Is is telling, though, than Jordan was able at 32 years old to take up pro baseball and have some limited success at the AA level. I mean, I’ve been trying to play baseball all my life and I couldn’t have played AA/AAA ball as well as he did at the peak of my athletic ability.
Had Jordan started playing baseball seriously at age 18, it’s perfectly reasonable to believe he might have made the major leagues.
Look at the contestants on The Biggest Loser. Some of them were upwards of 400lbs, cigarette-smokers, couch potatoes, etc. A few months later they are 160lb of lean, ripped muscle who run, jump, swim, practice martial arts, and more. I bet before that experience most of them would’ve told you that they just weren’t genetically capable of having those bodies or being athletic; they were fat, slow, easily winded their whole lives, etc. Most people will never know what their potential is because they will never push themselves hard enough to find out. The human body is capable of amazing things.
Again, I’m not saying that genetics do not play a part, but I believe psychology, dedication, and conditioning play a much larger role than genetics, and certrainly a larger role than they are getting credit for.
I think it’s wrong to perpetuate memes like Michael Jordan is a “freak of nature” and other people shouldn’t bother trying to compete with him. Those who never try already outnumber those who give all and fail by orders of magnitude - why add to their numbers?
I don’t think anyone here is seriously saying that you can get to the elite level without dedication and mental gifts - in addition to the required physical skills. It’s noble to say that most of us can be much better than we are now (I agree with this) - but elite-level athletics is very much divorced from our regular day-to-day experience. Why do national sports federations worry so much about getting kids early? It’s because you need to identify the really talented kids early, then allow them to train all throughout childhood - this is the best way to increase the depth of top athletes.
As you can see, the difference is much more dramatic than you might expect.
I should add that the differences at ages even up to 7 and 8 can be dramatic. Ask any primary school teacher. They can tell the kids who were born earlier in the year without looking at their records.
I remember an interview some years back with Bob Mathias, the two-time Olympic gold medalist in the decathlon. He said something along the lines of “If I could train Michael Jordan for two years, he would break the world record in the decathlon.”
More anecdotal evidence: years ago when I was on a special security response team I ran 5x a week, typically 3 miles, and weight-trained just as often. After two years of this, there’s no doubt I was in the best shape of my life, but even so I had to struggle to break a 7-minute mile. Even with another couple of years of training I don’t think I’d ever get under 6:30.
A cow-orker that was in a different, less-physical job never worked out or ran. He once remarked that he could run a mile under 6 minutes whenever he wanted. We arranged to have him demonstrate; he ran it in 5:10, and he was several years older than I was at the time (well, I guess he’s still several years older than I am).
As other posters have noted, the prevalence of athletes born in the early months of the year suggests that talent is more nuture than nature. What’s more, this applies to other fields besides athletics.
From this article:
You can read the paper on the age effect on European Soccer here (warning PDF)
Here is another article. This is not to say that nature has no impact, just that people tend to overestimate it.
Being 160lbs and “ripped” is nothing like being a top athlete. Back in my soccer playing days I ran around a 6:00 mile. I could bench press 200lbs. I could do 15 pull ups. I played at one of the best youth clubs in America. That’s absolutely nothing compared to even a poor division 1 player. I practiced 5 times a week year round and I played against people that smoked a pack a day and never practiced that could run a 5:00 mile and out jump me by 4 inches.
If by top athlete you mean being a substitute for a division 2 college, then maybe although that’s probably out of reach for some. If you mean professional, then no, not even close. Might as well ask if you can outrun a horse if you try hard enough.
First time poster so be gentle. Sorry I’m long winded.
To add more anecdotal testimony allow me present my personal view.
I am 6’ 1” 165lbs. and have been above average height with a low body fat ratio all my life. I have had no “talent” with normal childhood sports. Always, without exception, I was the one picked last for all sports. My coordination with tools is excellent but with balls and sticks I was hopeless, no matter how hard I tried.
I grew up in a family without firearms present and beyond the young boys toys I never even handled one until I joined the Marines in 1990.
With very little training I was already shooting the best scores in my platoon by the end of the first week of live fire. Today I shoot non-competitively in several shooting sports and with one exception do exceptionally well. I could not however compete against the top shooters out there and do not on my best days come close to their average performance.
The reasons?
First, I have exceptional eyesight as recorded by the United States Marine Corps. I can see clearly about 100 to 200 yards further than the average Marine at the time I joined. Further more I can see well at distances further than most people can see at all. That is entirely genetics.
Second, I have very good fine motor skills. That is, I can and do work well with very small fragile or sensitive items. I feel each click of the trigger and every vibration in my own body when shooting. Again genetics.
Third and the contrary aspect, as I mentioned, I only shoot non-competitively. I have been asked by several organizations to join their teams including one training for an Olympic event. I have chosen not to. The only reason I can give is that I am simply not motivated to put forth the time and effort required to go from naturally very good to a true top in my sport.
I suspect that if I did choose to pursue this recreational sport fully I could find myself at the very top. But then we will never know on that speculation.
In my case natural “talent” (i.e. genetics) has made me very good with little effort but training and practice is absolutely required to become one of the best.
Right. I wasn’t trying to imply that they should be packing their bags for spring training. I was just making the analogy that, a year ago, they wouldn’t have believed they could do that. They would’ve sad “I’m fat and slow, I’ve always been fat and slow, I’ll always be fat and slow”, and so would most of the people who knew them. I think the birth charts that have been posted support my argument.
No, not really. While Karate tournaments back in the day weren’t to the death or anything stupid like that, it was often non-padded, or minimally padded, and they didn’t have the rules agaisnt things like kicking your opponent in the head.
My old instructor, back when he was coming up through the Kuk Sool Won ranks, had to spar 3 guys at once. He had to break an arm, and his jaw got broken, but he “won”.
These days, in our litigous society, most martial arts schools have been nerfed.
I think we need clarification from the OP or at least someone by what a “top athlete” and “anyone” refer to. Taken literally, some people are paraplegics so the anyone notion falls short right there. Taken less literally, there are plenty of people with poor body shapes that don’t fit any sport and some people have terrible eyes, tremors, or genetically poor muscle tone.
As to the top athlete status, hardly anyone can become an NBA basketball player. That sport requires several types of freakishness that happen to fall within the same person. Likewise with NFL players. Most people can’t keep themselves at 300 lbs and still run nearly as fast as competitive sprinters yet that is what it takes to be a defensive lineman.
I think the whole notion is insulting to people really. There are plenty of people that try to become the top in every sport and don’t make it. They do everything right and many of them have a gift for it but being in the 99th percentile is completely different than being in the 99.9999th percentile. I have a close coworker who’s husband is a Major League Baseball player or was at least. He clawed his way through the minor leagues and finally got called up to the majors last year where he was instantly unremarkable and then, in a flash, he got hurt. Is he a top athlete for the purposes of this discussion or are we talking about high school kids that practice there way to a Division III college or a 30 year old that trains his way to finishing 5th in the Podunk City marathon?
Here’s a variation of the OP’s question.
I’m a klutz when it comes to sports. We’re talking about consistently being picked last for teams in elementary school gym class, even picked behind those in casts and “special” kids who took the short yellow bus to school. Is there any hope for a guy like me? Could I train to a point where I could be … well, a little better than average in sports like basketball or baseball?
Last year, a friend invited me to the open house of a local curling club. It took several weeks until I felt comfortable on the ice, but now, a year later, I’m discovering that I’m actually good at at the sport. I mean really, really good - a few older members have said with the right training, I have the potential of playing on a competitive level nationally in a few years. I have off weeks, but when I’m on jaws drop. Still, I can’t help but feel like I was missing out; that I only discovered something I was good at at the ripe old age of 40 … and why, of all sports, did it have to be curling? Why not something normal, damnit?
I have curled a few times in my life. I think it is fun.
I had tacos for dinner. They were delicious.
We all have a lot more potential than we usually develop. How many former couch potatoes run marathons? Lots. In undeveloped parts of the world 20-40 mile daily trips on foot are pretty common and definitely unremarkable. But no, not everyone could be a top athlete with just the right training. The superstars in sports you see are selected in many different ways to be the best, most motivated, and most innately talented people doing what they do. If everyone trained with the same amount of dedication that professional athletes do we would have a population of people in great shape with developed athletic skills, but there would still be the cream 99th percentile people who are better; so much better that by definition 99 people out of a hundred would lose against them.
Training does make a difference, sometimes a huge one, but that’s usually measuring against the average person who doesn’t do that training. Given the same amount of training, a physically superior athlete will probably beat someone who doesn’t have the genetic advantages. Training will probably make the biggest difference for people with potentials right in the middle of the bell curve and significantly less for the outliers. When it comes to top athletes, the edge of the outliers is what we’re talking about.
For what it’s worth, differences growing up made a difference in what things I did. I did gymnastics, swimming, and springboard diving in school; nothing that involved direct competition, no team sports. I was always a bit of a solitary person anyway, but I was also a small kid until about 8th grade. That made a psychological impression on me that lasted for years after I reached average size. I felt small even though I wasn’t. While I was always in the top 5-10% of the kids as measured on the standard physical tests, excelled at sprinting and jumping, and had reflexes that are probably faster than the norm (catching flies in my hand is usually pretty easy for me) I never went out for team sports partly because of always being picked last for teams due to my size, and partly because I didn’t have many friends outside school so half the time I didn’t even know all the rules for the games and certainly hadn’t developed specialized skills for those games.
The choice of sports makes a big, big difference. You only hear about people with exceptional abilities in non-team sports when you watch the Olympics. Most people who don’t compete in a sport like fencing or diving or the high jump don’t know the top competitors in those sports. Even after the Olympics, you’d probably be hard pressed to find people who remember the names of most gold medalists for those sports. To do those things you have to be intrinsically motivated, and that means that even people with the physical potential to succeed won’t even attempt becoming one of the best most of the time.
This is counterbalanced by the interesting phenomenon of people who kind of make up sports that they’re good at. Dean Karnazes has said that since he wasn’t competitive at the marathon or double-marathon, he decided he’d go for ultras. This is a guy who does 40-100 mile training runs and competes mainly on novelty since even at the ultra level he’s not actually the best. Last I heard, he’s currently running across the US.