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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I say thought past tense, because after thinking about it, @Mottizen seems right that my opinions about basketball are outdated.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.
Why does genetic gift or not matter? That's like me saying to be consistent you need to care about only water sports or only land sports. You e created the distinction and you insist I follow it. No. It's not something I think matters as a distinction, I thought we'd get past this when I made my position on determinism clear
So you're just picking random genetic traits that you think are "athletic" and others that you deem "non-athletic", it is just a personal feeling then?
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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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