Exodus Strength

I'm not an expert on any of these by any means. But in mind here are some of the greatest to have ever lived:
Usain Bolt
Eilud Kipchoge
Michael Phelps
Adam Ondra
Naim Suleymanoglu
Brian Shaw
Eddy Merckx

Although, I would say the greatest is Marc-Andre Leclerc.

Mark Rippetoe.

Damn I can't believe I forgot about the great Mark.

Aleksandr Karelin

Oh, we being silly? Takeru Kobayashi.

Oh we being serious? Bo Jackson

Jim Brown

Dave Winfield was drafted in all 3 major US sports. In baseball he was drafted as a pitcher and became a hall of fame position player

Serena Williams

augeleven wrote: ↑Wed Oct 26, 2022 4:13 pm Oh we being serious? Bo Jackson

Best answer so far IMO.

I know people hate him, but Deon Sanders.
Bo and Deon proved that they could excel in two sports at a high level....they could do anything if the had to.
And in the way they performed (type of athleticism) ....that would easily translate if they were transplanted into another sport.

Some of the smaller NBA guys (6'4" lol) ... like Westbrook but not Westbrook I guess.

When looking at Winfield’s wiki page, I found this:

https://www.espn.com/espn/page2/story?p ... ndathletes

Team athletic aesthetic

Allen Iverson
Mike Vick
Lebron James
Julius Peppers
Ken Griffey Jr

SSJBartSimpson wrote: ↑Wed Oct 26, 2022 2:25 pm Eddy Merckx

bingo

So, I'm reading "greatest athlete" as "apart from sport specific stuff, who was all around the best physical human with crazy levels of drive/will2power".

Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders seem like fairly solid locks for going 1 2 in either order, so let me just throw in some amazing people that might round out a top 50. I hyperbolicly discount pre-near modern people, which might be unfair, but I think the competition was weaker "back in the day" and it makes it too hard to judge.

Valentina Vezzali won 6 individual world championships in foil, 3 oly individual golds, 1 silver, 1 bronze. Plus 19 Grand Prix golds (including team). For a full 20 years she was The Standard by which women's foil fencers were judged.

The craziest thing is that her career was basically half before, half after a massive rules change. Jokingly you might say it was like going to bed as a world cup Oly lifter and waking up to find out next week your sport is powerlifting and Oly lifting is gone. And then not missing a beat. Or maybe you go to sleep in the World's series of poker and wake up in a chess tournament. Regardless, a god damn legend.

5hout wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 2:17 am So, I'm reading "greatest athlete" as "apart from sport specific stuff, who was all around the best physical human with crazy levels of drive/will2power".

Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders seem like fairly solid locks for going 1 2 in either order, so let me just throw in some amazing people that might round out a top 50. I hyperbolicly discount pre-near modern people, which might be unfair, but I think the competition was weaker "back in the day" and it makes it too hard to judge.

Valentina Vezzali won 6 individual world championships in foil, 3 oly individual golds, 1 silver, 1 bronze. Plus 19 Grand Prix golds (including team). For a full 20 years she was The Standard by which women's foil fencers were judged.

Fencing is not a widely participated sport. It is very difficult to determine if an athlete that competes in a niche sport like fencing is an elite athlete comparable to Bo Jackson or Deion Sanders. We know Bo Jackson and Deion Sanders were freaks because of the competition they faced. A sport like fencing does not draw from a large enough population. Which you seem to recognize this rationale by the underlined.

I don't see how Sanders or Jackson make anyone's list, they were fairly one dimensional athletes. Bruce Jenner managed to demonstrate better athletic ability in his prime, and he isn't making anyone's list and shouldn't. I think arguments for Jim Thorpe, or Odd Haugen, or a handful of other guys that are outside of everyone's scope would make a lot more sense.

Hardartery wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 10:32 am I don't see how Sanders or Jackson make anyone's list, they were fairly one dimensional athletes.

I think American Football requires a very high level of athleticism. A combination of size, speed, agility, explosiveness, and strength. American football allows for different types of athletes to directly compete against one another. No other sport does that to the degree American football does. Transcendent players like Bo Jackson showed the ability to out power 300+ pound men and outrun 180 pound men. Dion's ability to read an offense and break on the ball combined with his pure speed made him the most dominant defensive player of his era and he did it from the CB position. No one has done that before or after him. Both had to hit a 90+ mph baseball. I have heard that described as one the hardest feats of human athleticism (ability to identify, react, and hit a MLB pitch is at the extreme of human limits).

Maybe I am not understanding by what you mean as one dimensional. Can you explain by what you mean when you state one dimensional?

Bruce Jenner is a great example of questionable competition. Decathlon: a niche sport that only a small population of people compete in.

What do we mean by athleticism? For me, I'm looking for a genetic freak. Someone that exhibits physical attributes and abilities that are near super human. Not just someone that spent 10,000 hours specializing in a niche activity.

To be fair (hey, remember letterkenney?…) Jackson et al was a two dimensional athlete.

Also probably not the greatest athlete of all time, but this guy right here has a pretty cool story.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/648 ... n-20-lives

I think the very nature of athletics (barring CrossFit, decathlon etc) is one of one dimensionality. Who can do a very specific thing the best?

What would be the ground level event to have athletes of different disciplines face off, Mortal Kombat-style??

Ping pong?

aurelius wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 11:33 am

Hardartery wrote: ↑Sun Nov 06, 2022 10:32 am I don't see how Sanders or Jackson make anyone's list, they were fairly one dimensional athletes.

I think American Football requires a very high level of athleticism. A combination of size, speed, agility, explosiveness, and strength. American football allows for different types of athletes to directly compete against one another. No other sport does that to the degree American football does. Transcendent players like Bo Jackson showed the ability to out power 300+ pound men and outrun 180 pound men. Dion's ability to read an offense and break on the ball combined with his pure speed made him the most dominant defensive player of his era and he did it from the CB position. No one has done that before or after him. Both had to hit a 90+ mph baseball. I have heard that described as one the hardest feats of human athleticism (ability to identify, react, and hit a MLB pitch is at the extreme of human limits).

Maybe I am not understanding by what you mean as one dimensional. Can you explain by what you mean when you state one dimensional?

Bruce Jenner is a great example of questionable competition. Decathlon: a niche sport that only a small population of people compete in.

What do we mean by athleticism? For me, I'm looking for a genetic freak. Someone that exhibits physical attributes and abilities that are near super human. Not just someone that spent 10,000 hours specializing in a niche activity.

Both athletes are demonstrating athletic ability, sure. But they are demonstraing a very specific skill set within narrow parameters. Hitting a 90 mph baseball might be difficult, but way too many people demonstrate the ability to do so for it to be particularly elevated in rank versus other things. Alexeev was a transcendent Weightlifter, but he's not making anyone's list either in spite of incredible strength and speed, and I'm sure a massive vertical as well. But all of that adds up to basically one dimensional athletic ability because it's all that he did. In contrast, every single decathlete that reaches the top of their sport is required to possess a fairly incredible ability in 10 different disciplines that are frankly quite different from each other. That event is by it's very design proof of all around athleticism. American Football, as much as I enjoyed playing it, is a very narrowly defined skillset. It is arguable that your list of qualities combined in it is actually BETTER demonstrated and tested in Rugby which also requires significantly better conditioning. Football players are good at Football, and I honestly do not value Baseball at all as a test of athleticism or even a real sport. These two sports are very much niche activities, not made less so by numbers of participants. Frankly, outside of the US American Football is not poplular or particularly contested, and baseball is only slightly more popular than Football. They are both very much tiny minority sports compared to Futbol, or as it is called in North Americ Soccer. Which would make it much more powerful of an argument to sayy that Messi, or Ronaldo, or Pele or several others are in fact vastly superior athletes to anyone found in Football or Baseball.
Additionally, I think that it's pretty easy to identify many sports that are greater tests of athleticism tha either American Football or Baseball. They just aren't as popular in America.

I think there's a strong case for wrestling to be the most demanding sport requiring the broadest array of individual attributes (as opposed to skills, where decathlon obviously would win).
What's not as present in wrestling, or decathlon for that matter, is the ability to work as part of a team. Which would be critical for lots of other sports.
So before you decide the greatest individual athlete, you have to decide whether you're going to consider team sports or not.
Unless, maybe, you were arguing for Jordan.