Sports Analogy for Elite Skills

It's a reasonable comparison, but it's probably more like being great at a sport: a professional tennis player is not going to become a professional bicyclist with a few weeks of effort.

Isn't that true for any sport where endurance is more important than elegance or intelligence (such as ballet or chess)? Almost everyone, if not everyone, at the Olympics or world championship is better than you or me in their expert field of sport.

Ones man's anecdotes are anothers statistics. I haven't seen any data driven evidence for this, but let's use a thought experiment: would you expect it is more likely for professional athletes to come from a background of playing sports and being active from a young age?I think most people would say yes except to play devil's advocate. Becoming a top caliber athlete requires years of conditioning, experience predicting trajectories of fast moving targets, ability to read

I suppose it's like football. There are only so many athletes that can make it to professional leagues. Best to check out the career prospects before undertaking the effort to train.

Supposedly Bill Gates was like this when he was young. But I would compare these people to elite athletes. Most people can train as much as they want but will never reach that level. they may risk injury on the way though.

It's not an extremely rare talent. Virtually anyone can run/swim/play games. It's an arms race. Every one trains hard because others train hard.None of them are inherently amazing. They just work a lot.If no-one bothered training we'd still have an Olympics, it'd just be slower.

People can be 10x in one domain but not in others, experience is part of the equation. That's not too strange is it? Compare a football player in a ice hockey team. Even though they still have a significant head start compared to someone on the street, when it comes to physique, ball sense, etc.

I have nothing against professional athletes. In fact I admire them a lot. But let's face it, sports is a zero sum game from the perspective of skill level. What real difference would it make to the world if all the world's athletes were 10% less fast/strong/coordinated etc...? Would people still be interested and entertained by sports - of course they would. In watching sports people like to see a contest of the best but the absolute standard of the best doesn't really influence that value. Th

Many sports & activities feel like this at high level. An athlete will train everyday and build muscle memory in order to jump over a bar placed as high as possible. A chess player, a football player, etc. Highly specialized skills that are of no use in day to day life. The collateral benefits like fitness or entertainment value can also be found here.

See i think his choice of golf (or most sports where you rely mostly on repetitive physical training) is a bad one. It's like a brute force attack - effective, but not much of an achievement.