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You can run, but you can't hide from the ultimate athletes in the natural
world.
We are counting down the top ten animal all-stars as they race to
surpass the best human competitors on the planet.
Discover that it's no-contest when the champions of the wild are taken to the
most extreme.
Earth is a planet of extremes.
Extreme places and extreme animals, but some animals are more extreme than
others.
Join us as we count down to find the most unusual, the most extraordinary,
the most extreme.
To make a big splash in the world sporting arenas, you need to be
fitter, stronger, and faster than any other competitor.
But can humans handle the pace set by the ultimate animal athletes?
In the natural world, the stakes are high.
When humans have an off day, they might end up with a few bruises.
But animal athletes aren't after medals; they are competing for their
lives.
If our first contender makes just the slightest mistake, it could die.
The gannet is the world's most extreme high diver.
Gannets are number 10 in the countdown because when they go fishing, they
dive head first into the sea from over 30 meters in the air.
That's twice the height of an Olympic high diver.
Gannets can hit the water at 140 kilometers per hour.
To survive the impact, gannets have several advantages over human high
divers.
They can inflate air bags in their chest to absorb the shock of hitting
the water at such high speed.
And unlike most other birds, gannets have no nostril holes on their beaks
so that water can't be forced up their nose on impact.
Gannets begin their dive with wings spread wide to give them maximum
accuracy.
But just before they hit, they tuck their wings out of harm's way so that
they enter the water like a feathery needle.
Some humans need similar techniques to perform death-defying dives.
In Georgia, the extreme team high divers entertain the crowd by throwing
themselves off platforms into a pool of water only three meters deep.
These guys may only be fooling around, but one member of the team knows what
it's like to hit the water like a gannet.
Danny Cosmo is a former bronze medalist in the World High Diving
Championship.
He routinely leaps from a platform eight stories above the water.
Well, the risk of high diving is when you are hitting the water at 60-62
miles an hour and you are not perfectly straight or you are a little
bit loose in your body, your whole body needs to be tight.
When you hit the water, sometimes it's hitting like concrete.
You can pull ligaments in your knees, your back, ankles.
It's not an easy sport, but it's a sport that with the right training and
the right techniques, it's second to none in my book.
At this height, one tiny mistake can leave a diver with broken bones and
disfiguring scars.
Danny may not have air bags like a gannet, but thanks to a well-practiced
technique, he can safely dive four times a day.
High diving is also a part of the gannet's daily routine, especially
when there are young athletes to feed.
Gannet chicks need to eat over half a kilogram of freshly regurgitated fish
everyday.
That's why both adults take it in turn to go fishing for their young for up
to 14 weeks.
They are such proficient providers that by the time they leave the nest,
the fledglings are bigger and heavier than their parents.
Gannets may be tough, but our next animal athlete takes part in a sport
that's so dangerous, it needs a crash helmet and a really thick skull.
Our next athlete competes in a bone-crunching competition so tough
it's more than a match for the world's best football players.
The frozen tundra of the Arctic is home turf for the animal at number 9
in the countdown, the muskox.
In late summer, hundreds of bulls gather for the annual clash of the
titans.
Male muskox fight for the right to mate in a competition that definitely
sorts out the men from the boys.
The bulls can charge at each other more than 20 times during a fight.
The collisions are so loud, they can be heard from over a kilometer away.
The muskox is number 9 in the countdown because it can survive a
head-on collision at about 50 kilometers per hour.
That's twice the speed most NFL players hit each other.
Even though football players collide with only half the force of a charging
muskox, they still need to wear protective helmets.
The rigid plastic cover diverts the force of the tackle away from the
player's head.
Researchers have found that modern helmets can reduce the force of a
tackle by a factor of 10.
This protective armor is so effective that in recent years, the players have
sustained fewer broken bones than the cheerleaders.
If only cheerleaders were more like muskox, then they'd have a built-in
crash helmet.
Ten centimeters of horn on top of seven centimeters of boney skull
combined to give these hairy jocks the thick heads necessary to survive the
high speed collisions.
And while muskox may have the best defensive record in the Arctic, they
couldn't keep up with our next contender.
Our first two animal all-stars have been twice as tough as any human, but
coming up in the countdown are more athletes that can easily knock us down
to sides.
After all, we have no chance in a race against the fastest thing on four
legs.
That's next on The Most Extreme.
Next off the starting blocks in our countdown of extreme athletes are the
fastest runners on earth.
The best human sprinters can run the 100 meters in less than 10 seconds,
but they are no match for our next contender.
You'll find the real track stars out on the African savannah.
Cheetahs are number 8 in the countdown, because when they are out
hunting, they can move at over 95 kilometers per hour.
That's nearly three times the speed of the fastest humans on earth.
They usually target gazelle that have strayed from the herd.
That cat stalks its prey to within 30 meters then puts all its efforts into
a straight sprint.
The hunt usually only lasts 20 second because cheetahs are built for a rapid
response.
In fact, if you take a closer look at the cheetah's racing aspects, they
bear more resemblance to a racing car than a track star.
The bones of their chasse are lightweight and flexible.
Enlarged heart, lungs, and adrenal glands power their acceleration from 0
to 90 kilometers per hour in just four seconds and it's the only cat to have
permanently extended claws for extra grip.
We may never be able to sprint like a cheetah, but we are getting faster.
Thanks to improved training methods, in the last century more than a second
has been shaved off the record for the 100 meters.
And while men are still a second faster than women, researchers at
Oxford University have found that the gender gap is closing.
The researchers compared the times for the 100 meters for both sexes since
the modern Olympics began in 1896.
They found that the times of the female sprinters have been improving
faster than the men.
If the trend continues and women keep getting faster, the scientists predict
that in about 150 years at the Olympic Games in 2156, a woman will beat the
man in the 100 meter dash in a time of just over eight seconds.
Strangely enough, there was a time when female athletes risked death just
to watch the Olympic Games.
The ancient Olympics were strictly for the boys.
Women were barred from entering the stadium on pain of death.
Perhaps it was just as well because back then the ancient athletes prefer
to run in the nude.
They believe their clothes just got in the way.
That's why the word, gymnasium, comes from the word, gymnós, which is Greek
for naked.
Clothing may not have been important to the ancient Olympians but good
nutrition was a key part of training.
Athletes from Southern Italy were big advocates of a diet of meat.
Milo of Croton took this advice to the extreme.
He reputedly ate 18 kilograms of meat in one sitting and washed it down with
seven liters of wine.
Cheetahs also live on a diet of meat, eating an average of three kilograms
of flesh everyday.
They may like to eat more but not all hunts are successful.
Adult cheetahs have a hunting hit rate of only 50%.
This time the gazelle's agility means that the cheetah will have to find
another target in its race for survival.
So far we've been outrun and outfought by animal athletes.
But still to come, what huge hairy weightlifter hoisted itself into
Hollywood history.
And we'll discover an animal that has no trouble throwing a ball, not of
stone, but of dung.
That's next on The Most Extreme.
Our search for the world's most extreme athlete takes us to the
Scottish Highland Games where the men wear skirts and the women dance with
swords.
The games originated over 500 years ago when clansmen gathered to practice
military exercises.
Today, they are better known for their unusual strength events.
There is tossing the caber and older forms of weight throwing contests like
the shot-put.
To be a contender, you have to be able to throw a seven-kilogram ball over 22
meters or 12 times the thrower's body length.
Relatively speaking, our next contender can throw more than three
times further and it doesn't wear a kilt.
Meet the skipper caterpillar.
It lives in woodland areas throughout America and has a talent for throwing,
not a metal ball, but its own fecal palettes.
This four-centimeter long athlete can fire poo an incredible 1.5 meters.
Believe it or not, this is an extreme form of self-defense.
Several species of caterpillar have ways of ejecting their feces that
would revolutionize the shot-put as an Olympic sport.
You could decide to use the head butt.
Fortunately caterpillars have an armored-platted head to prevent
injury.
Another caterpillar gets rid of its waste by using its strong jaws to
spit.
But by far, the most effective method is that of the skipper caterpillar.
First, it holds the shot between clenched buttocks.
Then by rapidly increasing its blood pressure, it ejects the shot a
distance equivalent to 40 times their body length.
If we were like the skipper caterpillar, we'd be able to throw the
shot-put three times further than any human.
Caterpillars have good reason for projectile pooping.
Recent research suggests that predatory wasps are attracted to the
smell of caterpillar poo.
By hurling their fecal palettes, the caterpillars reduce the chance of
being detected by wasps.
Our next contender's defense mechanism is much simpler.
It runs for its life very, very quickly.
Jogging into number 6 in the countdown is a middle distance runner that likes
living in the fast lane.
Meet the elephant shrew.
It runs through the scrub lands of East Africa every hour of the day.
That's because these mammals don't hide in burrows to shelter from
predators.
Instead their shrew uses its very own race track.
The animal shrew carefully maintains a network of intricate pathways that can
cover an area of the size of three football fields.
At the first sign of trouble, it can cut corners and connect with another
track.
And shrews are fast; they can hit nearly 20 kilometer per hour which is
about 40 body lengths per second.
If we ran 40 times our body length, we'd move at 265 kilometers per hour.
That's seven times faster than the best track and field stars.
The shrew has a turbocharged physiology to cope with its fast pace.
Its heart pumps at about 600 beats per minute.
That's 8.5 times faster than the average human.
But there is a price to pay for such a fast paced lifestyle and its
longevity.
It's estimated that the hearts of both the elephant and the elephant shrew
will beat around 800 million times in their life.
However, elephants that have a resting pulse rate of 40 beats per minute can
live for about 70 years.
The shrew with its racing heartbeat will be lucky to live longer than 2.5
years.
The elephant shrew maybe seven times faster than any human, but our next
contender has the strength of eight men.
So far we've seen shrews on the go and caterpillars that can throw.
But still to come, we race through the urban jungle in a truly extreme sport.
And it pays to be careful when you are looking for the world's hairiest
weightlifter.
That's coming up next on The Most Extreme.
The next contender in our countdown of extreme athletes became Hollywood's
biggest movie star back in 1933.
King Kong was a box office hit because back then people were scared of giant
savage apes.
Even today it's easy to see why people were afraid of gorillas.
A dominant male will protect its troupe from any intruders, which is
why these animal paparazzi are in for a big surprise.
The short sharp blow was a warning to the film crew, but it could have been
much worse.
Weighing in at over 200 kilograms and standing nearly two meters tall, the
gorillas are the heavyweight champions of the world.
They are number 5 in the countdown because they are eight times stronger
than any human.
These apes need all their strength to defend their family and territory from
other gorillas.
Imagine if you were as strong as a great ape.
The best human weightlifters can hoist over 250 kilograms above their head.
But if you were as strong as a gorilla, you'd easily set a new world
record by lifting the equivalent of two family cars.
That's over 2,000 kilograms.
Lifting just one car can be a struggle for the even the strongest humans.
In 1990, James Reeves from Great Britain used a harness fitted into
especially designed platform to lift a family car complete with two adults.
The total weight lifted was over a ton.
Just like human weightlifters, gorillas power their massive muscles
by following a strict diet.
They spend 12 hours everyday, eating over 25 kilograms of fruit and
vegetables.
The average human eats 15 times less than a gorilla.
Gorillas have to eat all of that food because their vegetarian diet makes it
harder to extract sufficient proteins, carbohydrates, and minerals.
Gorillas may have the strength of eight men, but our next contender
jumps to even greater heights.
You'll find our next extreme athlete on rocky outcrops high above the
plains of Africa.
This dwarf antelope is perfectly adapted to life in the rugged terrain.
It's not hard to see why the early Dutch settlers called it the
klipspringer or rock jumper.
While most antelopes are long and lean, the klipspringer has a muscular
body that's short and stout.
The klipspringer is perfectly at home on the cliffs, thanks to hooves that
are blunt and rubbery like skid-proof shoes.
Each foot has two hooves joined by a tough piece of tissue that keeps the
hooves from splaying.
That's important because klipspringer stand, walk, leap, and land on their
tiny hoofed tips.
It's the equivalent of humans walking around only on the tips of their
toenails.
Imagine if we could jump like a klipspringer.
The best human high jumpers can clear less than twice the height of the
average human.
But if we could jump like a klipspringer, we could clear at least
ten times our height.
That would be like leaping on to a five-storey building.
But there are some human klipspringers that really do leap over rooftops.
Welcome to the extreme sport of free running.
Born in the suburbs of Paris, free runners use gymnastic based skills to
navigate their way around the urban jungle in hair-raising ways.
For some, free running is more than a sport.
It's a philosophy that challenges the boundaries and restrictions imposed by
city life.
But kids, don't try these jumps at home.
Just like klipspringers, these athletes have been practicing their
moves for years.
And even with careful planning, accidents can happen.
If only free runners have the rubbery hooves and added safety features of a
klipspringer.
The antelope is covered in a dense layer of short hairs that function as
shock absorbers for collisions with rock walls.
All that hair also acts as an anti-predator device.
If a leopard gets within striking distance, a klipspringer can avoid
capture by shedding some of its thick fur coat.
The leopard ends up eating a mouthful of hair and the klipspringer lives to
jump another day.
We are on the home stretch of our countdown of the world's most extreme
athletes.
But still to come, we'll meet a deep sea diver that runs marathons and what
animal athlete can move twice as fast an America's Cup yacht.
Find out next on The Most Extreme.
We are searching the seven seas to find the most extreme animal athletes
on the planet.
Our next contender was built for speed.
It even comes fitted with its own sail, rigging, and propeller.
The sailfish splashes into number 3 in the countdown because it can move
through the water at speeds in excess of 109 kilometers per hour.
That's 20 times faster than the best human swimmers and twice as fast as an
America's Cup yacht.
The sailfish can be distinguished from other billfish like marlin by its
large dorsal fin which can be twice as high as its body.
While this huge sails provide maneuver ability under water, it can also act
like a handbrake.
That's because the fin's large surface area creates drag that slows the fish
down.
So when the sailfish wants to move fast, it tucks its protruding fins
into grooves and depressions on its body.
But it doesn't tuck away its tail which is stiff and sickle shaped,
ideal for creating maximum thrust.
While no human could swim as fast as a sailfish, one group of swimmers almost
reached 90 kilometers per hour as they swam across Australia.
In 2004, an ambitious team of fundraisers swam across the Australian
outback in a swimming pool on a truck.
Volunteers took turns to strap into a harness so they could swim against the
tension of an elastic chord.
The trip across one of the world's most arid landscapes took 21 days to
complete and raised money for water safety education.
But sailfish don't swim for charity.
They speed through the world's tropical oceans in search of fish.
They are after large balls of schooling fish that feed in open
water.
The school makes it difficult for a predator to isolate a single target
which is why the billfish uses its long snout as a weapon.
By rapidly thrashing at the bill within the ball, it can stun fish and
isolate a meal from the heaving mass.
The sailfish might be quick off the mark but it could never keep track of
our next contender.
These people are looking for our next contender off the coast of New
Zealand.
The *** whale is number 2 in the countdown because with just a single
breath of air, it can dive at least 20 times deeper than any human.
The whales spend 10 minutes breathing on the surface to oxygenate their
blood for their big dive and they've got a lot of blood to oxygenate, about
three tons of it.
All this blood carries enough oxygen to let them stay under water for more
than two hours.
That's enough time to let them feed three kilometers below the surface.
No human could survive such a dive because the extreme pressure of all
that water pressing down on your body would be lethal.
It would be like trying to breathe with a whale sitting on your chest,
pushing down at more than 200 kilograms per square centimeter.
The only way we could cope would be to wear a protective suit.
Lloyd Scott from England used his diving suit to travel 41 kilometers
under the surface of Loch Ness in Scotland.
But he didn't dive straight down.
He walked the marathon distance along the length of the famous lake.
It took Lloyd 12 days to complete his journey.
It was the first time anyone had successfully walked the length of this
loch under water.
But it wasn't the first time Lloyd had worn his lead boots in an endurance
event.
Lloyd's also competed in the New York, Edinburgh, and London marathons.
He smashed the record for the fastest marathon in an antique diving suit in
a time of just over five days.
It doesn't take a *** whale that long to complete its record-breaking
journey.
But in the two hours it spends submerged, it has to navigate its way
through the darkness to find food.
That's why the *** whale uses a sonar.
It sends sound waves into the darkness and listens for echoes that have
bounced off the body of its favorite food, the giant squid.
Nobody has ever seen what happens in the depths of the sea, but from the
scars on the head of the *** whale, it would appear that the giant squid
puts up quite a fight.
The
*** whale has a secret weapon.
This extreme athlete can concentrate its sonar ping into a sonic boom that
can even stun a 12-meter long giant squid.
But the *** whale is still not the most extreme animal all-star in the
countdown.
We've seen the nine contenders.
They are the best of the best.
Only one animal is a more extreme athlete.
It's number 1 and it's coming up next on The Most Extreme.
So just who was the greatest athlete that ever lived?
It's difficult to compare the power of a boxer, the flair of an Olympic
gymnast or even the hand-to-eye coordination of a homerun hitter.
But not one of these sporting talents even comes close to the athletic feat
of a high flyer who is on top of the world for over 20 years.
On the Arctic coast of Sweden, members of the media eagerly await an audience
with a legendary athlete.
Meet Sylvia.
This Arctic tern was so famous that she was a regular in the daily
tabloids.
In fact, she was so highly regarded that she was named after the Queen of
Sweden.
So why did this tiny seabird make front page news?
Every autumn, only weeks after giving birth, Sylvia and her family headed
off on the most extreme migration in the world.
To avoid winter, Arctic terns travel from one side of the planet to the
other.
Their search for an endless summer means that no other animal sees more
daylight than the Arctic tern.
Imagine if we made the same journey as Sylvia.
We'd be taking part in the world's longest race.
Guided by the sun and stars, we'd head out of Sweden, along the coast of
Europe and down to Africa.
If we were like Sylvia, we'd need only two months to cover the 19,000
kilometers to reach Antarctica.
We'd spend a month, resting and fishing in the continent's fertile
waters and then before winter arrives, we turn around and head back north
again.
An Arctic tern can make this roundtrip every year for more than 20 years.
In total that's the same distance as flying from the earth to the moon and
back.
The human equivalent of the arctic tern was a pair of remarkable athletes
who ran around the world in just seven days.
In 2003, explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes and his friend, Dr. Mike Stroud, set
out on a race to run seven marathons on seven continents in just seven
days.
Their challenge began in South America.
Then they flew to and ran on a sub-Antarctic island, Australia,
Singapore, Cairo, and London.
After traveling 72,000 kilometers in the air and 295 kilometers on foot,
they crossed their final finish line in New York City.
Sir Ranulph Fiennes has dedicated his life to travel and exploration.
But the Arctic tern's annual circumnavigation of the globe is
motivated by hunger.
By spending summer close to both poles, terns have 24 hours of
daylight.
That means there's good fishing to be head around the clock.
It's an incredible journey for such a tiny bird which is why when it comes
to athletic ability, the Arctic tern really is the most extreme.