What Really Determines Your VO2 Max Globe and Mail series on the physiological limits faced by Olympic athletes deals with oxygen. Part 3 endurance:

Retired cross-country ski legend Bjorn Daehlie’s record tally of 12 Winter Olympic medals was matched last week by fellow Norwegian Ole Einar Bjoerndalen, who will attempt to dethrone Daehlie in the biathlon relays later this week in Sochi.

There was much less fanfare two years ago, when Daehlie lost a more obscure title. Until then, he had also been hailed as the greatest oxygen-user of all time – a laboratory marvel whose off-the-charts ability to suck oxygen into his lungs, transfer it into his bloodstream, and deliver it to hard-working muscles played no small part in fuelling his repeated trips to the podium...

So who dethroned Daehlie as the VO2max champ? An 18-year-old cyclist from Norway named Oskar Svendsen reportedly notched a test of 97.5 ml/min/kg in 2012, besting Daehlie's value of 96. Of course, neither of these values appear in the peer-reviewed literature, so there's always some question about whether the reports are accurate and the equipment properly calibrated and so on. And of course, the real question is: Who cares? Does VO2max actually matter?

It has become popular lately to dismiss VO2max as a meaningless measurement. After all, you can't use it to predict who among a field of elite athletes will win a race. And it's not clear whether it represents a true physiological maximum. But it would be a mistake to dismiss it entirely. In mathematical terms, having a high VO2max is a necessary but not sufficient condition for success in endurance sports. It's the ticket that gets you in the door; once you're at a high level, everyone has a relatively high VO2max, so other factors then determine who actually wins the race. Svendsen understands this:

“The figures are not important,” he told reporters after news of his test values spread. “I’ve been beaten by many with lower oxygen uptake than me over the years.” Still, Svendsen did win the world junior time-trial championships a few weeks after his VO2max test. Being an oxygen super-user certainly doesn’t guarantee that he’ll achieve as much as Daehlie did – but it’s a good start.

Another element in the article that readers of this blog might find particularly interesting deals with Who Has the Greatest VO2max of Them All, from Bill Sheel's group at the University of British Columbia. Many endurance athletes exhibit a characteristic desaturation pattern: when they exercise, the oxygen levels in their blood start dropping, sometimes well before exhaustion. Sheel and his colleagues went to Kenya to test runners there to find out whether they were less likely to exhibit desaturation.

The results, which will be published in Medicine & Science in Sports & Exercise in April, show that the Kenyan test subjects were just as likely to exhibit oxygen desaturation during exercise as runners from other countries, and their respiratory system had to work just as hard. In other words, whatever makes the Kenyans such great runners, it isn’t because they have better lungs.

The final piece in my here. If you're interested in earlier pieces in the series, check out Part 1 (cold), Part 2 (pain), and Part 3 (endurance).

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