3 ms·
That sounds plausible, but it is pretty hard to verify.
by pg 16y ago
That sounds plausible, but it is pretty hard to verify.
- Retric 16y agoThe following men won gold in a solo swimming even in 2008. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Phelps 6 ft 4 in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alain_Bernard 6 ft 5 in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/C%C3%A9sar_Cielo_Filho 6 ft 5 in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Park_Tae_Hwan 6 ft in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Oussama_Mellouli 6 ft 3 in http://sports.yahoo.com/olympics/beijing/TUN/Oussama+Mellouli/217537 http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aaron_Peirsol 6 ft 4 in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ryan_Lochte 6 ft 2 in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kosuke_Kitajima 5 ft 10 in http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Maarten_van_der_Weijden (10 km marathon) 6 ft 7 1⁄2 in Height is not the most important factor in swimming, but out of 10 people, only one was under 6' and he is still taller than average. Now look at something like size of hands and they are going to stand out even more. Practice may be able to get an average person to the 90th percentile in most things but once you start talking about 99.99% DNA becomes extremely important.
- pg 16y agoThis was the part I meant was plausible but hard to verify: That causes athletes' genetic gifts to overshadow their hard work. Obviously successful swimmers have to be tall, but merely being 6' 4" isn't the sort of genetic gift that's so rare it outweighs effort.
- briancooley 16y agoI should have added "in the minds of observers." to make that sentence clearer. It's more a statement about human nature than the relative weighting of the ingredients most vital to elite athletic success.