Peter Keating looks at why athletes in this Olympics are unlikely to break many world records:
[I]t's innovation — scientific discoveries and breakthrough applications — that improves performance in bursts and produces records in bunches. Women's track and field stars achieved all kinds of record times in the 1980s, when Soviet-bloc countries were massively doping their athletes. Their actions encouraged other nations to do the same, and neither drug testing nor Olympic politics initially shunned the behavior. In swimming, peak times picked up after 2000, when athletes started wearing full-body suits. The times stalled again in 2009, when FINA, swimming's governing body, banned the LZR suits and their brethren. Plateaus in world records don't mean athletes' bodies are reaching their limits; they mean we've slowed down the help, largely for moral reasons, that athletes' bodies can get from outside forces.
Earlier Dish on technological attempts to improve Olympian performance here.
The Dish 