come a point where the entire field is doing it. And all of a sudden, it's like it's just a just kind of maybe takes away something of what made the sport fun in the first place.

28:08Michael Stevens:Yeah. So we have to bring in new rules like the leader is limited. And it seems unfair at first until you look back at the definition of a game and you say we need unnecessary obstacles. And so you're right. It's a bummer. It's unnecessary. And yet we need those kinds of obstacles to keep it fun. We're going to limit the defensive shift in baseball because it just gave too much of an advantage to the defense. And it meant that we were getting too many of these three kind of boring outcomes. We want to see more small ball. We want to incentivize people doing the fun things that are exciting and thrilling to watch.

28:48Michael Stevens:So, yeah, it's happened in Formula One. It's happening in baseball a lot.

28:54Hannah Fry:Happening in basketball in a slightly different way. after the break I I think we should talk about the beautiful game the game that thought that it was immune from being moneyballed football and maybe a few other examples of places where people have used science to their advantage to to maybe make the game better maybe make the game worse

29:16Michael Stevens:let's do it

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31:48Hannah Fry:okay we're back from the break and we are asking whether every sport is immune from this idea of mathematical and scientific optimization will anything escape michael yeah i think some sports

32:00Michael Stevens:are more at risk of the predator of data and i'm not alone in thinking this baseball is in a precarious position because in some ways it's a more simple game. When you talk about the three true outcomes, you're talking about three people, a pitcher, a batter, and a catcher. And when you think about baseball, there are only like 24 states. Who's on what base and how many outs are there? And that's it. But in a game like American football, you've got billions of data points to build up all the possible states. Where is the ball? What down is it? What distance is required to get a new set of downs?

32:41Michael Stevens:You've got all these variables and you've not got a pitcher, a catcher and a batter. You've got 11 people on each team and you don't even know what play one person is going to be secretly doing. So it's a lot harder to just be like, oh, A plus B equals C, do C. With baseball, it's like, OK, we've got 18 billion variables. What does that even equal? And then what is the other team secretly deciding they're going to be doing?

33:10Hannah Fry:At the same time, though, I mean, people certainly have tried to to mathematize NFL. There's a group called Zebra Technologies or probably Zebra. I imagine they're American. So let's let's call them Zebra. And what they what they do is they use player tracking data. so uh when players are in practice they'll have little rfid tags on their shirts but you can also do this where you have like a top-down shot of a of a field in play and then get people to go manually say okay this player moved from square a21 to b22 or whatever it might be incredibly boring work but what you can do when you have all of that data and i'm talking you know you're sampling this sort of 10 times a second right over the course of not just a game but a player's entire career, you can essentially get an AI model to learn the unique data footprint of a particular player, the way that they move, how fast they can run, how much force and energy they can put into the particular play that they're making.

34:08Hannah Fry:But then what you can do is basically run many, many, many millions of simulations of what might happen in the game. So this is essentially what they do. They sort of like create this kind of fantasy version of the game that may be coming up and simulate it 50 million times, try every possible combination of strategic choices, every different, you know, attack and so on, and come up with a probability map of what they expect to happen in the game. And I think this is sort of taking the whole idea one step further. I mean, Moneyball originally was about finding undervalued players based on past performance.

34:53Hannah Fry:But this playbook simulation is about predicting the future performance of the future calls, the different way that you're going to play the game going forwards. I don't know, like you're a big NFL fan, right? Do you do that ruin the joy for you or does it does it add to it?

35:07Michael Stevens:The idea is really exciting. But of course, you can imagine an end result where the coaches have this AI on a tablet and they're able to use quantum computing to go through so many options that they know exactly what play to run. And all of us at home have the same app on our phones and we go, oh, it's going to be a screen pass to the left, you know, and we all just know. And we start to just know so well, it just feels so automatic that we just don't really even need to have the games anymore. We can just have a computer simulate the whole season and we can go, oh, cool. And then people might still want to put bets on them.

35:40Michael Stevens:And suddenly American football becomes a slot machine, right now we're not at that stage but i think we won't get to that stage though because we will just keep changing the obstacles and adding new ones so that it doesn't become automatic and that might mean that we'd make some decisions that seem kind of like fuddy-duddy and boring like no you just you cannot use quantum computers to calculate your next play all right like like we could even amish the whole thing and say no electricity is allowed all right no microphones

36:11Hannah Fry:no rfdi chips like you gotta you gotta stitch those players shirts exactly you gotta weave

36:20Michael Stevens:the cloth yeah i think that would be a very fun game to watch i'm not against the optimization because i think that we always need our games to be subjected to the efforts to solve them but at the same time we want to watch problems not solutions you know i thought it was a was interesting how you said that the idea itself is intriguing right the idea of like can you do it

36:48Hannah Fry:is it possible is the scientific challenge of it and I sort of feel the same way um there's been a lot of work of analyzing football uh soccer I'm talking about here right the real the one true football um so although I have to tell you actually my ex-husband who's still a very good friend of mine was a sports writer and we had a rule while we were together that um he was only allowed to watch a maximum of eight hours of sports in a day when he wasn't working this was this is uh this is in his free time and he would regularly break that rule so since since when soon as we separated i've gone on a on a on a football hiatus i haven't watched even a single minute of football since then so so i'm slightly out the loop right so all of you listeners who are experts in football can can write in and tell me all of the things i'm about to get wrong don't know anything about soccer, do know a lot about maths though.

37:38Hannah Fry:And there's quite a lot of maths now going on in football. This really started with Ian Graham, who is this theoretical physicist, Cambridge theoretical physicist, who in 2012 joined Liverpool and set up this basically data analysis team where they were initially trying to money ball football, right? Try and find players who were undervalued. But what they did that was extremely clever was there was this idea floating around about looking at expected goals, calculating your probability of scoring a goal from a particular position on a pitch. And what that does is it separates out the actual result from the process itself.

38:19Hannah Fry:It kind of gives you more of a sense of how well the player is doing because whether you score or hit the post or the goal of the ganache to get to it, it often comes down to luck, but getting yourself into a position from which you can have an attempt on goal, that is something that's much more about skill. This idea of like mapping out from many, many thousands of games where goals are scored from and from which positions on the field you should try and take shots at goal. But he took it further, right? So what he was doing actually is not completely dissimilar to what has been done in NFL since.

38:56Hannah Fry:A full data picture of where every player is across the pitch and the way that they're moving and sampling this many times a second and then calculates the probability of a goal being scored in the next 15 seconds. Okay. But then crucially looks at the next decision that the player chooses to make, whether the player then chooses to pass the ball, move into a particular area, and whether or not that increases or decreases the probability of a goal being scored in the next 15 seconds. Okay. So it's all about like looking forwards. And suddenly when you do that, you have access to this whole new level of analysis for what makes a player good.

39:41Hannah Fry:You're no longer just looking at the number of goals they scored, the number of passes they completed. You care much more about what decisions did this player make that added value to the game rather than just what were the end kind of outcomes. When he started doing this, he says in his book, he says that he realised that the scouts, the football scouts were like getting loads of stuff wrong. They were way too obsessed with the aesthetics of play. They cared a lot about people who looked really good, who looked kind of comfortable when they were handling the ball, who were like very athletic and moved really beautifully.

40:14Hannah Fry:And they didn't care. Scouts didn't care about people who were totally effective but looked really awkward. Joel Matip is an example. This guy was like, he was a free transfer, so he didn't even need to pay for him. And he looked clumsy as hell. But the data demonstrated that he actually advanced the ball more effectively than almost any defender in Europe. So kind of Liverpool like went and swept him up. So at this point, you know, this is sort of 2014 or so, maybe a little bit further on, Liverpool has this like secret sauce. They've got this mathematical model of a way that a game unfolds that allows them to analyse players.

40:53Hannah Fry:They take themselves from this sort of, I don't know, maybe this is a little bit harsh, I'm sorry, Liverpool fans, but like this team of faded glory to right at the very top of the league. It has definitely changed the game. Now other teams have caught up, Brighton in particular, doing some amazing stuff at the moment with finding, you know, really incredible players that they pick up for absolutely nothing and then selling them on for, they've made genuinely millions and millions and millions, maybe even hundreds of millions by doing it. the thing is is that that this has definitely changed the game so the first thing is that people don't take wild punts anymore you used to get people from the halfway line and be like oh just whack it like boot it down the pitch may as well see if you can get a goal just doesn't happen anymore you also don't really get mavericks anymore you know you used to have people who would just be, who'd play in this very sort of unhinged way, right?

41:52Hannah Fry:Unpredictable, just kind of very bullish. You don't really get those as much anymore. There's still a few of them around. There's Cole Palmer at Chelsea, who's still a bit of a little bit of a maverick. Everyone could disagree with me. I don't, I mean, frankly, I wouldn't recognise him if I met him in the street. But my sports writer ex-husband told me that Cole Palmer was a current maverick that still exists. it has shown that there is this optimal way to play right so you don't get this same diversity in play that you perhaps had before on the flip side you know it saved us from this monopoly it means that it's not just like the rich teams buy the expensive players and that's it and they're up there and it's the end of it actually you know Brighton being an example of a team that can get really good players for nothing anymore and I think you could also say that the standard of play has increased as well, right?

42:42Hannah Fry:They're making fewer mistakes. The defenders are moving much smarter. But maybe that's part of the problem because maybe the mistakes are the things that makes it fun to watch in the first place.

42:54Michael Stevens:Yeah, I think they are. So I think the data analysis can make something so automatic it's not fun, but they also keep things really fresh. Like you said, They help the smaller teams and they also give us new challenges to overcome.

43:11Hannah Fry:Maybe we just need different leagues, right? Maybe we just have these are the leagues that are doing it as we have at the moment. And then you have the enhanced performance league and then you have the Amish league.

43:20Michael Stevens:I think at a certain point, you can only optimize humans so much, especially in certain sports. Like you can tell a player, hey, this is what you should do in this circumstance. And they might still not do it because they'd rather do something fun and be a hero. And this isn't even by choice, right? There's this well-known phenomenon known as action bias, where humans are psychologically biased to do something as opposed to do nothing. So when it comes to goalkeepers in football, right, when a penalty shot is taken, they've got to make a decision about what they're going to do. because the ball comes so fast.

44:04Michael Stevens:What is it like 11 or 12 meters away? That's it. It's kicked like super fast. They cannot wait and watch where it's going. So they need to decide, okay, am I going to stay right where I am in the middle? Am I going to dive left or dive right? And so in 2007, a group of psychologists analyzed what happened in hundreds of penalty kicks. They found that standing still allowed the goalkeeper to stop the ball about a third of the time. But if they decided to dive left or right, like before they even really knew what was going on, that dropped their chances to just 13%. Despite those statistics, goalkeepers still dive 94 % of the time.

44:44Michael Stevens:Because to not move looks like you're a lazy bones.

44:48Hannah Fry:Yeah, you've got how many thousands of people in the crowd shouting your name with probably swear words attached to it.

44:55Michael Stevens:And so if we come up with optimization strategies that look boring or lazy or disinterested, even if they are optimal and are better, that doesn't mean it's going to make for the story of a hero.

45:10Hannah Fry:Yeah, because that is it, right? Ultimately, we are talking about stories that involve people and mapping the kind of coldness of statistics onto it might give you some advantages. But there's a limit, really. There is a limit because you're still talking about, you know, like genuine people in all of this.

45:26Michael Stevens:That's right. In fact, I thought about this a lot watching football lately. I think that there are some teams, especially the Chiefs a few years ago, who succeeded because they played really smartly. but it wasn't necessarily a jump up and scream and shout and have a lot of fun game. They would do things where I'm like, whoa, that was definitely the optimal nerdy choice. Get out of bounds or, you know, don't score that point. You need to run the clock down. It was just smart. And they won and they won a lot of games by like a point. But there weren't the big, deep, risky passes. There wasn't the what happens when humans test the limits of their skill.

46:08Michael Stevens:It was instead, what if we do exactly what mathematically gives us the most optimal chance of winning the game? And I appreciated that.

46:17Hannah Fry:But a lot of people didn't. There is something interesting in that, though. This idea of like testing the limits of what humans are able to do, which I think is the reason why most people are drawn to sports. I think there are other ways that you test the limits of what humans are able to do, though. There are sort of like optimization strategies, but just maybe not mathematical ones. So there's this story about, this is cricket story that I really love about reverse swing. I don't know if you've ever come across this. Do you know the rules of cricket?

46:43Michael Stevens:No, I don't. I mean, it's... Correct answer. No one does. There's far too many. Being an A is like baseball. You've got a cricket bat. What's a reverse swing? Does that mean like sweep from behind your back? No, no.

46:56Hannah Fry:So the swing is all about the ball itself. OK, so it is, I think, the grandest of sports. Actually, I'm not really a sport fan, but I do love going to Test cricket. It's really, really wonderful. There's something so gloriously slow about it.

47:13Michael Stevens:Yeah, I've never been to a cricket match, but I used to live by the Oval. And I kept saying, I want to do this. I want to, I hear it's so chill.

47:20Hannah Fry:Oh, the Oval can be not chill. The Oval can get pretty spicy as far as cricket goes. yeah but it's enormous enormous fun what happens when you are throwing a cricket ball the cricket ball itself you have this seam that's running down the middle i'm doing the american version for you okay so you have these two sides it's very very hard this ball and the amazing bowlers can do lots of very clever things with the ball in the way that they have they hold it in their hands the way that they spin it and in particular the way that they get it to bounce on the seam or otherwise. And the fact that you have a bounce before the batter hits it adds this whole layer of complication to cricket that you do not get in baseball.

48:04Hannah Fry:Because when it bounces, how predictable is its trajectory from that moment? Now, the thing is, is that also because of this seam, you can create this swing on the ball where it ends up sort of bending around. You're basically using aerodynamics to your advantage. It's like curling a ball, right, in football. You are creating areas of laminar and turbulent flow on the ball that change its trajectory from being a straight line. You're also with the spin. Now, reverse swing is something that the Pakistani cricketers worked out in the 1970s. It's sort of credited to this one particular cricketer called Sarfaz Nawaz.

48:44Hannah Fry:And he realised that if you have your cricket ball and you absolutely brutalise one half of the ball, right, you smash it a bit. You mess it up until it is so rough. How do you mess it up? Do you get to do this before the game or just while you play? No, no. No, because you're given the game while you play. So you could do it during the game if you just deliberately hit it against that side every single time when you're bowling. There are cheekier ways to do it too. And people have been accused of using all sorts of tactics to mess this up as time has gone on. The key point about this, though, is that if you do this where one side is roughed up to hell and the other side is slick as anything, you get something called reverse swing, which is where after the ball bounces, it bends in the opposite direction.

49:35Hannah Fry:And now when that happens, it's like, what the hell just happened to that ball? right it's an aerodynamic trick and it is it's one that was found through trial and error and that actually the mathematicians and aerodynamicists have spent many many many days weeks months writing academic papers trying to work out how the hell this is even possible but it's like you're making the ball do something that seems like it shouldn't work and people get out the batters get out like like that when it happens okay so for 20 years right the pakistan you go and play pakistan and they would do this and it'd be like what the hell is going on they could not figure it out eventually they they worked out that what they were doing was roughing up one side of the ball and this is the english and the australian cricketers they started accusing the pakistanis of cheating they accused them of like using um bottle tops to scruff up the side they accused them of like using their teeth to bite it there's actually some footage of one one cricketer um in 2010 literally biting the ball right like it was an apple trying to rough it up the thing is the british and the australian teams they they by this point they knew that it was something to do with roughing up the ball on one side and keeping it smooth on the other they knew that that was what was going on but they couldn't replicate it as hard as they tried they could not make the ball do this thing that the pakistanis had worked out and so instead they just frequently accused the pakistanis of cheating sure this is like over and over again they just couldn't do it.

51:03Hannah Fry:They even tried illicit tampering. They even tried to like do really tricky things to the ball to try and get it to do it. They just couldn't do it. But then what happened is they finally worked out, they finally worked out how to do it and they had to do it by cheating. They worked out that they could get this reverse swing to work if they ate Murray mints, right? Like literally sweets and then shined the ball using saliva and the stickiness from this murray mint okay so this is like proper ball tampering right but this is like the biggest scandal you can imagine because it's like the sugar in this mint is acting as this binding agent it's keeping the saliva on the side it's allowing the kind of artificial weight imbalance that's what makes the ball kind of hoop around corners.

51:51Hannah Fry:And at that point, then that was like, that was genuine cheating. At that point, this starts to become banned. Okay. Because there was an existing rule against tampering with the ball in that way. You cannot tamper with the ball. Yeah. You can't, you can't be tampering with the ball. Yeah, absolutely. I mean, Murray mints, that is, that is, it's clever. What is a Murray mint? Is that a kind of candy? Yes. A kind of candy. Exactly. Exactly. It is, as they say, not cricket. sticky spit on the ball sweet sticky spit exactly exactly so sweet sticky spit is out spit was still okay for a long time right it's still you can still spit on the ball disgusting but it did work to allow you to do reduce to do reverse swing until covid happened and then now spit was not allowed oh yeah okay but here's the thing okay um basically you can't really do reverse swing unless you get to mess with the ball.

52:45Hannah Fry:You can't really do it. You can't really naturally get this imbalance, this asymmetry in the two sides. And actually, you know what? Reverse swing's quite fun. It is that example of where humans have pushed things to the absolute limit. Sure, it's like in an intellectual way, it's in a sort of like harnessing the laws of physics to your advantage way rather than athleticism or just, you know, like amazing tactical decisions on the field. But I sort of think there is something quite sports-like about it at the same time. Yeah, right. I should say that the IPL, which is this version of cricket where they can make any rules they like, they've now unbanned saliva.

53:28Hannah Fry:So I think they agree. But actually, spit is good.

53:32Michael Stevens:So it's so much of it comes down to what is the spirit of the game, right? Like, do we want the cricket ball to be really unpredictable or not? And so much of it comes down to whether it feels fair, like whether it feels automatic, right? If you're able to rough up the ball to the point where the batters just never have a chance, then the game stops being fun. And that's how I first felt about the tush push in American football. Go on. What's this? This was pioneered by the Philadelphia Eagles who figured out, you know, when you find yourself in a position where you only need to move the ball like a foot or just like one yard forward to get a whole new set of downs.

54:19Michael Stevens:What if we just got really, really heavy guys and we put some in front and some behind? So when the quarterback gets the ball, we all just push forward. We fall forward, guys in the back push. And because we're the offense and we know the call, we know when the ball's going to get hyped. We'll have a split second advantage. We'll get momentum first and the defense won't be able to stop us. And they weren't. And this strategy was so effective that as not an Eagles fan, I hated it. because it felt like it could not be beaten, which meant it was automatic. If the Eagles were in a fourth and one situation, they weren't, they were going to get a first down.

55:07Michael Stevens:And it was just like watching a big scrum of people slurp forward. And that was the end of it. It worked every time. And so a lot of people said, we need to ban this move because it's just not fun. There's no competitive gamified element. It's automatic what happens every time. And I think one of the Eagles coaches or someone even joked about how for a team that can do this tush push, there's no first in 10. It's first in nine. You only have to go nine yards. That last yard, you just do the push that no one can beat. Lately, though, I've kind of changed my mind because other teams have tried it and they haven't been able to do it in the same way.

55:52Michael Stevens:maybe because their players aren't heavy enough maybe because there are ways to beat it i think there was a a moment where a player stayed outside of the scrum and like grabbed the ball from the outside i think someone tried to just like lay down to stop it and i think if there are ways around it then what we're really looking at is a really creative challenge and i can't wait to see the future of the move but right if it's just going to always be automatic then it's not a game anymore. I may as well watch people drop bricks off of buildings. Oh, look, it hit the ground again. It hit the ground again.

56:27Michael Stevens:Who cares?

56:28Hannah Fry:I think this is it, right? It's like you have different layers of competition. You have what's actually going on on the field. And then there's sort of like a meta competition. And then maybe even another layer above that of the regulators and the entire teams together. And I think that, I mean, what we've been talking about here is people coming up with ideas, people coming up with ingenious inventions that allow them to circumvent what is at the base level and sort of compete one level above. And I don't know, like I'm not a sports fan, right? Like I'm not somebody who follows sports religiously.

57:00Hannah Fry:There's something I quite like about the idea of coming up with an idea of a tush push or a reverse swing or like a really insanely complicated mathematical model that allows you to simulate these things and get an advantage. But I appreciate that it doesn't make what you're watching on the field is interesting, perhaps.

57:17Michael Stevens:Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think it's like a game of whack-a-mole that must occur. We should be encouraging people to figure out analytically and strategically things that will be almost unbeatable. But then maybe we do need to change the rules so that it continues to be competitive. So when it comes to Olympic records, let's talk about the 100-meter dash, all right? Here's another study that showed that the fastest possible 100 meter dash speed was estimated to be 9.44 seconds. Now that's only 0.14 seconds faster than Usain Bolt's current world record. But this is the estimated limit for human running speed.

58:01Michael Stevens:So what happens next? And I think that there's a fun option here. And it's that we should start allowing people to run on all fours. Hey, look, it's a different optimizer. Is it definitely not in the rules? It probably is against the rules, but even if it isn't, at the current moment, no one can run on all fours faster than Usain Bolt. There's a theory that with proper training, four-legged running could very quickly become faster because biomechanically it should. There are other animals that run faster than humans, okay? Like the cheetah, all right? Now, the cheetah does it by being, there's a lot of reasons the cheetah is fast, but look at this statistic.

58:48Michael Stevens:When a cheetah runs at top speed, it spins 70 % of its time with at least one leg on the ground. And a leg on the ground means you're accelerating, you're pushing, you're applying force to your body against the earth. Usain Bolt, when he set the world record, he had a foot on the ground, not 70 % of the time, but 43 % of the time. So most of the time, both of his feet were off the ground. He was flying, which looks cool and sounds cool. But when you're flying, you are decelerating, you are losing speed. But once you get more legs and XKCD did a great comic about like, here's, here's how you can go faster.

59:32Michael Stevens:the only winning option is to have more legs because then you get to have more force constantly being applied. You can always have a leg that's on the ground while the others are resetting. This is a person like crawling like an animal on the ground. We are in early days here. And look, here's a paper that is estimated that by the 2048 Olympics, if we dedicate ourselves to learning how to four-leggedly run, it will become equally fast to run on two legs versus four as a top athlete. And every Olympics after that, all runners will run on four legs crawling around like an animal it's the new tush push it's the new

1:00:07Hannah Fry:tush push it's the new tush push it's the new reverse swing by the way i've just i've just checked while you were while you were talking i've got up the world athletics book um there is no specific rule that says you you've got to run on two legs there's i mean there's lane infringement you've got to be careful about not infringing in your leg which is only 1.22 meters wide and you only finish when your torso crosses the line although i mean you sort of have an advantage

1:00:29Michael Stevens:Yeah, exactly. See, the path has already been cleared for this future. And I think that's what we need to embrace. Not the tradition of the game's rules or what's usually done, but instead the tradition of just the spirit of the competition.

1:00:45Hannah Fry:I'm going to put that one in my predictions for the future. 2048. Tush push of athletics. I'm okay with this. I'm okay with this. Who needs normal sports? We've got meta sports. We've got Amish football. We've got monkey running. And we've got enhanced, drugged up people in Las Vegas. It's way more fun than the normal stuff.

1:01:12Michael Stevens:I know. And I'm glad I think we're going to be on the right side of history here. I think in the future, all running events will be done on four limbs. And it'll be this huge sensation. Everyone's like, this is so weird. I can't believe it. Like what an invention. And people will show clips and they'll say 20 years ago, Michael and Hannah did this. And I mean, we didn't predict it. Other researchers said this first, but I believe them. And I think that it is the point of sport is for us to do things like this and always be changing.

1:01:41Hannah Fry:Too right, too right. Well, that is a wrap for this episode. Make sure that you are following The Rest of Science wherever you get your podcasts. Also on YouTube, where you can clip this to play it back to yourself in 25 years time, when we end up being proved to be right. As ever, if you want to ask us a question or send us in anything, you can do that. We might just answer it on Thursday's episode of Feel Notes. Send that into the rest of science at goalhanger.com. See you next time.

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