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These athletes are beyond any of my abilities to even comprehend their level of skill by I always wonder if it is just recency bias or are these athletes truly

These athletes are beyond any of my abilities to even comprehend their level of skill by I always wonder if it is just recency bias or are these athletes truly the greatest of all time. Multiple 100+ year old sports seems to have coincided their arguably greatest of all time players play at roughly the same time. Lionel Messi, Christiano Ronaldo, Tiger Woods, Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, Sachin Tendulkar, Usain Bolt, Lebron James, Michael Phelps, Michael Schumacher, Magnus Carlsen. No doubt they are just that good but so many of them playing at around the same time is very interesting to me.

headsoup 4y ago
I think you have to factor in the amount of technology (i.e. video review of technique, mocap, etc), training level, 'performance' programs (diet, additives, etc) and of course pay/background funds these athletes compete through. More time, more training, better stuff that many past athletes could only dream of. In saying that, Messi is on another planet, with perhaps Pelé , Michael Jordan and Ayrton Senna...
TacticalCoder 4y ago
> Multiple 100+ year old sports seems to have coincided their arguably greatest of all time players play at roughly the same time. I agree! > ... Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, And most of all Novak Djokovic. It's totally insane that these three were playing at the same time. Now Djokovic has 373 weeks as world number 1 (Federer 310 weeks, Nadal 209), 21 grand slams (Federer 20, Nadal 22), six ATP World Tour Finals -- arguably the hardest tournament ever-- (Federer six too, Nadal zero) and contrarily to the others (if I'm not mistaken) Djokovic also held the four Grand Slams at once (consecutively but over two years). Even though Federer was a bit older these three mostly played at the same time and that is completely insane. It makes their achievements even more incredible: the records each of them would have had one of the two others not been there would have been even more unbelievable.

headsoup 4y ago

I think you have to factor in the amount of technology (i.e. video review of technique, mocap, etc), training level, 'performance' programs (diet, additives, etc) and of course pay/background funds these athletes compete through. More time, more training, better stuff that many past athletes could only dream of. In saying that, Messi is on another planet, with perhaps Pelé , Michael Jordan and Ayrton Senna...

TacticalCoder 4y ago

> Multiple 100+ year old sports seems to have coincided their arguably greatest of all time players play at roughly the same time. I agree! > ... Roger Federer, Rafael Nadal, And most of all Novak Djokovic. It's totally insane that these three were playing at the same time. Now Djokovic has 373 weeks as world number 1 (Federer 310 weeks, Nadal 209), 21 grand slams (Federer 20, Nadal 22), six ATP World Tour Finals -- arguably the hardest tournament ever-- (Federer six too, Nadal zero) and contrarily to the others (if I'm not mistaken) Djokovic also held the four Grand Slams at once (consecutively but over two years). Even though Federer was a bit older these three mostly played at the same time and that is completely insane. It makes their achievements even more incredible: the records each of them would have had one of the two others not been there would have been even more unbelievable.