And more generally, I would take almost no health advice from American footballers, many (most?) of whom will go into old age with ailments and injuries due how they treated their bodies.
And more generally, I would take almost no health advice from American footballers, many (most?) of whom will go into old age with ailments and injuries due how they treated their bodies.
American football requires a different skill tree than world football. So of course if you only judge by the standards of world football he is not great. But why would you do that?
And athleticism as different from health. In fact, beyond a threshold I believe it is detrimental to it.
We have our own kind of "American Football" in the Netherlands, it is called ice skating. But.. every Dutchman understands that being the world champion in ice skating doesn't say much as it is a highly local phenomenon.
But you still can enjoy the athleticism that such a sport requires.
When we do compete in other sports we fair above average to exceptional (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All-time_Olympic_Games_medal_t...) with the notable exception of soccer, which we've never broken through despite investment and a decent population of players.
Don't kid yourself, just because other countries don't play American Football doesn't mean the players aren't freak athletes - they are
Isn't it exactly the point of the article though that this doesn't necessarily mean elite across-the-board athleticism?
Your statement would also have described Tom Brady for most of his career, and I don't think anyone would seriously claim he was a 99%ile athlete (certainly not for sprinting, agility, etc.)
It sounds like for you, being a top athlete simply means being very good at a sport.
I've always generally understood athleticism to be about raw physical traits, like speed, strength and agility (and is therefore only part of the range of attributes that makes up the overall profile of a sportsperson).
Out of interest would you consider people performing at an elite level in high-skill, relatively low-physicality sports like golf to be top athletes?
That is likely to wind up true when it's all said & done but Tom Brady still holds that title.
Otherwise we would look at kick boxing.
i love both sports, but wouldn't call the players universally "athletic"
Although... fine motion control is more natural for hands then for legs. In football, running on full speed, while keeping the ball close to the foot, then evading defenders (still on full speed), making an accurate pass to a team player. Almost any boy on the planet dreams about those skills, some are able learn a few of these skills somewhat. But it requires abnormal leg control.
In football there is a harsh filter of it not only being the global #1 sport, so insanely competitive, but also because it requires an insane fine control where we normally don't have that.
Does not take away from other sports like tennis, or base ball. For most sports the elite level will be unreachable for most humans.
Also your comment about Ronaldo is basically that he can jump high and run fast which makes him one of the greatest athletes? I think he's an amazing athlete but not because of his vertical jump. There were 30+ kids at my high school with a higher vertical jump than him.
The article's point is that there is more to athleticism than run fast, jump high. They are right.
There are closer to a million professional actors… so actors in general are around 4 sd above average.