TV REVIEW : ‘Champion’: The Science, Not Soul, of Sports

“Can Science Build a Champion Athlete?,” a “Nova” segment airing tonight at 8 on Channel 28 (7 p.m. on Channel 24), examines the ever-faster pace at which athletic records are broken. Is there an end in sight? What are the limits of human athletic potential?

The show charts the impact of modern training practices on world-class athletes, demonstrating dramatic increases in performance levels. One example among many: Mark Spitz is perhaps the greatest Olympic athlete ever, a swimmer who set seven world records at the 1972 Olympics--but none of his times would be good enough to even qualify for today’s contest. Spitz had excellent technique and all the qualities of a champion but today’s swimmers have water treadmills with computer imaging systems to record and examine their skills, a variety of training methods that go beyond Spitz’s marathon lap-swimming routines and such things as sensory deprivation tanks to better visualize competing and winning.

The advances aren’t limited to training methods--the “tools” of sport are changing as well. Bobsleds have less drag, bicycles less weight; the list goes on and on.

Writer-director Mike Slee has done a decent job of assembling footage of the scientists and the technology at work and of the athletes/subjects striving to reach peak form. But he takes this effort at face value, never questioning the expenditure of astonishing amounts of money or the faults of this mechanistic approach--he even seems to be in favor of adapting the late East German program where officials searched for children who might be potential athletes and then raised them like racehorses. “Champion” overemphasizes the mechanics of sport--at the expense of the beauty.

Sure, records are meant to be broken. But let’s not forget the “heart and soul” that powers the true great athlete.