A few days ago, a robot broke Usain Bolt’s world record for the 100-metre sprint. At least, that’s what the news reported. However, the movements of that robot bear little resemblance to those of an athlete, however much its biomechanics may be designed to mimic them. There is a flaw in that comparison – a telling one – which I believe is important to bear in mind so as not to lose our way amidst all the science when it comes to an athlete’s body.

The Humanoid World Championships held in China this year are yet another instalment in this series of competitions, which have been held in Japan since 1997. Since then, other disciplines inspired by Deep Blue – which defeated the world chess champion, Gary Kasparov, in 1997 – have been added to the football World Cup.

There, technology developers have fun whilst fine-tuning robots that will later be brought to market.

For a robot to beat a runner’s record, put simply, means that only speed and time matter. These physical parameters are similar to the indicators (physiological, psychological, aerobic, etc.) to which high-performance athletes are subjected. That is what makes such a comparison between athletes and robots seem possible. But I consider this to be, as we say in psychoanalysis: symptomatic.

Symptoms are made up of words through which the body speaks. The body of an athlete, whether professional or not, speaks – and not because it is quantified on the basis of the vast amount of data which, with the best of intentions, now exists in every sporting discipline.

That is why it is capable of expressing such beauty: Jesse Owens’s race under Hitler’s gaze; a Messi slalom; any backhand from Federer; a sequence of three-pointers from Stephen Curry; and so much more. And that is also why there are setbacks, the interpretation of which psychoanalysis has been addressing for over a century, including: inhibitions, symptoms and anxieties; failures in the face of the possibility of success; not wanting what one desires; and whatever arises within the athlete when listening to their body – a body that speaks.

But let it be clear that however much androids may want to beat us, however much science may want to measure us, the mechanical little steps of a robot sprinter will never be the strides of Usain Bolt. Those joyful, graceful strides that traversed the sweltering Jamaican landscape every morning until, over two nights in Berlin in 2009, they broke the 100-metre and 200-metre records. The athlete’s body will always speak to us of a dimension of desire and that is inescapable.

And I don’t know if that is the Olympic ‘faster, higher, stronger’, let alone the ‘nothing is impossible’ – which are closer to a science fair than to real life.

I am referring to finding a resolute and unambiguous desire, just as Miller saw in Lacan himself. Something that goes beyond the norms without sidestepping what is unbearable, something that allows us to ‘know how far one can go too far’.

* Psychoanalyst member of the WAP and the EOL. Practices psychoanalysis in Mendoza