Which sports have the biggest & smallest gap between pros and regular people?

The Game Room
81

As an aside to the bicycling discussion: Riding 100 miles in a day is actually not that difficult. Many people routinely ride 50-75 miles many days in a row while on touring vacations. Of course, a non-cyclist wouldn’t be able to just hop on a bike and ride that far, but any reasonably in-shape person could do it with just several months of training. It’s not an achievement comparable to hitting a major league fastball or dunking a basketball, which most of us could never do no matter how hard we trained.

Of course, I’m talking about the sort of recreational riding where you stop at ice cream shops and pubs when they catch your eye; elite cycle racing is an entirely different animal, and no amount of training is going to get Joe Middle-Aged Schlub into the Tour de France.

You could argue that cycling thus has a very small gap, in that I could cover the same amount of distance in a day as a Tour rider could; the difference is that in my case it literally would take all day, not just a few hours!

Edited to add: cycle touring is also a great hobby for zombies!

82

I ride a lot and I would certainly agree. I saw something once, a few years ago, that clearly illustrated this.

A popular ride in Montreal is Mount Royal (Montreal dopers will be familiar with this). It has an average grade of 7.8%. I used to be fairly fast 30 ago when I was in my early 30s. Now, in my early 60s, I am passed by all the young 20s and 30s Tour de France wannabes. There was a professional race that entailed multiple laps and climbs of the mountain and one afternoon, when I was climbing, I was steadily being passed by everyone else.

Then I saw something spectacular. It was, I presume, a pro who was hanging around for a couple of extra days and he was doing the climb with his forearms draped over his bar tops, like he was riding to the local pub. Except that, with absolutely no apparent effort, he was probably riding up at 30 km per hour and just blowing past the young fast guys.

It was sort of like watching a Spitfire getting passed by an F-15.

83

I’m not very athletic at all, but I am a regular biker. I wouldn’t have any problem biking 100 miles in a day, day after day indefinitely. I wouldn’t be anywhere remotely near a professional’s time, but I could at least finish the course.

As for auto racing, I’m not much of a driver, but I do know enough physics to understand the challenge in auto racing. The key is friction. For any given normal force (the vertical force from the pavement on your tires), there’s a maximum possible amount of static friction. Put a small force on your tires, and you’ll get a low acceleration. Put a large force on them, and you’ll get a high acceleration. But put too much force on them, and you’ll exceed the friction maximum, and your tires start spinning or sliding, and suddenly you’re dealing with kinetic friction instead of static friction, which is significantly lower. So to win a professional race, you need to get right up to within a hair’s breadth of that maximum, but without going over, and if someone else can get to within a thinner hair’s breadth than you, they’ll win the race.

84

There are two differences between pro cyclists and amateurs: their training regimen (training at high altitudes, living in hypobaric quarters, probably other stuff) and PEDs. Of the two, I suspect the latter make a bigger difference.

85

So you think anyone who followed a training regime and took PEDs would be at the same level as the pros? That’s not true in any other sport, so why would you think it’s true in cycling?

86

I didn’t say that. It’s not just any regimen, it’s a full time, as in 24 hours/day, regimen that amateurs can’t copy because they usually have to work for a living.

87

Pros are ex-amateurs with enough talent that their job is now cycling.

Just like any sport, the pros are the elite few with exceptional physiological natural ability. Of course they are also highly trained, and PEDs have been widespread in the sport. But your suggestion that any amateur could be at a similar level if they only had the time to train (and access to drugs) is just silly.

88

I’m with Riemann on this. Pro athletes in any widespread, popular sport are a hugely selected bunch, where freakish natural ability / potential is the foundation and huge amounts of training, money, drugs etc. only make the final difference between the 1 / 100 000 freaks. This applies to auto racing, team sports, field events etc.

I think it was RickJay who in some long-ago thread illustrated this (I’m just paraphrasing poorly). The pro athlete is just like you and me in many, or most ways. Then there’s her specialty: you put her on the track etc., and she exhibits basically superhuman ability, way beyond what a hobbyist can begin thinking of doing.

89

Cliff diving. There’s 2 types of cliff divers, the champions, and the guys on the rocks.

90

OK, you’re right. I was mainly thinking of the difference between pros and the top amateurs.

91

Isn’t the 1980 Miracle on Ice an example of where one team was almost amateur-level compared to another team of seasoned pros who practiced closely and trained well and were the cream of the crop of their whole nation?

92

AAA is really a holding tank. Half the guys at AAA have played MLB ball, are about to, or soon could. A casual fan cannot tell the difference in play between AAA and MLB. There is definitely a difference, but it’s gradual, and you’re going to see guys at AAA who are BETTER than some guys currently in MLB.

A college pitcher would certainly stand out to me as being completely inadequate in MLB, unless they were some once-in-a decade superprospect.

The skill required to be an F1 driver is ludicrous. Their physical skills are on par with the athletes in any other sport. If a good street driver tried to jump into an F1 and run a competitive lap they’d crash the car every single time. Mercedes is not entrusting their zillion dollar organization to anyone who isn’t merely superhuman in every respect of driving.

93

Equestrian sports have a very small gap in terms of talent. There are many amateurs just as talented as the pros, who work as hard as the pros. What separates them mainly is money. The pros have sponsors, and often, deep pockets themselves. The difference is that an excellent amateur might be riding a $15K horse, a top-flight amateur might be riding a $30K horse and the pro is riding a $200K and up horse. And it isn’t just the horse, but the ability to trailer around the country to the top events with your team of exercisers, groomers, stable hands, etc. It’s a very expensive sport, so even if you have just as much talent as pro, you can’t be one without boatloads of cash from somewhere.

The gap would be between a regular rider who likes to mosey down trails or pop over a few jumps, and the competitive non-pro rider.

94

I don’t think he meant that just anyone who took the right drugs could become a pro cyclist. If the point is that steroids are both so helpful to cyclists and so ubiquitous at the pro level that nobody, regardless of their natural gifts, can succeed at the highest level without using them…I don’t follow the sport, but as a casual observer that doesn’t seem too far off.

95

Well first, who are the athletes in equestrian sports, is the riders or the horses?

96

This is fairly old but it took place between the OP and now (2013) so I guess it fits. Brian Scalabrine, a 6’ 9" NBA journeyman accepted a challenge to play 4 college level players one year after he retired. The players were good, not great, and he won the combined four games by a score of 44-6.

More recently, he was challenged by an over eager high school player and beat him 11-0. Keep in mind he was retired from the NBA for 9 years for this one.

97

Sure, but that’s not what he said, and here you’re simply agreeing with me. Just as I said - it may be that PEDs are necessary to succeed as a pro cyclist, but they are certainly not sufficient without exceptional natural talent.

Cycling is inherently susceptible to doping, as are sports like running and swimming and weightlifting, since they are principally about raw output. But your “casual observation” is more applicable to the egregious doping of the Armstrong era when there was no effective testing. Pro cyclists are probably now more heavily scrutinized than any other sport. There’s undoubtedly still some doping, but what they can get away with is much more limited. And I think you might be shocked at the amount of doping that’s just swept under the rug in many other sports.

Cyclists don’t generally take steroids, incidentally. That would be sports like baseball and football and tennis.

98

I was actually thinking this week why we never see an amateur qualifier just show up on the leaderboard from out of nowhere. Reading this, specifically the two meltdowns shows me that the mental & course management side of things is likely just as crucial, at this level, as is the purely physical & skill-based side.

The “luck” aspect of the game helps disguise the differences between the pros at the top of a typical leaderboard, but these guys are, as I said about racing drivers, the result of years of a highly stringent selection process, and that includes mastering your nerves when contending.

99

The issue of racecar drivers has been touched on, but I’d like to repost some comments I made in 2005 in response to similar claims about how “easy” it is to be a pro driver. (I have edited it slightly to update some factual and style issues.)

Driving a top level racing car (e.g. F1, IndyCar, NASCAR, and some sports car series) is arguably one of, if not the, most challenging forms of athletic competition in the world, taking into account not only the physical, but also the mental aspects.

The physical difficulty is far greater than is generally understood by people who’ve never driven or ridden in a racecar. There are the G forces and other strength requirements Fridgemagnet spoke of, and the fact that, unlike almost any other sport, except marathon running and long-distance bicycle racing, a racecar driver must keep that effort up for two hours or more with virtually no breaks. (BTW: pit stops are not relaxation breaks: most drivers’ heart rates are higher in pit stops than in any other part of the race except the start and the finish. Besides, they only last between 2 and 20 seconds.)

So from a physical standpoint, a driver needs greater endurance than a player of almost any ball sport, none of which (IIRC) requires more than 20 minutes of continuous play.

Furthermore, a car moving at 220+ MPH (350 KPH) is travelling a the length of a football field every second. To make a turn at precisely the right point requires faster reactions than are needed in any other sport.

Oh, and the cockpits of these cars can easily get to 130-140 degrees F. For two hours.

On the mental side, drivers need to be engineers, capable of determining from feelings, sounds, sights, even smells, what the car is doing, and which of the hundreds of possible engine, transmission, suspension, or tire adjustments might be needed to make it perform even better. They need to communicate these to the team so they can be ready to execute them in the next pit stop.

They need to know strategy not just against one other team, as ball sport players do, but against a dozen or more teams, represented by 20 or 30 other drivers. They have to know the abilities of every other driver, who is safe to run side-by-side with, who is unpredictable, whose teams’ equipment may be more likely to break, etc., etc.

They need to maintain laser-sharp mental focus for the entire length of the race. A tiny slip of concentration can put them into a wall.

And here’s the bottom line: unlike virtually any other sport, if racecar drivers don’t do everything right, they could DIE. Fortunately, safety systems are constantly improving, and fatalities are now much rarer than in the bad old days, but they still happen.

So I think race drivers are certainly among the best athletes in the world, and pro level racing is among the most challenging athletic competitions going.

To the point of this OP, when it comes to determining the gap between talented amateurs and pros in motorsports, the problem is that no amateur can possibly afford the immense sums of money needed to get into pro level equipment. In many sports, talent can show through regardless of the equipment. Anyone reading this thread could almost certainly afford to buy the tennis rackets and shoes used by Serena Williams.

OTOH, the top F1 teams spend as much as $400 million a year to field two cars. IndyCar and NASCAR budgets are in the tens of millions. Elon Musk could afford to have a go at pro racing; the rest of us, not so much.

You don’t just go from racing your Miata on weekends or doing High Performance Drivers Ed in your Corvette to driving in F1. Getting to the top levels of motorsports requires not only talent, but generally starting out as a child no older than about 6, with parents with enough money and dedication to devote to taking the kid to dozens of kart and junior series races a year for many years, and then the luck of finding sponsors who will support them through the ladder series to the point where a top team will notice and give them a try.

There are undoubtedly hundreds or thousands of people who might have the raw talent to be a top F1 driver, but will never get the chance. It’s impossible to know.

100

Sorry, I know it’s un-Doper like of me, but I guess I am just agreeing with you!

And I knew things have tightened up since the Armstrong era, but as I said I don’t follow it enough to have an opinion about how effective that has been.