Sometimes technology malfunctions and the transcendent peeks through. Sometimes we get it on film. Watch closely: When the gunshot sounds, the only thing distinguishing the runner in lane five is a grainy flair of dark hair as she leaps from the blocks. For the first 50 meters she is level with the pack; a beat later she’s ahead by a stride. Then, at seven seconds, the footage seems to skip: her gait lengthens, the other runners fall away, and she is all alone, way out at the far edge of the frame, with a bare track stretching at her heels.

Indianapolis, 1988. In the first heat of the U.S. Olympic trial quarterfinals, the American sprinter Florence Griffith-Joyner, a.k.a. “Flo-Jo,” set a world record for the women’s 100-meter sprint that stands to this day: 10.49 seconds. In a sport where advances are made by mere hundredths of a second, Flo-Jo’s time—a full 0.27 seconds faster than the previous world record—seemed impossible. There had to be an explanation.

As it happens, there was: Flo-Jo had the wind at her back.

In track and field, the results of short sprints and horizontal jumps are only allowed record status when the wind is blowing less than two meters per second. At the time of her historic race, the mechanical anemometer at the triple-jump runway across the stadium clocked a wind speed of 4.3 meters per second; in the footage of the race you can see the white flag fluttering behind the starting line. Even before the gunshot, one commentator warned, “the wind will mean that it won’t count.”

But when her winning time appeared on the scoreboard, the official wind measurement beside it read 0.0 meters per second. The commentators grappled with disbelief. “It can’t be,” one said. “No one can run that fast.” But Flo-Jo had. Her record held.

Seven years later, the International Amateur Athletics Federation released a report concluding that the anemometer at the 100-meter track had malfunctioned. The wind speed, the report said, was likely between 5.0 and 7.0 meters per second. But the governing body did not revoke her world record, and in a sense, it hardly mattered: In Indianapolis the day after running 10.49, Flo-Jo ran the second-fastest time ever, a 10.61. Over two days and four rounds of the 100-meter sprint, she clocked the three fastest times in history. And then, for good measure, she went to Seoul and won an Olympic gold.

Was Flo-Jo’s record a technical fluke? Did the wind meter lie? Does the footage of her race jump a frame? Maybe. Call these glitches, if you like. A glitch is what we invoke when the world does not obey the rules we have assigned to it. But glitches are revealing; they show us the limits of tech's ability to determine reality, and gesture at different forms of authority and truth. There is another word for such an event; you might call it a miracle. When we watch Flo-Jo fly on that windy Indiana day, what we see is not the failure of our technology, but the triumph of our divinity.

Sports enchant us by combining two popular stories about what it means to be human: We are like machines, and we are also like gods. The history of athletic achievement and how we perceive it is a story of the shifting balance between these visions. In the earliest work of what is now called physiology, Aristotle characterized the movement of animal bodies as “those of automatic puppets, which are set going on the occasion of a tiny movement; the levers are released, and strike the twisted strings against one another.” By contrast, human bodies were propelled by something intangible in Aristotle’s view: “It remains to inquire how the soul moves the body.”

Ancient athletics favored the model of the god over the model of the machine. The lyric poet Pindar, whose Olympian Odes lauded the athletic champions of his time, wrote that the glory of a big win “is the highest one that comes to every mortal man.” Victory lifted the winner up, perpendicular to the worldly plane, in the direction of the divine.

In Book V of the Aeneid, Aeneas and his Trojans are forced by squalls to stop in Sicily, where Aeneas honors the death of his father with a series of competitions, including a footrace. The Trojan arrivals and the Sicilian locals send their finest to the starting line, including the young soldier Nisus, his younger lover Euralyus—“a boy of blooming years, / With sprightly grace and equal beauty crown’d”—and the Greek Salius. When the race begins, Nisus takes the lead, with Salius and Euralyus far behind. In the final turn, though, Nisus slips on the blood of a sacrificial bull. Thrashing about in the gore, he manages to trip Salius— clearing the way for his lover Euralyus to cruise to victory.

Euralyus crows. Salius, predictably, calls foul play:

. . . and, exclaiming loud
For justice, deafens and disturbs the crowd;
Urges his cause may in the court be heard;
And pleads the prize is wrongfully conferr’d.
But favor for Euryalus appears;
His blooming beauty, with his tender tears,
Had brib’d the judges for the promis’d prize.

Euralyus doesn’t win because he is the fastest; he wins, in the final analysis, because he is beautiful. In a culture where beauty is the mark of divine favor, his victory bears the trace of the gods.

Fair? Perhaps not. But if ancient judgment skewed in favor of heavenly gifts, modern judgment skews in favor of rational rules. A mechanical understanding of the body informs how runners train and mechanical timepieces arbitrate their results. At the highest level of contemporary athletics—right up next to the gods, as Pindar would have it—tech is our model and our measure.

The mechanistic paradigm presents challenges. To understand a machine you take it apart, and the tricky thing about a moving body is that it does not stay still long enough for you to break down how it moves. This was a paradox that troubled the sleep of Leland Stanford, the business mogul, university founder, and equine enthusiast who was determined to see if horses at a trot or gallop ever lift all four hooves off the ground at the same time. In 1872, Stanford famously commissioned an English-born photographer, Eadweard Muybridge, to conduct a photographic investigation of whether horses do in fact “fly.”

This esoteric inquiry, under less moneyed auspices, might never have shifted history. But Muybridge’s invention of the “automatic electro-photograph,” and his published work, The Horse in Motion, seemed to resolve a timeless paradox. His pictures arrested moving horses in the form of photographic stills. But when the photos were displayed in rapid succession, with the help of Muybridge’s subsequent invention, the so-called zoopraxiscope, they miraculously created the illusion of movement. That dusty racetrack in Sacramento is often credited as the birthplace of film. Which is to say that the blurry footage of Flo-Jo’s Olympic race marks a return of photography to its original purpose: the capture of bodies in motion.

Film facilitated the growing dominance of the mechanical model of human bodies. While a runner’s footfalls could now be preserved for eternity with a level of detail that would make Pindar blush, those same steps could also be deconstructed, analyzed, and put back together. Runners had a shot at godly posterity, but only if they submitted to increasingly precise mechanical tuneups. Consider this report on the film analysis of runners, published by Wallace Osgood Fenn in the American Journal of Physiology in 1930:

The angles of the upper and lower arms and legs are first measured from the films when projected on a screen, one measurement being made at every second frame. This was done simply by laying a protractor long [sic] the long axis of the limb and reading the angle by means of the plumb line. These angles are then plotted for each limb against the frame number (i.e., time) and smooth curves are drawn through the points in such a manner that they return to the starting point . . .

It’s far from Virgil. Yet this kind of quantitative analysis produced results. Over the past century, the increasingly sophisticated marriage of tech and technique has reshaped the world of athletic pursuit for professionals and shuffling mortals alike: A recent article in Nature explores the applications of machine learning and wearable sensors for instructing a sample of non-elite undergraduates in track and field. An excerpt from that highly technical paper shows the mechanical model’s propensity to make the simple act of running almost unthinkably arcane:

The technical and transcendent views of the runner aren’t mutually exclusive, but they are irreducibly distinct. A Greek amphorae cannot teach us how to optimize our VO₂ max, and calculus cannot tell us why, in the words of one YouTube commenter, Flo-Jo’s gait is “poetry in motion.” We are always like gods, and we are always like machines.

But these days (as a recent Duracell x Messi ad suggests) we seem to be more and more like machines, which is why Flo-Jo’s world record sprint has something important to teach us. In the face of the tech industry’s conquest of nearly every zone of human experience, temporarily suspending the authority of quantitative measurement can help us to remember that we are not, in the end, reducible to numbers. Fortunately, this is not so hard to do: At the level of precision that distinguishes 10.76 seconds and 10.49 seconds—the point at which we call on “quantum timers” to decide the reigning champ—a record margin is nearly imperceptible to an unaided viewer. But the beauty of a human taking damn near to flight? Plain as day.

Flo-Jo understood that beauty was a kind of divine favor. She ran 10.49 with her curls loose, in four-inch tiger-print acrylics and a candy-colored one-legged track suit that she stitched herself. She was nearly as famous for her fashion as she was for her fitness, and her race-day glam paved the way for the long lashes and jewelry of Sha’Carri Richardson and the Jamaica-yellow hair of Shelly-Ann Fraser Pryce.

We’ll see how long Flo-Jo’s record stands. The Jamaican sprinter Elaine Thompson-Herah nipped at her heels in 2021 with a 10.54 finish in Eugene, Oregon. Forgiving the pun, it’s only a matter of time. But even when it falls from the top of the chart, Flo-Jo’s race in Indianapolis should be remembered as the rare instance in modern sports in which the mechanical and the transcendent views of athletic achievement come cartoonishly uncoupled. In just over ten seconds, she struck an enduring blow to the false supremacy of the machine model of the human.

Faulty tech isn’t always bad; sometimes an error signal points us back to ourselves. In this view, we can be grateful to the (supposedly) glitchy anemometer that sat and watched Flo-Jo fly by, just as we do, over and over again. By flouting its assigned task, perhaps the machine meant to tell us something else: about what we are, and what we are not. The Greek root of anemometer, anemos—what the machine is meant to measure—means wind. But some things can’t be measured, and anemos also means spirit. ♦

“Glitches and Miracles” is part of Embedded, a series of writings on the moving image. Artists, musicians, and writers choose a piece of media—embeddable on a web page—and elaborate on why it has lodged itself in their psyche.