I once held a state age backstroke record until the next heat swam.
Assuming I had the mental requisites to persevere (which I very much doubt, athletics training sounds very boring) I imagine I would have been a good sprinter. I played rugby union, rugby league and soccer and never came across players faster than me over any distance up to the length of the field. When the school athletics came around I would win all the sprints even though I competed against kids a year older than me. I was a year younger than my classmates but it seemed wrong to run or play football against the guys a year below me. This was true even for the interschool competitions.
If I hadn’t tried to start getting really competitve in both tae kwon do and soccer at once, the summer before freshman year in HS, I probably could have gone far with either.
Instead, I tried too hard on both and seriously mucked up my knees.
Given my age, I could still be a sprinter or a weightlifter in the Olympics. I can run very fast for short distances, and my strength is completely ridiculous compared to my weight. Unfortunately, I’ll have to train to become competitive in either one, and I’m really not sure which one I want to do more. I love to sprint, but a 100m sprint takes much more out of me than bench-pressing 400 pounds. (Granted, I’m more wiped after benching, but that’s after a full workout, so…)
If they ever make Foosball an Olympic sport, and I decided to get back on my game, I might have a chance. Neither of those are likely, so I guess I’ll just continue to watch.
If my parents could have afforded lessons, I think I could have excelled in gymnastics. I’ve always been very flexible, and I was fascinated with gymastics and dance.
My trainer - who, without going into identifiable details, was in a position to know what she was talking about - said that given enough time and the right horse, I would definitely be a contender for a slot on the team. Alas, she did not expect I would have to give up riding while in college, and after graduation, my finances changed sufficiently that I never had the money to pursue it further. A malpractice level misdiagnosis of a non-horse-related injury a few years later sealed my chances. I certainly can’t ride in my current condition, and I may never be able to again.
Not a day goes by that I don’t miss it. Sometimes I wake up from riding dreams so vivid that I’m seriously disoriented when I find myself in bed. With all the Olympics hype, that’s been happening a lot lately.
I was on the high school race team. We did Slalom, GS and Super G. I was always a mogul skier, but did well enough to make the team. Every race day, when racing was done, we would all free ski and I would blow all the guys who finished in the top ten off the mountain in the moguls. Heck, most of them raced then went straight to the lodge. I never finished very high in individual events, but I never DNF’ed in two seasons and at the end of the season was ranked pretty high (just because I never blew out).
I was “approached” by the team adviser and he was trying to find people interested in spending thousands of the thier own money and countless hours of training to go the the 84 olympics to participate in freestyle skiing as an “exihibition” sport. Wow. What a deal. All the sacrifice and struggle of a “real” olymian, without any financial assistance or payoff of any reward!
Anyway, my parents shot that idea down pronto. But back in the day, I was a serious bad-ass mogul skier. I never would have made the games however as my aeriels were weak. (even as an old, fat fart I still ain’t too bad, and can pop a tight line pretty hard)
I might have had an outside chance in the 100 freestyle or backstroke - if I kept up my grades in high school and didn’t get kicked off the team, if my family had money, if if if. I was also into mountain biking but before it was an olympic sport. I probably would have been better at that, since I’ve loved bikes from the age of 4.
Swimming of some kind, probably the breaststroke. I took swimming lessons as a kid, and the last year I took them (I think I was 10) the instructor told me that I had one of the best breaststokes she had seen in someone my age. I wasn’t really that fast (about average) buy my form was what was superb. If I had practiced at it, and joined the county swim team, that I might have had the ambition to keep swimming and joined in college. I really have (had?) a good body fow swimming. Super-lean, so there was a lot less weight to have to pull through the water. But, in high school, I joined x-country and track. I was never great, just decenty (qualified for the state meet in only one event, triple jump, but came in close to dead last at the state meet.)
Well I doubt I could ever have reached Olympic skill, but I started Judo young, and if I had kept it up and worked harder at it I could have been a very good practitioner. But at the age of 12 I realised that dedicating your life to one persuit was a fools errand, at that time I could have become a very good chess player but I saw that those people who had taken up chess to a very high level were not well rounded people, so I decided to persue broader interests. So I susspect even if I had studied Judo hard from when I started (at 7 years old) I would still not consider doing judo to the exclusion of other interests to have been a wise life choice when I got to 12.