Jamaica's rising star, sprinter Usain Bolt, set a new world record in the 100-meters at the Olympics on August 16, seemingly leaving other world-class sprinters in his dust. However, some biostatisticians claim, "this is nowhere near what we predict for the natural limit of
the human body".

To 'predict' the next world-record times, statisticians use mathematical models to forecast expected results. Of course these models don't take into account factors such as advances in training or nutrition - or even the human body's physiology - to assess the lower limit, they simply use previous world record times, plotted on a graph against time, and fit the data to a curve. The statisticians have used a lower limit for the 100-meter time of about 9.45 seconds to generate an exponential curve which - up until Bolt's recent performance - had been fairly successful at predicting the progress of world-record setting runs. Bolt caused researchers to have to rethink their curve a bit - as his time of 9.69 seconds wasn't "predicted" until the year
2030!

"This trend seems to defy simple curve fitting," wrote Tatsuo Tabata, the director of the Institute for Data Evaluation and Analysis (IDEA) in Japan.

See the curve, or read comments from other 'modelers' at Wired Science.