Steve Sailer writes: In the past, the judges gave taller, more elegantly moving young women advantages because they looked better. But that gave an advantage to Eastern European girls raised in the traditions behind the Bolshoi ballet. The Americans have lobbied to make scoring more objective, which gives the advantages to muscular human cannonball body types like Biles’.
Over time, the various Olympic sports have become hyper-specialized by body type, so medalists tend to be rather freakish looking.
One interesting question is which sports have the best normal looking athletes: i.e., the winners look like movie stars rather than people selected at an early age for their odd proportions.
Traditionally, men’s pole vaulters — an event that requires both lower body speed and upper body strength — have been good looking guys.
When women’s pole vaulting was introduced, they tended to be good looking too.
Slate recently ran an article by a woman journalist claiming that Allison Stokke is the most popular lady pole vaulter in the world for a “gross” reason: i.e., people think she’s pretty. (Slate has since memory holed their old headline and replaced it with “Allison Stokke Is the Most Popular Pole Vaulter in the World, and I Wish That Weren’t So Depressing.”)
But Stokke is only the 168th ranked women’s pole vaulter in the world.
* The ol’ First Law of Female Journalism. The existence of pretty people is psychologically ‘problematic’ for ugly people.
* There’s an old axiom in basketball, “you can’t teach height”. This true in volleyball as well. Tall girls are at a premium for both sports, but it doesn’t take long to notice that female volleyball players tend to more feminine and attractive when compared to their basketball counterparts. This is true at all levels of the respective sports, high school, college and at the Olympic level.
* Female basketball players aren’t at all hot. They look like men with women’s heads attached.
Female volleyball players are often hot though. Especially at the pro level.
* In the US, at least, there’s a cultural component to that. Higher class women do tend to be more attractive for various reasons. I dated a tall girl who played volleyball in high school and got the impression that volleyball is higher class than basketball at the high school and college levels (big surprise, I ignored both while in high school). What I also learned is that high school and college volleyball is mostly a scam. High school volley ball players often use the sport as a way to gain college admission and a year of free school at college and then quit the team. I went to an ACC volleyball game and was amazed at the number of freshmen who were starting. Universities don’t really care because volleyball isn’t a revenue sport and it’s sponsored for Title IX compliance. In particular, schools that have rushed to create football programs in the last 10 years have created women’s indoor and beach volleyball teams in order to offer relatively cheap lady athletics scholarships. I got my masters at an urban university that added a beach volleyball team as part of starting a football team. What’s funny is that the beach volleyball team is now one of the best in the country, albeit being a few hundred miles from the coast, and the football team is one of the worst in the FBS.
* I’ve wondered if East Asians have an advantage in “precision sports” compared with other nationalities. Ping pong, badminton, archery, and stationary shooting events tend to be very East Asian heavy. Oddly enough, East Asians tend to be very good at marksmanship events, but not at skeet/trap shooting. It’s something that could be evolutionary or cultural. South Korea considers archery their national sport and Chinese Communist revolutionaries had a passion for ping pong, so maybe there are just cultural reasons for these results.
* The precision sports are about self control which they have an abundance of. Shooting between the heartbeats, that kind of stuff. That’s why PEDs in the shooting sports are primarily beta-blockers, which slow and regularize your heart beat.
Ping-pong, despite being viewed in the U.S. as a silly parlor game, is actually extremely technical and very, very fast. I.e., it requires instant reading of spin, which is much more important than in slow made-for-TV racquet sports like tennis, quickness, precision, and outstanding reaction time. Reaction time is, of course, highly correlated with IQ, and precision requires tremendous practice and self control. Given the dimensions of the “court” and the paddle, the relatively short limbs and small hands of East Asians are much less of a disadvantage then in, say, basketball or American football, and the other qualities are prototypically East Asian.
Which is why the Austrian delegation flag at these Olympics was carried by a Chinese, a ping-pong player.
* Human biodiversity: the most interesting and essential subject to be constantly and consistently derailed by crude, subjective value judgments. Seriously, Steve: can’t you just enjoy the diversity on display from a purely prurient perspective? In most cases “freakish…odd proportions” don’t negate the raw, native attractiveness that comes from symmetrical bodies, perfectly toned muscles, and the general glow of good health that radiates from these champions. There should be something for everybody at the Olympics, so to my mind Slate’s headline isn’t entirely wrong: it’s depressing that everybody seems to have been trained to want exactly the same thing.
* Female basketball players from other countries tend to be quite a bit better looking than their U.S. counterparts, though gigantism in the taller players doesn’t help. Besides, how many heterosexual women are there on the U.S. National basketball team? Some may not even be women genetically.
The key to winning women’s athletic competitions in highly contested sports (for women) is to field teams with as few feminine and actual females as possible.
* Also, while volleyball and high-jumping favor height, a high center of gravity and light weight are also an advantage. This tends to results in competitors with long legs and gracile builds, producing the classic tall, slender, long-legged volleyball and high-jumper look, which looks more feminine in women.
In basketball, while height reigns supreme, a husky build can be an advantage, or at least less of a disadvantage, particularly in the ground-bound women’s game. Not sure about the center of gravity – Epstein claims that having a higher center of gravity of helps in basketball, but I’m not so sure it’s not confounded with race. Having long legs seems unhelpful in quickly changing direction laterally, a major athletic requirement in basketball, though if you are loaded with fast-twitch fibers as most players of West African origin are, it may be overcome.
Many a tall, white, supremely offensively skilled player could not make it in (or into) the NBA because of the lack of lateral quickness, which is murder on defense, Kyle Wiltjer of Gonzaga being the latest example. On the other hand, the (relatively) short-legged Chinese Jeremy Lin has done just fine, all the anti-East Asian hate notwithstanding.
* Short legs tend to be good for complicated dancing, which is kind of like the skills needed to play good defense in basketball. A tall dancer, like 6’6″ Broadway song and dance man Tommy Tune, is pretty wonderful to watch, but they are rare.
* When I was in high school, the Compton High kids would arrive to compete with us at track meets, and for two years straight, they only had one black kid representing them in the pole vault. Nobody else was interested.
He was a short kid, muscular, and the funny thing was, his pole was way too flexible for his weight. He’d plant his pole, and it would bend like you wouldn’t believe, before sending him up like a freaking sling shot. We said at the time that it was like we were in a Cosby kid cartoon.
He outscored us in the pole vault almost every time, and none of us could believe it. The kid had no technique. No anything. Just a lot of balls, the will to win, and a pole he shouldn’t have been using. On the last day of his last vault, the pole broke on him. He was lucky he wasn’t maimed.
* American gymnasts have always been stockier than their Eastern European and Asian counterparts. People used to complain about Mary Lou Retton’s weight but she would just laugh it off. The generation after her stopped eating. Shannon Miller’s coach bragged that she could train all day on just one baked potato. American gymnasts were routinely experiencing all sorts of horrific injuries that aren’t heard of today.
In 1994 gymnast Christy Henrich died of anorexia and the 1995 book Little Girls in Pretty Boxes exposed eating disorders in gymnastics and figure skating. Reforms were made and by 1996 the US had a well fed gold medal team. I remember gymnasts’ weights being televised but now it is difficult to find the official weight of any female athlete.
* There aren’t any knock-outs in women’s tennis. Sharapova was as good as it got, and you could easily find her level of quality and far beyond, any summer by the Huntington Beach pier.
* “How many heterosexual women are there on the U.S. National basketball team? Some may not even be women genetically.”
It’s uncanny. I think the entire team and certainly the majority of it are out lesbians or clearly lesbians and heavily rumored to be so.
The one I was holding out hope for and thought was fairly attractive adjusting for her 6’5″ height, Elena Delle Donne, just “came out” and is engaged to her female live-in partner. N.B. She dropped out of Geno Auriemma’s UCONN program her freshman year to play volleyball at Delaware before returning to basketball, so the volleyball is more attractive thing may still hold.
Being exceptionally tall and slender with a rectangle build from all the aerobic exercise probably makes them feel less feminine, which in turn keeps them away from social situations and boys.
It’d be interesting to get hand measurements from the WNBA players (and even more interesting to get accurate information on their sexual preference/same sex attraction with which to compare if that was possible). The prevailing belief is that the longer ring finger correlates to high prenatal testosterone in the womb and its evolutionary use is to better throw things accurately (e.g., stones at some animal you wanted to eat or some bad dude from a few huts over), and longer ring fingers on women relative to the index finger correlate with same sex attraction/lesbianism (the reverse is true for men). So maybe in aside from height, ball handling and shooting skills in basketball favor the longer ring finger in both men and women accounting for the very high proportion of lesbians (and rumored lesbians) at the highest levels of women’s basketball (and probably few gay men in the NBA). I did an image search for Delle Donne and sure enough in pictures where one was able to see the relative lengths of her fingers, her ring finger was noticeably longer.
With regard to the perception, I think Gilbert Arenas recently got in trouble for saying “most WNBA players are ugly lesbians” and later Andre Iguodala’s baby mama testified in a custody proceeding that he doesn’t want his daughter to play basketball because it “would turn her into a lesbian.” But more to the point, if you google players’ names usually one of the top results is some lesbian lifestyle site speculating about whether their basketball crush who isn’t officially “out” is a lesbian too but then supporting the conjecture with some pretty persuasive photographic evidence of the player suggestively nuzzling up with other women. It’s such a phenomenon I think over half of the WNBA’s fans have to be lesbians themselves.
It’s modern heresy to ask whether culture or environment can influence sexuality (in spite of ready examples like the British Navy) but I have to wonder if the ether of the WNBA isn’t so tending towards lesbianism that it has some influence, maybe only on those who could be persuaded. “Everyone else is doing it, so why shouldn’t I?” IIRC, Griner seduced another previously “straight” WNBA player and married her before the whole thing blew up in domestic violence arrests. From a practical perspective, exclusive lesbians don’t get pregnant without some real planning and medical intervention, so you’re not interrupting your career and your team’s season to have a baby.
* Mexico the nation of over 125 million people has so far not won a single medal of any type. Mexico punching well below their weight as usual, it’s what they are good at.
You have countries with significantly smaller populations than Mexico that are winning medals right and left.
Mexico has a higher obesity rate than The United States, so that could explain why they do not produce a lot of world class athletes on a per capita basis for a country with a population that large.
* The real college concubines are the recruiting interns that try to convince prospective basketball and football players to attend their university. Andre Tippet played for the New England Patriots for 12 seasons. His daughter is a recruiting intern. Bad Dad.
* Men’s Volleyball has just too much power, it makes rallies much harder. It’s just boom boom boom. People want to see rallies and because women don’t have so much power, you see much more rallies.
* I watched a ton of indoor volleyball games during the 2008 Olympics, probably all of the American women’s and men’s games. Listening to the announcers chatter it quickly became apparent that male coaches use their own women’s volleyball team as their personal dating pool.
The coach of the American men’s team was married to a volleyball player. I don’t know if he coached her but I believe there was an age difference. Her father was the American who was stabbed to death in Beijing and her mother was seriously injured.
In 2013 after Bev Kearney, the former U of Texas women’s track coach, was fired for having an affair with one of her athletes she filed a $1 million lawsuit alleging gender and race discrimination. I wasn’t surprised to read that, “The lawsuit said that UT showed a double standard by punishing Kearney for an inappropriate relationship with a student athlete, but hired former volleyball coach Jim Moore, who married one of his athletes.”
* Depending on the social dynamics of a particular high school, cheerleading can be expensive. Many of the girls probably grew up taking gymnastics and dance lessons. A cash-strapped school districts may charge a few hundred dollars for extracurricular activities. On top of that there are travel fees, uniform costs, and most likely cheerleading camp.
Back to Andre Tippett. He had two daughters before getting married. One of them was a cheerleader for the New England Patriots.
For those of you who listen to financial radio, Ray Lucia’s daughter was a San Diego Chargers cheerleader. After her divorce Ray bought her a dance studio. Her ex-husband is former quarterback Ryan Leaf.
* Soccer players who are really good at dribbling tend to have short legs and long upper bodies.
Different roles on a soccer team tend to be filled with people with different body types.
* Since Nadia Comanechi, who to me was the perfect female gymnast, the minimum age was moved to 16. I’ve run into Mary Lou Retton a few times in person. She looked like a midget you’d find working as a carnie. Nothing elegant about her at all. Just a mean little pitbull midget.
Nadia had the symmetry, proportion, elegance, and power to weight ratio that being 12-16 allows. Seeing her on the floor, without anything nearby to clarify her short stature made her look like a long, slender ethereal tree fairy. It was like Disney created her. Coupled with her technical skill, and the artistic sensibilities of her handlers, nobody has matched her before or since, except Olga Corbett somewhat.
We won’t see another Nadia unless they lower the age requirement. With the increased age requirement, the routines with an artistic flair and elegance is gone with it.
From now on, unless we get some kind of one-in-a-billion genetic freak, get used to the snorting power-midgets.
* I’ve met Mary Lou Retton: she seemed like a nice pitbull, not a mean one.
* Cucky jock-sniffing Republican dads really do enjoy the costly ($50,000 a semester) thrill of having their darling little daughters pumped and dumped, and passed around by the Mandingos of the football or basketball team. After such a vibrant and enriching experience, these girls then go on to enjoy their “sex and drugs and hip hop” gap year. Further experiences include slutty unpaid internships; ten years of riding the big city carousel as they become cubicle drones and middle management concubines; an expensive marriage as they settle down with some poor beta chump; one kid and a half; and finally a ruinous divorce, this time on the other party.
* It’s more like girly girls are attracted to sports where victory comes from an more arbitrary and capricious judging system—i.e. a subjective score— rather than something objective.
Heartiste has pointed out two seemingly contradictory points: beauty is both objective and subjective. The objectiveness is on a macro scale and the subjectivity is on a micro scale—the latter being something referred to in polite company as “taste.”
For example, no man but the brain damaged would deny that a Gisele Bundchen or Farrah Fawcett or Cindy Crawford or a Kathy Ireland or Christie Brinkley in their primes were some of the most beautiful women alive —at the top end of the scale for beauty. That’s objective,. No man would deny those women are infinitely more attractive than, say, Amy Schumer. Every man meeting one of those in-their-prime supermodels in the flesh would have had a visceral, objective reaction of “holy moly, this chick is off the charts hot!!!!”
However, just which one is hotter than the others (in their prime) is entirely subjective, and depends on the man doing the judging. One guy likes Kathy Ireland’s smile, another has a fetish for Charlie’s Angels, another prefers brunettes to blonds, etc.
So ranking those mega-hot supermodels amongst each other is subjective—it’s up to the taste of the individual man. This is why guys can spend literally hours arguing over which of a group of famous beautiful women is the hottest and which they would prefer (a great game that passes the time for guys in the military or dudes on long road trips together).
This is why girly girls prefer the more subjective sports—both to watch and to participate. It’s built into their DNA that, if they are in anyway able to rival another woman, then they should do all the little subjective things that will make others—especially men, but women as well—-like them more. Everyone at the Olympics has to have certain basic objective standards—can they do a double lutz? Can they do a flip on the balance beam?
Uglier/mannish girls never get as close to competing for every man’s attention, so gravitate towards more manly sports where they can at least objectively beat a beauty queen.
But once that objective measure of talent is met, whether a judge likes their routine more—especially at the highest levels, like the Olympics—is 90% based on the judge’s personal preferences, and how well the female participant matched herself up to those preferences. E.g. Did the judges want a more up-tempo routine this time, with lots of bouncing around, or were they more in favor of an elegant routine?
Meanwhile, men’s sports tend to be objective: did the runner touch home plate before the catcher touched him? Did the runner cross the plane of the goal line with the ball? Was the ball released before time expired? etc. Lesbians and manly women are more attracted to these male sports.
Men’s sports therefore are to test objectively who is better. Women’s girly girl sports are to test who can manipulate/know the judges better.
* The USA women’s soccer team seemed pretty lesbian-heavy and they don’t even use their hands for any part of the game.
Women’s team athletics would seem to be an irresistible draw for women who love women. Opportunities for close camaraderie with other women, highly emotional relationships and bonds with women, group travel, segregation from males, etc. It would seem to be a prime avenue for aspiring lesbians to have opportunities to meet and date other women.
I knew a female college soccer player who related that on her team there was a soft butch player who was in the habit of seducing other “straight” girls on the team seriatim. She wrote the girl I knew a letter in what I was told a failed attempt to woo her as well. At a certain point the coaching staff had to step in to diffuse the high level of drama on the team.
* Dramatic improvement in the looks of female golfers? Not in the top ranks of the LPGA, quite the opposite. Ever since someone over there decided U.S. professional golf was something to a$pire to, we’ve been deluged with waves of exceptionally talented South Koreans with the sex appeal of wood blocks.
* It’s like saying that it’s unlikely that the majority of elite theoretical physicists in the U.S. would have been Jewish, given that Jews comprise about 2% of the population. Yes, it’s extremely unlikely, and yet they have been.
As you get farther into the right-hand tail of the distribution for a given ability, people with gifts in that ability will be represented disproportionately more until, in the extreme, they will be the only ones. That’s why the NBA is disproportionately West African more than NCAA, which is disproportionately more so than HS basketball. And that’s why the 2016 All-Stars and Team USA are all black (not counting injury sub Gasol in the former, and light mulatto Klay Thompson in the latter).
That’s Olympic 100M dash finals have been all West African for a long, long time. I believe the only white person who’s broken the 10 second barrier in the 100M, was a Frenchman. There has also been one Asian, and a couple of mixed (with some African) ancestry sprinters that have done so. All them just barely broke it, with times in the high 9.9s There are probably now over a 100 sprinters with West African and 100% of the sub-9.9 times are from those with West African heritage (though they claim that Fredericks of Namibia, which is in Southwest Africa, is not West African – how would you be sure?). See the pattern?
It’s the argument that Larry Summers made about male overrepresentation in elite STEM, to which female academics countered by saying that boys and girls do equally well in math in elementary school, thus proving his point that most of them don’t understand math well enough to be in elite STEM.
