Liquid`Drone Norway. Nov 25 2013 05:39. Posts 3093
thats just cuz swimming has so many events. olympic medals is a poor way of establishing how dominant someone is anyway, as it's only every 4 years. bubka set 35 world records, but only won 1 olympic gold medal.
It's a hard topic to be honest. There are so many people that could fit here, that dominated the scene in a specific sport for a long, long time... You could write Michael Schumacher (F1 racing) here as well, or Gary Kasparov (if you consider chess a sport).
I think there is no definite answer here, rather a list of people that would fit
1
blackjacki2 United States. Nov 25 2013 07:15. Posts 2581
On November 25 2013 04:39 Liquid`Drone wrote:
thats just cuz swimming has so many events. olympic medals is a poor way of establishing how dominant someone is anyway, as it's only every 4 years. bubka set 35 world records, but only won 1 olympic gold medal.
It's still insanely difficult to do and incredibly dominant, otherwise a bunch of other swimmers would have a dozen gold medals as well. There's only 30 male Olympians with with more than 5 gold medals, and only 3 of them are swimmers.
Setting 35 world records isn't so amazing in a sport where you can break the record by 1 cm at a time. There's also weight lifters with just as many world records because they break the record by 1kg at a time.
Ronnie O'Sullivan. Back 2 back Crucible wins with a 1 year break inbetween them. Amazing with both hands. He is maybe even 2 levels higher, than anyone ever was. Too bad this affected his motivation (no wonder, though).
I'm throwing another hat in the ring for Don Bradman. If the guy came back for 1 more game post-retirement he would have had a 3 digit batting average where most pro batsmen are lucky to make 40. This is all assuming our first place player is being considered vs the 2nd place in their time period of course. Bradman would get rolled by modern cricketers.
Statistician Charles Davis analysed the statistics for several prominent sportsmen by comparing the number of standard deviations that they stand above the mean for their sport.[238] The top performers in his selected sports are:[239]
Athlete Sport Statistic Standard deviations
Bradman Cricket Batting average 4.4
Pelé Association football Goals per game 3.7
Ty Cobb Baseball Batting average 3.6
Jack Nicklaus Golf Major titles 3.5
Michael Jordan Basketball Points per game 3.4
The statistics show that "no other athlete dominates an international sport to the extent that Bradman does cricket".[2] In order to post a similarly dominant career statistic as Bradman, a baseball batter would need a career batting average of .392, while a basketball player would need to score an average of 43.0 points per game.[239] The respective records are .366 and 30.1.[239]
Every sport has its own greats, but the thing is which one is the most dominant taking the competition into consideration,
which is the key to inhuman dominance.
Jahangir Khan was riduculously dominant but the fact that its a quite a small sport makes it a little less spectacular.
Aleksander Karelin, winning 12 years in a row and 6 years without giving the opponents a single point. Small sport.
Phil Taylor winning nearly every competition he entered for a long time span is amazing, but a small sport.
Tiger Woods did something ridiculous at his peak. Take in consideration that golf is a game where there is a high variance in your performance and scores,
but it did not seem to affect him over a long time span. Keep in mind that golf is a game where the 500. ranked player can win, unlike tennis, wrestling, squash, darts.
I go with Woods because the fact that he was up against a talented and wide field and still was so dominant in a game which is nearly impossible to dominate hard.
Please no more federer and messi (= fc barcelona = 15 greatest players around him) here, you are mocking this thread.
If federer is the only one you can think of, please dont say it, and open your eyes.
Netherlands. Nov 25 2013 07:43. Posts 10422
