Agreed, hence the plethora of pro/am golf tournaments around. You couldn’t exactly do the same for a rubgy match.
Road and Track article from 2019, about journalist Sam Smith’s experience taking hot laps in the 2007 McLaren F1 car that Felipe Alonso used to drive so well: Driving a Modern Formula One Car Neat article.
There’s another article I remember, but can’t find, where one of the teams was showing off something new at Estoril, Portugal. They had a two seat F1 car, and were letting journalists ride in back while a tire test driver whipped them around the course at 8/10ths. There also offered select journos to, if they wanted, to do 1 lap solo and slow. One guy, who I want to say had some sports car racing background, tried the solo lap and got humbled. Though he didn’t wreck.
My own experience is watching pro golfers and semi to pro poker players. The golfers hit the same shots I do, or at least they did in the mid 90s before distances in the age of Tiger got so ridiculous. They hit those every shot though, while I had to be content with two or three a round. Every ball got up, every ball bent the way they wanted, and they shoot at 4 x 4 foot areas of greens, tighter if they’re feeling it. As Johnny Miller said, when he was on top of the world in 1973, “I only needed 183, not 185, so I took a little off that 6 iron.” I think I’ve also mentioned the Seve Ballesteros sand wedge piece of memorabilia: shiny and chrome everywhere, except for a pitted, rusted out egg shaped part exactly in the middle of the club face.
For the poker players, it’s the memory of hands they’ve played, and all of the details they can recall. Take a given hand from another session, and they can remember all of the bets, who ended up with what at the showdown, and the reactions of the involved players as the hand progressed. I try, but I can’t even keep a hand from a few minutes ago straight.
I would offer cycling. The pro roadies are orders of magnitude better than even the most fit competitive weekend racer, never mind your average recreational rider, commuter, or guy that rides his bar bike on Saturday nights. Billions of people ride a bicycle every day around the world, but the pros make-up a tiny percentage of them.
Same with running. Go to a local track and run a 200 in 35 sec/400 in 70 sec. Congratulations. You’re running slower than marathon world record pace.
For gymnastics in particular, the distinction between strength and skill/technique is almost academic. I’d guess that for most people in this thread, their rings routine would consist of the “hang straight down with arms extended” pose, with a few of us managing to pull up to like sixty degrees or so.
That’s really the answer- in general, most sports or activities like that at the highest levels are FAR removed from everyday participants. Even stuff like e-sports, where you’d think that your average good video game player wouldn’t be that far behind the pros, proves that wrong. Those guys are QUICK, and very well versed in how to play the game.
Same for most any other competitive activity.
The real question isn’t “average layman” it’s “skilled amateur” I think. Because I can think of some sports where skilled amateurs and pros aren’t THAT far apart, and I can think of others where they are.
For example (and I may be wrong on this), I suspect that in shooting sports, the difference between a top level shooter and a good “amateur” isn’t as dramatic as say… the difference between a good Autocross driver and a F1 or NASCAR driver.
And I don’t know that you can say that golf is the lowest difference because some amateur may have a spectacular round. By the same token, a pro can have an abysmal round as well. Determining who’s really good in golf, just like any other sport, is determined by performance over time. I mean, I could get in the batter’s box and crank a center field home run off Justin Verlander. It would be a total fluke, but it could happen. But could I put up a .300+ batting average? Hit more than one home run? Doubtful.
Speaking of golf, I wonder how many strokes it takes the average layman (with just about no golfing experience) to sink a ball in a hole. Tiger Woods can probably reliably sink a ball in 4-6 strokes for any hole on the planet, but would the average person take 30 strokes to do the same?
Until notfrommensa and TonySinclair show up…I’ll try.
The average lay person, never having touched a golf club before, isn’t going to be able to get the ball up. There’s a minimum level of skill to hit a golf ball, even with something like a pitching wedge.
Assuming they have that level of skill, and assuming all of the rules of golf are followed, my guess is that most people play about quadruple bogey golf. I.e., if par is 4, they’ll shoot an 8. Difficult holes, ones with forced carries over obstacles, severe obstacles by the hole (water, out of bounds), can make that number skyrocket. To infinity, I guess, if the golfer simply can’t make a 240-ish yard forced carry over an obstacle.
But a garden variety, 360 yd par 4 from the whites? Shoot, 3 or 4 pitching wedges, and you’re on the green. Three or four putts, and you’re in, and on to the next hole. No need for 30 shots.
It’s the only sport I can think of that I could have been a pro if I began training at a young age. I’m glad I didn’t, since the PBA has struggled, but I could have made some pro tournaments for sure, maybe even made a living. I mean, if my Dad owned an alley and I bowled 10 games a day starting as a kid, I think I’d get good enough to be pro.
An interesting way of quantifying this might be via ELO. A 100 point ELO difference is meant to represent the higher ELO player winning 64% of the time.
Comparing an average layperson directly against a world class competitor is not likely to yield illuminating information but we can instead ask, for a world class player, what type of person would they win against 64% of the time, and for that person, what type of person would they win against 64% of the time and so on until you reach the average layperson. The number of links in that chain would be a good proxy for the “disparity” in skill.
If 64% is too fine a gradation to evaluate against, a 200 point ELO difference is a win % of 76% so you could instead look at matchups that one person wins roughly 3 out of 4 times.
Raises hand.
If by “could” you mean Could do it 25 years ago
it is a deceptively simple sport, as so many are.
Having played amateur to a decent level it would be tempting to think that the pro sport is just a little notch or two further up but it really isn’t.
Sure, you could hide from the action (and be a burden) but if you wanted to try and get involved in a serious way you’d not get a touch of the ball, or the speed of pass and movement and the lack of time to think means you’d be kicked from arsehole to breakfast-time and puking your guts up within the first ten minutes.
How would a novice chess player do against a grandmaster? Obviously they would lose 99.9999% of the time, but how many moves would a grandmaster need to finish off a true chess novice?
The single athlete sports could probably be broken up into activities which only the pros can do versus activities which the pros can do better. Sports like gymnastics, ice skating, and diving have unique moves which take a lot of practice to be able to complete. A lay person isn’t going to be able to attempt moves that are common in those kinds of sports because they haven’t had any training. But other single athlete sports are the kind where the pros and amateurs do the same activity, but the pros do it much better. So lay people could at least participate in sports like golf, running, and bowling with virtually no prior experience.
It might be a bit unfair to consider sports which require extensive training to even be able to do the most basic move. With some modest amount of practice, it might be possible for a lay person to be able to do some set of basic moves. That’s true for many activities and skills. Take computer programming as an example. A lay person won’t be able to write a line of code, but after a 1-hour class they could write some basic programs.
How would someone who was an excellent shot in the military do if s/he was suddenly thrust into the Olympics?
I’m a FIDE Master (two levels below Grandmaster.)
It’s not really about how quickly you win - e.g. if you’re a piece up in a simple ending then you win 100%, even if it takes a while.
I have given many simultaneous displays (where you play 20-30 people, one move at a time.)
If they are all novices then you can win 100% just using technique (no real calculation required.)
(In practice, I usually give one player a draw - since you don’t get invited back if you crush them!)
But you asked about a face-to-face game.
A friend of mine (novice standard) asked to play me and told me not to go easy on them. :eek:
I was Black and checkmated them in 6 moves. 
The game went 1. f4 e5 2. fxe5 d6 3. exd6 Bxd6 4. Nc3 Qh4+ 5. g3 Qxg3+ 6. hxg3 Bxg3 mate.
The game is here.
I should mention that I was playing blindfold (i.e. visualising the game in my head.)
Unless they were of the caliber to be on the Army Pistol or Rifle teams, it would be a long shot at best.
Near vanity candidates from very minor countries, if they’re merely excellent shots. Excellent shot is one thing, it’s the repeatability and precision that makes Olympic shooters.
OTOH, medallists in Olympic shooting disciplines frequently are members of their country’s military. The military pays them to practice all day, essentially. Guys like Rajmond Debevec, Sergei Martynov, the US Olympians who also are members of the Army Marksmanship Unit. Or you can be like Niccolo Campriani, and be the coach of a shooting team (biathlon) as well as a multiple gold medalist.
There used to be a show on ESPN where athletes from different sports would do some big multi-sport competition. For some reason I recall the penalty kick competition. Other than athletes that also grew up playing soccer, not a single one knew how to kick a ball. Eli Manning in particular looked ridiculous. In the US I think the median person off the street is the same.
Sometimes I think about ability differences in tiers where a tier above basically doesn’t have any reason to play a tier below. Like barring an insane fluke, the higher tier always wins. For soccer (in the US) it’s probably like:
Never kicked a ball -> recreational league -> bad youth club team -> mediocre club team ->excellent youth club team ->bad college team - >good college team -> quite bad pro league -> mid tier pro league (MLS or something) -> CL knock out rounds.
Excluding people with disabilities you probably have something like 10 tiers of ability in the world. Not all of that is skill vs athleticism, and I have no clue what it’s like for other sports, but maybe a good way to think about things?
Depends on where you put the ‘excellent’ line at, but probably pretty poorly.