“I knew who he was. I’d seen him once the year before at a cross-country competition, and people talked about him. His name was Michael Seme. He was a Zulu man from Soweto, well known for helping runners achieve their maximum potential. He was kind of like the Mr. Miyagi of running, and he had a long list of accomplished athletes, including Stephen Mokoka, already an international long-distance champion.

“I knew from what happened to my father and what I’d seen on television that a career in sports didn’t last forever. Athletes have a small window of time to work with their body. And injuries don’t care whether you are young or old. The important thing was that if running didn’t work out for me, I would at least have a diploma from a respected university that would help me get a job. That would be my future, I decided, but for now, I had to get faster.

“The regulations would now only apply to athletes with what they called “differences in sexual development” (DSD) and only to those competing in the 400-, 800-, and 1500-m distances. Since Dutee Chand was a 100-m runner, she would not be affected by these rules. The IAAF didn’t need to address her case. The testosterone limit would need to be lowered from the original 10 nmol/L they’d announced in 2011 down to 5 nmol/L for a period of six months before an affected athlete was eligible to compete.

PART 3: The Secret of Our Success

9: Better at Everything

“Abrahams employed a personal coach, Sam Mussabini, before his 1924 Olympic victory. This was regarded as almost tantamount to cheating, but today even club runners benefit from extensive coaching, better diet and nutritional guidance, and from the advice of friendly competitors. Bolt runs 10 per cent faster and Kipchoge 50 per cent faster than the earlier winners in their events. These improvements in productivity have been observed in an activity whose essential character has remained unchanged for thousands of years. Mussabini could train Abrahams to win Olympic gold but could never have run the race himself; Abrahams could run faster than any man alive but had no understanding of sports mechanics. The combination was more powerful than either alone. The power of combinations of capabilities is the secret of our modern athletic prowess. And of our opulence.

We run faster because of the accumulation of collective knowledge about sports engineering and nutrition. With the aid of coaches this knowledge becomes collective intelligence – know that becomes know how. We eat better apples because plant species were carried across the world and because of the accumulation of collective knowledge of techniques of cross-breeding. The collaboration of Sam Mussabini and Harold Abrahams won an Olympic gold medal, and the collaboration of botanists at Washington State University, local growers and breeders and marketing and branding agencies produced the Cosmic Crisp. By accumulating collective knowledge, applying collective intelligence and practising the division of labour on a global and inclusive basis, humans have become better at ... almost everything.