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Comment by Marazan | Hacker News Reader

No, I am saying that people have physiological maximums. No matter how hard I train I am not going to become taller (or shorter), no matter how hard I train my knee and ankles will only support a certain mount of force and torque I cannot push past that (without suffering repeated and continual injury) - this is law of the universe stuff.

At the level of becoming very good indeed these limits have no effect on becoming better as you do not reach them, but at the elite level, at becoming the best they do. Do you really believe that the guy who came 2nd to 7th in the 2012 Olympic 100m sprint trained an appreciable, measurable, amount less than Usain Bolt - with less dedication, application and rigour? Do you think, say, Gatlin, Gaye and Bailyey trained in a worse environment less conducive to success than Bolt?

Are you really saying you can go look Donnie MacFadyen in the face and say he just didn't train with enough dedication?

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You are appealing to emotion.

Elite athletes are already outliers within the human race however within athletics there are extreme outliers like Bolt and Phelps who have astronomically rare genetic advantages. To be representative they need to be discounted. Not even the Olympics is N number of Usain Bolts racing against each other. It is N number + Usain Bolt.

Donnie McFayden may have trained as hard as he thought he could. That does not mean he was in the optimum training environment, he apportioned his time correctly or he trained with focus required to be better than he is. His training habits may have become effective simply too late in his career (Maybe he took training seriously at 8 years old but his competitors (in team and other team) took it seriously at 4. Maybe he is absolutely outstanding but the team failed him.

The factors are numerous. It might just be he is unlucky; his coaches didn't recognise his brilliance or they played him out of position. The point is not why is Donnie not the absolute best in history. It is 'Can anyone with the basic requirements reach the level of playing international rugby with the right focus and training and luck - the answer is yes, yes they can.'

They literally just have to want it enough and have the resources (time, money, family, coaches) in place to achieve it.

Anyone can be a Chess Grandmaster with enough study. Proven by Laszlo who specifically taught his children chess in order to prove geniuses are made/trained, not born."

http://www.psychologytoday.com/articles/200506/the-grandmast...

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/L%C3%A1szl%C3%B3_Polg%C3%A1r

Also proven by the Williams sisters whose father decided* they would be tennis champions and worked them mercilessly towards that goal using any equipment to hand. Unless your hypothesis is that -

Two genius tennis prodigies were born with the gifts required to be a tennis prodigy and their father just happened to settle on the sport of Tennis? I think those odds are considerably more unlikely than "anyone can be a Tennis champion with the basic requirements and dedication which is what the Williams sisters had."

You are literally accepting my premise and then telling me I am wrong.

If you accept that Usain Bolt is a astronomically rare genetic freak (which you just have) then you accept that some people have innate genetic factors that make them better at a sport than others.

Because people exist on a continuum and not in discrete boxes that means for a given subset of people, some people in that group have innate factors that advantage them over others in a particular tasks, just not at the extreme level of Phellps.

That means some people have 'talent', or as I like to say physiological factors that give them greater maximum potential.

Not quite. You are focussing on 1 in 6 Billion type athletes and discounting the 99.9999%.

The Olympics is not full of Usain Bolts. It is professional athletes AND Usain Bolt. Unless you think none of the other 100metre runners are professional athletes because they don't reach Bolts performance?

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