Ooh, an Unfogged old-timer has been pretty serious about freediving. Maybe they're still lurking and will have opinions.
1: really?! I'm very curious as to who it is.
As a writer with some really minimal work in Web design I liked the article and visual aids. As a reader I hated it. AIMHB, I prefer simplicity in my media. Static Web pages over infinite scrolling, Text over video, etc. Now we've got this? I often couldn't even scroll too far because the text I was reading would vanish, even though there was nothing visible to come. It's like the writer/designer is some kind of asshole trying to make me immerse myself (pun intentional by him, no doubt!) in experience of the work of art that is their multimedia story rather than merely skimming it!
Speaking of extreme sports and interesting athletes, even if you don't care at all about climbing Free Solo was an amazing documentary.
I thought it was a bit too into explaining how the Kessel Run line from the first movie could be explained.
Reading this article kind of feels like playing an experimental Interactive Fiction video game. Especially the two weird scenes right at the beginning. It even has an obvious moment of interactivity "Do you jump? (Y/N)" Then after the weird intro you get a strange game where you decide how long to dive and it shows a video of your dive and tells you how it feels based on the decisions you made.
I just rewatched most of that first movie and it is both dumber and worse-acted than I remembered.
I kind of liked all the slow-motiony stuff, both literally and figuratively, that the article made you swim through. Skimming was impossible but I didn't mind immersing myself in it for 15 minutes.
I hated the layout, as Cyrus did, and was irritated by the way the story was bent into an arc of redemption through pop psychology. But it is obviously about a brave and interesting woman.
I've climbed the highest mountain in Slovenia!
Also, Slovene retains the dual number, but I don't think you can see it on their euro coins the way you used to be able to on the tolar.
4 gets it exactly right. This trend to turn longreads into multimedia experiences is awful and clearly designed to prevent people from saving articles to read-it-later apps, and I hate everyone involved with a fiery passion.
The other thing that's amazing about her is that she holds the record for deep sea diving through all this haterade.
I'm thinking about how weird it has to be to discover that one has this rare talent that's practically useless except in this bizarre field. All elite sports are sort of like this, but with most of them there's a training program where one discovers exceptional talent while doing ordinary sports/movements that people might want to do for other reasons. It makes sense to run or lift weights, and some people who run or lift will discover they're exceptionally gifted. But she sort of stumbles into a sport that you have to be already crazy to want to try.
The fact that, at a certain depth, you just start to sink, had never occurred to me, and makes this sound even more intense.
And although I'm a big fan of the motherfucking website, I thought this was pretty well done, and it made me more likely to read and finish it. The promise of the multimedia web, people!
rare talent that's practically useless
On behalf of pearl divers and people thrown into the sea by mobsters, I'm offended. Also, maybe that's backwards? Like, this is a really cool thing (some) humans can do, and it happens to have been made into a sport, which sounds more like a club. If you had amazing powers of meditation (which this kind of is, therefore, NO ANALOGY) you wouldn't say, "what are you gonna do with that?" In conclusion, we've discovered that you're a capitalist running dog.
14.1: I did not know that and frankly don't feel better for knowing it.
14: it's more the idea that she very easily could have gone her whole life without knowing she had this rare gift. It's like the story that Michael Phelps only started swimming because his mom signed him up to get him out of her hair, times a billion.
Zomg, you were in that thread. I still think of '05 as "very early days" when, like, three people commented, but I guess I'm wrong.
17/18. From that thread, "I think sports are especially suited for such woolgathering; to reach the elite levels of most sports, one usually has to start out very young, and that has so much to do with parents, time, and money that it's very easy to wonder what if."
I'm happy to report that Range (and, I believe, The Sports Gene) by David Epstein argue that specializing early is not as import as most people believe.
I started the linked article and didn't make it that far because of the formatting. But the freediving sequence in H20 The Molecule that Made Us was impressive.
One interesting fact about seals is that they can store a crap ton of oxygen in their blood, and that allows them to dive for an extended period of time. I think that's also how Aquaman does it.
re: 19
I look at the kids in my son's class who are "sporty". There's four of them who are literally good at everything. One of them plays for a Premier League youth team, won the local county* "mini marathon" race in his 9 year old age group, represents the school at athletics (and excels at everything). I'd expect that those kids would be good at more or less any sport, given time and effort, and the sport they end up choosing is a factor of parental interest/time/energy, etc but that barring some sports that require fairly extreme or unusual body types and abilities, they'd be in the top couple of percent** at almost anything.
My son is reasonably athletic, although by temperament he's someone who enjoys being generally active rather than obsessed by sports. He's a fast-ish runner (top 9% in the county "mini marathon"), physically strong and coordinated, decent enough but not outstanding at swimming and tennis. He's not quite as strong as he was during lock down, when he could knock out 30-50 push-ups with good form, but he's still pretty solidly built. When he goes to his swimming lessons, a lot of the other boys look like they are made from blancmange next to him.
Compared to the sporty outliers in the class, though, there's still a noticeable gulf.
* this is a London borough, so the population is about the same size as Cincinnati or Pittsburgh. and there are many hundreds of kids racing in each year group.
** of course, Olympic athletes are nowhere near the top couple of percent at anything, they are vastly better than that.
"Blancmange" made me laugh as I made a similar observation at the kids' gymnastics recital - my two are lean and the Calabat in particular just looks built. Genetics are weird. Both kids are active but not unusually so - just short round muscles.
It's interesting that the big US money sports, Football and Basketball, at most positions are all about weird body type and not general athletic-ness. Soccer, by contrast, is really normal looking bodies but everyone is fast, strong, amazingly coordinated, and has ridiculous endurance.
24: One of the characteristics of a more advanced civilization is a higher degree of specialization.
Not sure 24 is true. Once you get to the big money sports, --where you can figure that almost everyone in the country has had a chance to at least give it a go--at the highest levels you have to have a genetically freakish body and be super athletic. It used to be that you could be 7' tall and reasonably coordinated and have a shot at the NBA, but that's not true anymore. And if you're a mere 6'6"--which already makes you a freak--without a vertical somewhere north of, say, 32", and fantastic hand-eye coordination, you have no chance at the NBA. The NFL is similar; it's a wider range of bodies, but they're all freak athletes.
I still remember Ryan Clark, who is very normal in size though obviously not in physical ability.
I looked it up. 5'11" and 200 pounds.
Professional sports is a cancer. This ethos please
Counterpoint: smoking is bad for you.
26: I didn't meant to imply they're not phenomenal athletes, but someone who is 6'6" if they're not playing basketball has very few other sports as options no matter how athletic they are. Volleyball I suppose.
And Goalkeeper of course.
32: Isn't height a good thing for non-goalkeeper soccer players too? Certainly would seem advantageous for a forward in heading situations.
I don't have the work ethic for worldwide domination in any sport that my body is optimized for.
33: Some height is a big advantage at central defender and striker, but much less so at other positions. But 6'6" is really tall and quite rare. Plenty of top CD are 6'3" or 6'4", but that's about the max for top people. In terms of strikers above 6'2" is pretty tall. There's some outliers though, Zlatan is 6'5", Haaland is 6'4", but they're extraordinarily fast for someone at that height in a way that basketball players don't have to be. It's more like Randy Moss types than basketball players.
Swimming is another sport where height is an advantage, at least in the long axis strokes.
Most sports have a 'type' at the elite level, which isn't surprising given how specialized and competitive sports have become. Working harder than the next guy isn't going to help much if he's also working hard and has the perfect body type for your sport.
I realize that, but for Soccer it's more about endurance, speed, and coordination than about proportions. The greatest men's soccer players of the past 20 years are 5'7" 150 lbs and 6'2" 190 with completely different body types, and they both play a similar position (though they play it in very different ways). This is very different from football and basketball where just naming the position tells you roughly what the person is going to look like the vast majority of the time.
Men's tennis is interesting because you get exactly two body types, because you have to serve and you have to play tennis and those aren't the same body type. So you end up with people who are like 6' to 6'2" with tremendous endurance, like slightly taller soccer players who don't need the same top speed (think the big three, recall that Federer was a very good soccer player when young but found having teammates frustrating), and then you have like 6'6 people with crazy wingspans (Medvedev, Zvarev, etc.) who are like even skinnier basketball players but with more endurance.
Same for women's? They all seem to be pretty tall. (Not that I've met many.)
re: 39
I'm assuming from the descriptions: Messi and Ronaldo. The latter's physique is, in a lot of ways, self-built. He was a fairly skinny guy in his early career.