Jip wrote:jezzamundo wrote:Jip wrote:
yes it is insult ro floyd. floyd is 1000 times more talented than ronda. my comparison was more focused on "media creations", the media created ronda as the best female athlete ever, the best mma female fighter ever, a girl that would beat floyd in a fight. with what we know today just total nonsense. i just wanted to point out that people should think more and not follow media creations or self creations, just because ali says i am the greatest, doesnt mean he is the greatest. be more skeptical, be more inteligent.
for example the human body/legs runs faster, not the shoes. stop the nonsense. just because you like old school athlete more than new school athletes dont bash the new school athletes for being superior. athletes simply got better in every single sport, everyone, every record got broken and not because of shoes and nonsense, but because man became more athletic over time, evolution, that simple.
sure there are rare rare athletes who were ahead of their time like robinson, maradona etc, but not many. just stop it jess...the discussion gets on my nervs, i had it to many times and people act stupid, cause they seem to have some kind of nostalgia with old school athletes, but everything got better, that simple. also there is a difference between physic and social behaviour. in that term i hate most athletes today. arrogant bastards. prefer the quiet old school athletes, but in terms of athletiscm these suckers today are ahead, cant stop the evo.
Did you read the quote from the bottom of my post? This is from a someone has dedicated his life to studying athletic performance and knows more about it than you or I. I probably shouldn't have mentioned shoes because the difference they make is probably negligible, but the quality of the track makes a massive difference. The full talk is here and makes for interesting reading:
To say that man has become more athletic over time and this is due to evolution is simply untrue. Evolution is a very slow process and it takes far more than three or four generations to see significant change. The average level of athleticism among humans would have been at its peak when we were cavemen, due to the fact that we had to hunt for food and run from predators - the fat, slow and uncoordinated generally didn't live long enough to reproduce. In first world countries, the average level of athleticism is likely at an all time low, with the exception of times of plagues and famine - due to our increasingly sedentary lifestyle and increasing levels of obesity. Athleticism in developing nations is generally on the up, mainly due to improved nutrition - this is why we are seeing countries like China do progressively better in every Olympic games. In some sports, improvements in technology and training have contributed to falling records, but the a major factor is simply the rapid increase in global population. Out of a much larger population pool, you are naturally going to have a greater number of extraordinary athletes, even if the average level of athleticism is on the decrease.
Boxing is something of an exception to the rule of improving performance, because the number of people going into the sport has actually decreased and the increasing popularity of other sports has had a draining effect on the talent pool. The rise of Eastern European nations in boxing has partially, but not completely, offset this.
it was a very good article.
i hope that cuba can finaly become professional in boxing, much talent would be added. i hope that black americans start more boxing and i also hope that some more mexicans come out. since barrera, morales, marquez they have not been many mexicans on top level.
i totaly understand your point of view. but let me figure one thing out.
why was a man considered big tall and strong when he was 5 feet 11 tall and looked like john l sullivan, when today we got monster like anthony joshua who are 6'6, 10 times more athletic than sullivan and stronger?
there is a saying from where i am from, "you gonne be 4 inches taller, than your father"...basicly what the logic is saying or you will call it myth, is that the son is mostly always taller and more athletic than his father, with exceptions, but overall i am right.otherwise why did we have only 2 good center in the nba for 30 years chamberlain and russell and all of the sudden, shaq, hakkeem, robinson, ewing, duncan, howard etc. u get my point....dna just becomes better. i see increase in young people no decrease, when i see young people today at 14 years of age, they so tall and athletic, its mind blowing.
Before I address your points I will let you know that I used to think the same way you did, but after having my ideas challenged by better informed posters on this site, I did some reading and realised my ideas about recent human evolution were false.
I did a post a while ago about the average height of top 10 heavyweight boxers:
http://boxrec.com/forum/viewtopic.php?t=199245
To save you reading the whole post, the average height of top 10 heavyweights in the 1920s was 6'1". This dropped to a low of 5'11 in 1949, which I imagine would have been partly due to the 2nd world war taking so many of our biggest and best men. The average height of top 10 heavyweights this decade is 6'3 1/2", which is an increase of just 2.7 inches in 90 years.
Comparing this to the average height in America (there isn't enough data for a global average height and boxing was dominated by America for most of the 20th century) - the average height of an American man in 1912 was 5'8.25, while the average height of an American man in 2012 was 5'9.9" - an increase of 1.65 inches in 100 years. Height increases is other countries have been far greater, due to huge improvements in nutrition and health. What is clear is that humans are not naturally evolving to be taller and any increases in height over the past 100 years are due to improvements in nutrition and reduction of disease.
Unfortunately I don't have data on average height during John L Sullivan's time, it's pretty clear that Sullivan was about average height for a top heavyweight of his time and about 2.5 inches taller than the average American man. By comparison, Joshua is 2.4 inches taller than the average top heavyweight this decade and about 8 inches taller than the average American man.
Using your example of a 4 inch increase in height in one generation, while there are many individual examples of this, the average increase in height is far smaller in reality. The only way this could possibly be the norm is if the older generation had far inferior nutrition and/or more disease. Of course there's no data on improving athleticism (of the average person) from one generation to the next, but given that the average adult weight is increasing at a much faster rate than the average height, and our increasingly sedentary lifestyles, it's fair to assume that in most first world countries, the average level of athleticism is on a decline. This isn't reflected in athletic performances, as the population increases, there's an increase in the number of gifted, athletic individuals.
The increasing height among NBA basketball players is quite well explained in the TED Talk I linked. One in six 7 foot men in America are currently NBA basketball players. There were giants in the past, but far less of them, largely due to the smaller global population.
Finally one more thing - my day job is as a Physical Education teacher and I can say without doubt that children today are, on average, less athletic than they were when I began teaching 10 years ago, and significantly less athletic than when I was in school myself. When you look at just the top 1%, there is a slight trend towards improvement, but looking at the population as a whole, kids are getting fatter, slower and less physically coordinated. This is largely due to them spending less of their free time being physically active and more in front of electronic devices.
you guys remember that and a lot of people had the same stupid oppinion. now we know that even an amateur boxer would ridicoule her in secondes.
