Why some groups are more natural athletes

[franklie]

While more and more I don't believe Bolt was any cleaner than any others, there is still the possibility that the simple physics play the bigger part. ie., Bolt being 6'5"(in a sport where from what I've heard coaches discouraged young athletes who were tall from running the sprints in the past) means he covers more ground with each stride. I believe I read he covered 100m in 42 strides, while most guys are 44-45. So if his turnover is anywhere near the same level as the others, he wins. Does he need drugs to improve his turnover?I don't know. I don't believe he has competed against anyone taller than 6'2" or so, and seeing the field at the last world championships, the tall guys haven't taken over yet.

I think within a decade, though, you will see 100m global finals full of guys 6'5" and up, because Bolt has shown tall guys can run extremely fast, and coaches have been training the tall kids they would have previously steered in other directions.

compare and contrast Usain Bolt with Ben Johnson. Ben was also born in Jamaica

[zinedine kilbane]

Thought experiment for you here:

Say you went to an MIT physics lecture and took 10 people at random who had never played chess. Then you paid them a bunch to do 10,000 hours of deliberate chess practice. Then you did the same thing at a local plumbing school. At the end of the experiment do you think one group would outperform the other?

Or say you did the same with shotput comparing a group picked from a d1 football team vs a group picked from a local chess club. Do you think the group selected from the footballers would do better?

[Mark Rippetoe]

Say you went to an MIT physics lecture and took 10 people at random who had never played chess. Then you paid them a bunch to do 10,000 hours of deliberate chess practice. Then you did the same thing at a local plumbing school. At the end of the experiment do you think one group would outperform the other?

I'm sure one group would outperform the other. I just don't know which one, because the plumbers were smart enough to learn productive work and problem solving, while the physics guys were just smarter. Intellectual shit is harder to tease out than physical shit.

Or say you did the same with shotput comparing a group picked from a d1 football team vs a group picked from a local chess club. Do you think the group selected from the footballers would do better?

The football kids, for the aforementioned reason.

[zinedine kilbane]

I'm sure one group would outperform the other. I just don't know which one, because the plumbers were smart enough to learn productive work and problem solving, while the physics guys were just smarter. Intellectual shit is harder to tease out than physical shit.



The football kids, for the aforementioned reason.

Sorry, that was question for me was supposed to be a reply to novicejay asking him.

You know significantly more about this stuff than I do Mark

[gatorjdmd]

You have read some things or educated yourself on lots of these things already because when I first heard about you, I would listen and read everything you said and you said and still say and do some of the same things in the research. I actually thought at one time you had read all this stuff because of the things you say and do but you replied a while back and indicated you had not.

Hard to describe in a few sentences, but, for example, there are assumptions about Kenyans and running and that Kenyans are just born to run marathons. The reality is there is one tribe in Kenya where most of these runners come from and it has little, if anything, to do with genetics. It has much to do with their lifestyle, i.e., they run everywhere from the time they are young and they are at a high altitude and their diet may also contribute. And there are several people that try to claim it is all kinds of things other than that. Once this tribe started winning, this started an avalanche of even more people in this tribe wanting to compete and this just builds on itself.

Setting aside the Kenyans, you need to have the right coach for whatever it is you are doing. The reality is, similar to my experience with weightlifting, most coaches THINK they know what should be done, and then there are SS Coaches, who actually KNOW what should be done. Obviously, the earlier you get this coaching the better chance you have of making an Olympic Team. For example, when you make corrections regarding knees out on the squat or bend over sooner or drive the hips up or squat below parallel, etc., you do it immediately and fix the problem immediately. Whereas a guy/gal without a SS coach can squat for years thinking he is doing it correctly, but the reality is, he is not and therefore is not as strong as he could be, etc.

In other words, it isn't some "natural talent", depending on how you define talent, or some broadcaster claiming, the player was just born to golf, born smart, born to run a marathon, born to kick a soccer ball, born to ace the ACT/SAT, born to whatever. . . There is going to be some actual reason behind what is happening.

I am fascinated by the study of what causes people to become an expert and I read everything I can on the subject. I used the methods I learned and applied them to my kids.

To say that some people do not have a heritable genetic advantage for particular sporting events is just silly. There's an agenda that some wish to promote that all demographics are essentially born equal. They want this to be true because otherwise it would also lead to also acknowledging that certain demographics are predisposed to intellectual advantages.

[anticausal]

Somehow selective pressures work for everything but divergent human groups. A human group spending thousands of years in harsh cold conditions must experience the exact same selective pressure as a group spending thousands of years in a warm equatorial environment. This is the big 2+2=5 almost everyone accepted long before they shoved the more obvious ones down our throats. I was arguing with a guy about this subject once, and asked him if any dog breeds are smarter than any others. To my shock, he insisted that no, it was the owners expectations that made them that way. That is how fucked up people's heads are when they think about this stuff. Their childhood egalitarian fairy tales simply can't be wrong because that would be racist, and racists burn at the stake.

[Mark Rippetoe]

To say that some people do not have a heritable genetic advantage for particular sporting events is just silly. There's an agenda that some wish to promote that all demographics are essentially born equal. They want this to be true because otherwise it would also lead to also acknowledging that certain demographics are predisposed to intellectual advantages.

Right. Is the NBA not a rather obvious example?

[Bluefan75]

This is a very good review of the bolt situation:

Usain Bolt, Lance Armstrong and the Duck Test | by Tom Rivers | Medium

In summary: if you think there’s a chance he was clean I have some magic beans I think you could be interested in purchasing

Magic beans? tell me a bit more about them. :-)

I will admit I wasn't aware that his performance jumped *so* much from one year to the next. I believe Bolt turned 20 in 2008? At what point does a sprinter's improvement due to natural growth stop? (ie, there's a reason 15 year olds don't usually compete against 24 year olds.) Your link is quite good at disabusing of any notions he was clean, but for argument's sake, how much could he have improved his start during that time? My point about the taller athletes being guided away from sprints was likely something to do with a mentality of "by the time you untangle all that mass out of the blocks, you're at least a step behind." Bolt was notoriously slow getting out of the blocks, and always came roaring back to win. But when comparing his time prior to 2008, how much could that have been cleaned upby an improved start? (I know I appear to be grasping at straws to maintain an idealistic view, but I'm really more curious about the mechanics of it, not the "doped/not doped" angle.)

My wife and I always laugh when Justin Gatlin, who has twice been banned for doping, is talked about having run faster at 37 than 24(and while track compounds and now shoes have improved considerably, come on...). Maybe we got caught up ourselves in the Bolt hype and wanted to believe it. I was just offering a potential reason why I could almost buy him being clean but not the others.

[Bluefan75]

compare and contrast Usain Bolt with Ben Johnson. Ben was also born in Jamaica

As a Canadian my theory on the whole Ben Johnson thing has always been this:

The whole field in that final was dirty. NBC paid the IOC a boatload of money that the IOC had never seen before. The last thing they wanted to do was kill the golden goose, so Carl Lewis was never going to be in danger if he won. With Ben Johnson, they had their perfect opportunity. Why? Because not only could they look like they were tough on doping by stripping a gold medal winner, they had the perfect foil in a Canadian, because they knew the Canadian public would react the way they did. Which is, a lot of moralizing, a lot of handwringing, culminating in what was the Dubin inquiry, where many, many athletes testified to having taken steroids and pulling back the curtain temporarily. Even today, you have commentators here who will decry "drug cheats", etc., like some athletes are clean.

Had they nailed Carl Lewis, the reaction would have been much different from the Americans. It would have been about how the IOC went about their business, who else was dirty, why didn't you go after them, here's why he's clean.... The attitude would not have been "it doesn't matter what others do, we must clean up our house and act with honor," which is how Canada reacted, and played right into the IOCs hands.

That's my theory, anyway. I don't think Johnson was an innocent victim, or anything like that, but I do think he was used to make it appear like the IOC was serious about steroids, just like the professional leagues rarely suspend a star, but they will nail a low-level guy and shout it to the moon to give the appearance.

Bolt would be the golden goose. Of the IOC's top 10 principles, integrity would be about 42nd on the list, and money takes up the top 13.

[zinedine kilbane]

To say that some people do not have a heritable genetic advantage for particular sporting events is just silly. There's an agenda that some wish to promote that all demographics are essentially born equal. They want this to be true because otherwise it would also lead to also acknowledging that certain demographics are predisposed to intellectual advantages.

This is the great unspoken truth of the area. It’s like mentioning Voldemort or something. That which must not be named. It’s a bit ridiculous in some otherwise interesting anthropology books (guns, germs & steel, why nations fail) how much people must bend over backwards to keep things in line with that groupthink message that all people are exactly 100% intellectually equal.