What if the greatest athlete alive decided to actually get serious? | Hacker News Reader

What if the greatest athlete alive decided to actually get serious?

esquire.com

83 pointspanic38 comments

It's an interesting article, but this type of piece bugs me. It means to suggest that Bolt is not that hard a worker. Now, to the reader, that means grabbing a bag of Fritos and heading directly to YouTube. To Bolt, I'd be willing to bet, it means something like training for five hours a day instead if eight.

I always admire high achievers who cop to having worked damn hard to get where they are. The article means to suggest otherwise, but I can't imagine Usain Bolt is anything even vaguely resembling lazy.

There has been a "known fact" that training more always implies having better results. Assimilating the training is, at least, as important as the training itself, and you can't do that without proper rest.

Track and field isn't an equation where if somebody does 9.58 in 100m (it's still unbelievable for me to say that time!) training 3h a day, he will do 9.10 training 8h.

In Bolt case he is not only really well trained but also he is a superior human being in athletic terms. People that are training way harder than he is, will never be close to his PB.

PS: yeah, I think that he will run under 43 seconds in 400m...

I don't think the article implies that Bolt is not a hard worker. After reading the article, I think the title could be rephrased as: what would the world record be if Bolt ran as fast as he could for the entire race. Or even, what would you get if you combined the drive of Lance Armstrong with the ability of Usain Bolt?

A postive result at the next drug test!

Unless I'm missing something, I don't think it's ever been proven that Bolt used Steroids.

No, just Lance Armstrong. (Many allegations have followed him.) To be fair, he's accused of blood doping, not steroids.

Cycling seems to be governed by the phrase, "If you ain't cheating, you ain't trying."

The tests results won't be known for days, but it was a reminder of the barrage of doping tests that Armstrong has faced in France over the years. Armstrong has called himself the world's most-tested athlete, and last year faced dozens of doping tests - all negative - in his return from retirement.

http://www.winnipegfreepress.com/sports/breakingnews/armstro...

How many times do pro-athletes in, say, baseball or football get tested in a year?

http://twitter.com/lancearmstrong/status/3732076442

How many times was Marion Jones tested? He had BALCO-type money that could help evade the current state of the art in testing.

I was referring to Lance's practices.

Ah, sorry. I thought since Lance has been tested so many times and always declared clean,that you must have been refering to Bolt. :)

I'd be fascinated to see how fast he could run if blood doped.

>I always admire high achievers who cop to having worked damn hard to get where they are. The article means to suggest otherwise, but I can't imagine Usain Bolt is anything even vaguely resembling lazy.

Sometimes the truth isn't what we want it to be.

As a 12 year-old without track & field training or experience, he was the fastest boy in his school. His interest was in cricket, but once he got to high school, his cricket coach noticed his exceptional speed and encouraged him to do track. Within two years, he posted a time of 20.61s for a 200 meter race! That's faster than many of the 200m times posted in the 2008 Olympics. In fact, 20.61 would have been fast enough to qualify in 7 of the 8 heats.

He did that at age 15. Think about it.

Gladwell's 10,000 hours yarn is bullshit. There is talent, and Bolt's got so much of it that he's been regularly demolishing more experienced, harder working opponents for his entire career.

http://www.monstersandcritics.com/people/Usain-Bolt/biograph... http://www.reuters.com/article/idUSISS99256920080818

Gladwell's 10,000 hours yarn is bullshit. There is talent, and Bolt's got so much of it that he's been regularly demolishing more experienced, harder working opponents for his entire career.

Good post. However, I think this needs to be clarified; running really fast is something that has a strong genetic component and a weak skill component. The idea that greatness is mostly the result of focused practice is more likely to hold true in fields with a strong skill component (for example learning to play the violin or writing code).

So I guess there is still hope that I can be the greatest programmer in the world and don't have to rely on my genes. Awesome :)

Musical talent may not have been the best example to choose to make Gladwell's point. Not only is genetics demonstrably important for musicians, but we even know that the strongly influencing genes come from a certain segment of chromosome 4.

http://www.scienceblog.com/cms/musical-talent-genes-16460.ht... http://www.independent.co.uk/news/science/musical-talent-pro... http://www.world-science.net/exclusives/080429_music-genes.h...

I didn't mean to imply that he doesn't have huge natural skill. He does, certainly. But what pushed him from a great runner to the greatest runner is a lot of focused training on his technique, and I'm sure that was arduous.

Fritos and YouTube, no. Chicken McNuggets and Call of Duty, yes:

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/life/family-and-relationships...

It also suggests that because Bolt is talented, he is obligated to behave like an athletic commentator wants him to. What if he just didn't want to run at all? What if he wanted to be a software developer or a chef?

Another thing to take into consideration is how prize money is awarded in track and field competitions: There is most of the times a separate amount of prize money awarded for breaking a world record as all hosts of competitions would love to see new world records set in "their" events. This prize money is often higher than the regular prize money for winning.

So for an athlete it makes kind of sense to try and set new world records in incremental steps in order to earn as much prize money as possible. It also might lead to more frontpage cover stories in the long run.

That being said, this might not 100% apply to Usain Bolt as he is already a popular figure contesting in a very popular discipline of track and fields but it might make sense for an athlete of a less popular discipline like Triple Jump.

It's generally acknowledged that Yelena Isinbayeva has been doing exactly that in the pole vault over the last few years.

And Sergei Bubka before him. Bubka set 18 indoor and 17 outdoor world records in the space of 10 years, often beating is old record by only 1 or 2 cm. There is no way he would have jumped like that if he didn't get a bonus for each record he set.

Maybe some of his success can actually be attributed to taking it a little easier, it does say in the article he used to train a lot harder and was held back by little injuries. This seems to happen in a lot of sports, once people get the chance to get over all the little niggling injuries performance really improves.

Summarizing passage:

"Bolt is not just one step ahead but three. When he set his latest 100-meter record, it took him forty-one steps to reach the finish line. The second-place finisher, the American Tyson Gay, required forty-four steps to cover the same distance. So the simplest, most literal explanation for Bolt's speed is this: He cycles his stride nearly as quickly as other sprinters, but his stride length, owing to his longer legs, is significantly greater than theirs. Or even simpler: He's a tall man who runs like a shorter one."

Single page link - http://www.esquire.com/print-this/usain-bolt-bio-0410

I contest the notion that Usain is the greatest athlete alive. Running in a straight line or with a slight curve (the 200) is great and all, but doesn't correlate with overall athletic greatness. For all we know, Usain's hand-eye coordination could be bunk, he might throw a ball poorly, etc. Probably not, but its not impossible.

For me, the greatest athlete right now is Lebron James. At his size, his ability to move in an agile manner, his body control, his ridiculous jumping and court quickness...I don't think it compares. He shows the complete athletic package night in and night out, and has from a young age.

Usain's ability to sprint is great, definitely the best so far, but I put more stock in overall athleticism in events other than sprinting.

I agree that it is not Usain. I would pick a living decathlete, probably Daley Thompson.

Wikipedia: "Traditionally, the title of "World's Greatest Athlete" has been given to the man who wins the decathlon".

He's also quite decent at cricket. In a charity match last year he hit Chris Gayle (captain of the West Indies) for 6 and also bowled him out. Being able to both bat and bowl shows a great amount of general athleticism, most people are only able to do well at one of those.

(http://news.bbc.co.uk/sport1/hi/cricket/other_international/...)

You might think this is stupid, but the guys who compete on Sasuke ( http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sasuke_(TV_series) ) are amazing athletes, some of them incredibly dedicated. They regularly have Olympians on who don't make it very far.

Just a reminder after some of the comments directly after the Beijing Olympics: Bolt is tested to death and is clean. As where those 100m female runners who swept away all the medals: Shelly-Ann Fraser, Sherone Simpson, and Kerron Stewart.

There is one thing that was shoddy though, with a bit more effort the ladies could have got equal times and picked up three golds in the race instead of one gold and two silvers :-)

- Paddy.

Why is this on hacker news? Not interested

I thought this was going to be about Peyton Manning. :(

Hahaha

Journalism is fucking dead. People write these days like they're Charles goddam Dickens and the page should be dense with their words. Like they're crafting great literature when in reality they're writing something that someone (with an iPad) will read while taking a crap at work.

Clarity. Precision. Transparent conveyance of content.

When writers turn in pieces for periodicals, they should be shocked with a voltage in equal proportion to the density of their prose.

More precision requires more data.

I think this is the first time I've seen the 'death of journalism' blamed on the writing being too _good_...

I like good writing. I can enjoy a good story and get ideas for how to write my own.

This is why I subscribe to real periodicals and try to read those in favor of blogs. For technical stuff, you can't go wrong with a blog. For general-interest topics, I've never found a blog worth reading.

> For general-interest topics, I've never found a blog worth reading.

Check out Arts & Letters Daily

http://aldaily.com

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