By: Brayden Yin

Athletes throughout generations seem to get better and better at the sports they play. Useful cases to study are professional darts and archery. While these aren’t the most popular sports, they nonetheless exemplify this progress towards perfection. Top ranked players these days are posting higher scores than four decades ago. The reasons for this improvement are starkly different from what one might expect.

Today, athletes are more achieving better results than their predecessors, often because they are playing with better equipment or using technology that allows higher scores. Darts themselves have improved. They’ve become thinner, making it less likely that the darts will crowd out a region of the board. The triple-20 area of the board, the highest scoring area, has become larger since the 1990s, mainly because the wires that separate the scoring sections have shrunk from 1.8 millimeters in diameter to 0.6 millimeters. These changes to the wire have increased the area of the triple-20 zone by 1.96 square millimeters. The wires are also no longer rounded, instead angled towards the target. This way, darts are less likely to bounce off the boards and more likely to hit the triple-scoring areas.

In archery, the challenge has gotten tougher to accommodate the improvement. A standard competition using recurve bows without wheels or pulleys included targets as close as 30 meters until the early 1990s, when archers started to shoot from 70 meters. If the 30-meter round was still held in modern times, it would be easy for the archer to score 358, 359, or a perfect score of 360. Now, archers competing in the 70-meter round are scoring comparably to 30-meter rounds from 30 years ago, when the typical score was in the low 300s.

Of course, technology will play a part in the improvement of athletes through generations, but it has been proven time and time again that the most effective way of improving is through individual practice.