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I find it bizarre that you consider basketball players to be unimpressive athletes because their sport requires a specific set of physical attributes (height, long limbs) while celebrating Michael Phelps and Usain Bolt, whose extreme and atypical genetically-determined physical attributes (both men look as though they were designed in a lab to excel at their respective sports) were absolutely vital to their success.
Why is LeBron James’ incredible success at basketball invalid because he couldn’t have achieved the same feat if his height had maxed out at 5’7”, but Usain Bolt is an incredible athlete even though he couldn’t have achieved what he did if his leg length had maxed out two inches shorter? At the top level of most sports, no amount of obsessive work ethic is enough to put one over the top without prodigious God-given physical traits. Sprinting is one of the most genetically-based sports - far more than basketball, where a great many of the all-time greats are on the lower end of the league’s height distribution. There is no sprinting equivalent of a Steve Nash, a player with limited physical tools who excelled due to hard work, intelligence, and savvy.
They won the lottery on athletic related traits. Basketball players won the genetic lottery on height. I don't consider height to be a key component of athleticism.
I also don't consider hard work, intelligence, or savvy to be part of athleticism. Apes are better athletes than humans in most respects.
To me the only IQ related aspect of athleticism is hand eye coordination / reaction times.
So wait I guess the better question is, what do you consider to be "part of athleticism"? Sounds like your getting on the hard determinist train. Welcome.
Athleticism: strength, agility, and speed at physical tasks (those words come up in lots of definitions, I'm not sure if power or toughness should also be included). I thought basketball allowed height as a partial substitute for these characteristics. You didn't have to be speedy and agile to get a rebound, you just need to be taller. You don't have to fight over the ball if you can literally just hold it over your opponents head. I say thought past tense, because after thinking about it, @Mottizen seems right that my opinions about basketball are outdated. A shift to shooting three pointers has apparently heavily evened the playing field in terms of height advantage.
There are some sports where injuries tend to take out promising athletes, fighting and gymnastics are two good examples. The people that do end up dominating these sports are still very athletic, but I just wouldn't be certain they are the most athletic. I just tend to feel that swimming and running have some of the least amount of blockers or gates on the sport. You can certainly still get injured doing both, but humans are designed for running, and swimming is low impact. Height gives a bit of an advantage, but it can still be overcome, the shortest gold medalist swimmer was 5ft 3in. Su Bingtian is a runner in the 2020 olympics, he is 5ft 7in. Su apparently holds the fastest 60m split time in the 100m dash (faster than Usain bolt). Those are below average heights for men in their country.
I'm not sure I'm not a determinist, so much as I think the determinism question is useless. Whether the universe is determinist or not does not change how I interact with it or how I think other people should interact with it.
But all those traits are basically genetically determined, especially when you get to the top end of any sport, the silver medalist isn't silver instead of gold because they didn't try hard enough or something. They studied top swimmers and found long arms compared to torso length is very important.
I don't think I ever expressed any problem with genetics, or the winners of sports being determined by genes. Perhaps you have me confused with some other commentor.
I just don't understand your criteria, why is hand eye coordination ability athletic and height not? Why is a longer wingspan vs height athletic and not just height? Why are more fast twitch or slow twitch muscle fibers athletic and not height?
We've had a long back and forth, did you already explain in one your posts why height should be considered part of athleticism?
I could be convinced wingspan is the same as height and should be used to ignore sports that favor it too much.
To be consistent you would have to discount all genetic gifts or none of them. You can't do that without writing off sports/athletes as nothing but a ballistic glide path once you're shot out of the womb.
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NBA players are still massive by ordinary person standards but there's less rewards for assembling stationary 7-footers.
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A huge part of Phelps was his frame, though. Guy is 193CM tall, 200CM wingspan and would not have been anywhere near as dominant without those two things. Usain Bolt 195CM and had probably the highest topspeed ever as a result of it.
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But somehow:
Usain Bolt is 6'5", Michael Jordan 6'6". Bolt could presumably have made much more money in the NBA than the olympics if he were the athletic equivalent of Jordan. Basketball filters on height but also many other athletic traits, much less unidimensionally than sprinting.
Phelps used his superpower of hard work to turn himself into the ultimate athletic specimen. If Phelps has worked hard at learning spreadsheets I wouldn't call him a good athlete. He worked hard at being an athlete. Possibly harder than anyone has ever worked.
Usain was born with muscle traits that made him an amazing athletic specimen.
Jordan played in a sports league with a bunch of lazy tall players that he could look impressive against. Steph Curry is doing the same thing.
Imagine a different world where basketball has a maximum height restriction, and that height restriction just happens to be the height of whatever basketball player you think is really good. I'd wager that we would fine better athletes who are a few inches shorter than the star players of today. But those few inches of height against Jordan would make them useless against the 7 foot centers of the sport. So they get weeded out early. I think there are 6'0" guys that could be to Curry and Jordan what they were to the rest of the league. Watch a bit of that weird trampoline basketball sport and you'll see how much talent is being left fallow in that sport cuz of height.
What you're describing is essentially the modern NBA, though. Curry brought an era that made spacing and mobility more important than pure height for various reasons. NBA height & weight peaked in 2013, just before the Warriors and Rockets made the 3 pointer so much of a pivotal part of the game. We're now starting to see true ridiculous freak 7-footers like Wembanyama who have the ability to shoot 3's/move dynamically whilst still being gigantic, but you're essentially criticizing a NBA product that hasn't existed since Jordan's era.
https://www.thehoopsgeek.com/average-nba-height/
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"I don't consider height to be a key component of athleticism"....why?
Would you consider plunging for distance to be a great test of athleticism? Thats a "sport" that rewards being extremely fat (plus i guess some amount of training and discipline).
Alternatively, what if they raised the basketball hoop so that you really have to be super tall to compete? That would be ridiculous.
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Because my learned friend in argument rejects obvious genetic gifts in favor of celebrating less obvious ones.
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Just use a measuring tape if you want a height competition.
This is all very confusing for me. So you think height is different from every other genetic advantage?
Yes and no. There are theoretically other genetics that might heavily gate a sport behind a non-athletic characteristic. I just don't know if any actual examples.
Gymnastics is sort of gated behind being short, so I'd sort of discount the abilities of those athletes as well. But that's just the other side of the coin with height.
I don't consider IQ to be athleticism related so if there were any sports that were heavily gated by it I'd apply the same discount to the athletes within that sport. But I don't know of any sports that are like that. Maybe chess boxing? Or maybe Esports which no one really looks to for examples of supreme athleticism. Even though most Esports players are in relatively good shape.
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