by Bernd Heinrich

Gerald Bybee

Power-mad: Track cycling is as rough-and-tumble as an NFL grudge match—except that its bruising participants are pedaling along at 45 miles per hour while bumping shoulders. It takes explosive strength and primal aggression to win, and given that 29-year-old Marty Nothstein (at right) missed gold by less than a centimeter in 1996, we'd recommend staying out of his way in the match sprint and the keirin events at Sydney.

Painted on the wall is a succession of sticklike human figures, clearly in full running stride. All are clutching delicate bows, quivers, and arrows, and all are running in one direction, left to right across the rock canvas. It's a two- or three-thousand-year-old pictograph, with nothing particularly extraordinary about it—until I notice something that sends my mind reeling: The figure leading the procession has his hands thrust upward in what seems to me to be the universal sign of athletic victory. As both a former ultramarathoner and a biologist, I know this gesture to be reflexive in runners and other competitors who have fought hard and then feel the exhilaration of triumph over adversity.

This happened several years ago, in Zimbabwe's Matobo National Park (formerly Matopos Park), but it remains for me an iconic reminder that the roots of our competitiveness go back very far and very deep. Between the marketing hype, the melodramatic background stories, and the sprawling spectacle of the millennial Olympic Games this September in Sydney will lurk the real reason we will tune in: an intense, innate, even visceral appreciation for the magnificence of the serious athlete's body. The modern Olympics represent the ultimate test of our ancient faculties. We thrill to see athletic skill—abilities that most of us possess to a degree—raised to the utmost level. The Olympics are a product both of our dreams and of our indomitable drive for perfection, the best of what the mortal human body can achieve.

Looking at that African rock painting made me feel like I was witness to a kindred spirit, a man who had long ago vanished yet whom I understood as if we'd talked just a moment earlier. I was not only in the same environment and of the same mind as my unknown Bushman, I was also in the place that most likely produced our common ancestors. The artist had been here hundreds of generations before me, but that was only the blink of an eye compared to the aeons that have elapsed since a bipedal intermediate between our apelike and recognizably human ancestors left the safety of the forest for the savanna some four million years ago.

It wasn't an easy transition. Indeed, it had fateful physiological and psychological consequences that are still deeply embedded in our bodies and our psyches. Standing before that long-lost victor in the struggle to survive, I was reminded of what I was, still am, and perhaps what we will forever be as long as we are human.