Engineering the Perfect Athlete

From the time he took up the long jump at age 11, Mike Powell showed great potential. But in his first 15 years of competition he had trouble making it to the far end of the sandpit. His jumps consistently measured in the 7.6-m- to-7.9-m range, more than a meter short of record-breaking territory. Then in 1988 he began improving rapidly. At the world championships in Tokyo last August, Powell came into his own. He bounded down the runway, hit the board and soared 8.95 m, eclipsing by 5 cm the "unbreakable" record set by America's Bob Beamon 24 years ago. A believer in nonstop improvement, Powell thinks he could set another record in Barcelona.

What accounts for his amazing metamorphosis from also-ran to world-beater? Powell, 28, gives credit to a five-year scientific training plan devised by his coach, Randy Huntington, who goes by the nickname "Mr. Gizmo" and leaves almost no technique untried in his exhaustive approach to training. Among the elements of Powell's regime:

-- To increase the explosive power of his legs, Powell runs on the track with an open drag parachute trailing behind him. For variety, he sometimes tows a sled.

-- In the garage at his home in Southern California, he builds strength by working out on pneumatic weight machines, which precisely control the velocity of his movements to prevent damage to his joints.

^ -- To avoid injury and reduce the recovery time between workouts, he performs dozens of water exercises in his pool. He also stimulates his muscles by applying electricity to them with a battery-operated microcurrent device.

Powell is caught up in the brave new whirl of sports science. Fast disappearing are the days when an elite athlete was simply the product of hard work, a gruff coach and a little luck. Today science has become an indispensable part of the formula for more and more world-class competitors, who find that the margin between gold and silver is often a centimeter or a hundredth of a second. Helping mold athletes today is a growing army of specialists -- from physiologists and psychologists to nutritionists and biomechanists. Result: athletes who are training not just harder but smarter. With some players already working seven hours a day, six days a week, "it is physically and socially irresponsible to increase the volume of training any more," says Gerd-Peter Bruggemann, a professor of biomechanics at the German University of Sports Sciences in Cologne. "Science must think of ways to make training more efficient."