Assume that before hand I have top experts, time and facilities to train the animals.
Also, ‘winning’ includes conforming to the human rules. If you were stupid enough to try and wrestle a male silverback gorilla I’m pretty sure he could tear both your arms off and bludgeon you to death with the wet ends, but traditionally this sort of thing is frowned on and would end with a disqualification for the muscle-bound behemoth.
Discus requires far too much learned technique for a chimpanzee to grasp. I’d say the same for any gymnastic event; chimps are obviously a lot more flexible and strong than we are but learning the expected techniques is something else entirely.
I agree they’d kick ass at weightlifting but you could definitely train a chimpanzee to lift a barbell in accordance with the rules. Otherwise I don’t see them as being trainable enough to win anything else they’re physically capable of winning.
Give them intelligence like Caesar from “Planet of the Apes” and you open up many, many more events to chimp domination.
Hmm, good point; let’s make our cousins adorable terrifying little brainboxes so that their intelligence isn’t getting in the way. Purely on physicality, how would they do against humans?
They wouldn’t have the same style and balance and poise that a human gymnast would, which is a significant portion of how they earn their points from the judges.
With more strength and a lower center of gravity (longer arms), they would be able to get more height when singing from bars.
Orangutans, especially, would be able to throw in some foot grabs that would make us look like pikers. They have been described (when in the trees) as having 4 arms rather then 2 arms and 2 legs.
“Sticking” a landing would be more difficult for them.
He tells the story of training a group of show dolphins to “play soccer”. They picked up the idea quick enough of course. (Dolphins usually do.) But they didn’t pick up the idea of what we would call “fair play”. Once they learned that they needed to get possession and control of the ball and move it to the goal, they played to WIN. They beat the shit out of one another and got all kinds of violent. This was supposed to be an act to be played out before an audience – but they had to discontinue it because the dolphins played so dirty.
See how this might be relevant to the discussion of this thread?
That’s why, as wedgehed reminds us in Post #9 above, “Let the Wookie win.”
This. They could beat us at hitting those high notes while singing The Star Spangled Banner at public watering holes at closing time.
It’s going to vary by the type of event. In short races, if allowed to run on all fours our hirsute cousins might compete well. On two legs alone, probably not. Judged against human gymnasts for form, they’re not going to look good. Accounting for the idealized form of an orang for instance, it then becomes a competition between species based on their individual criteria. Gorillas will take all the weight-lifting events in the heavier weight classes, and chimps in the lighter ones. Ditto for the martial arts. I have no idea if any of these new contestants can match a human in swimming or shooting. One of the big roadblocks might be the disadvantage some countries face because of the small number of simian citizens.
Chimps are not swimmers. I don’t know if anyone has tired to train one, but they probably wouldn’t be much good. Still, the best swimmers have long arms (chimps have longer arms, relative to body height, than we do) and broad shoulders (not so good in that department). It’s unnatural for them to extend their legs fully straight as we do, so kicking would be a problem. Their heads don’t face natural forward as ours does, so that might be a bit of a problem, too. They also don’t have a layer of subcutaneous fat like humans, although I don’t think olympic (men) swimmers rely on that much for buoyancy.
In fact, the reason their are two species of chimps as that the habitat of bonobos is separated from that of common chimps by the Congo River.
