The fastest human was the slowest out of the blocks
BOLT ran 9.58 seconds in Berlin in 2009 and the record has not been approached since. The detail people miss is that his reaction time was the worst in that final, and he was behind at twenty metres. Being tall is a disadvantage getting out of the blocks, because long legs take longer to unfold.
What happened next is the reason for the record. He hit roughly 27.8 miles per hour somewhere past sixty metres — faster than anyone has been measured running — and he decelerated less than the rest of the field over the last twenty. He also has scoliosis, a curve of the spine that made his right leg shorter and forced years of work on his core simply to run straight.
Ali lost the three best years he had
In 1967 Muhammad ALI refused induction into the United States Army on religious grounds, saying he had no quarrel with the Vietcong. He was convicted, sentenced, stripped of the heavyweight title and refused a licence to box in every state.
The ban ran from twenty-five to twenty-eight — the exact years a heavyweight is at his physical best. He spent them broke, speaking on campuses, and widely loathed. The Supreme Court overturned the conviction unanimously in 1971. He came back heavier and slower and won the title twice more, and it is fair to say the fights everyone remembers are the ones he had after losing the years he would have been unbeatable.
The rulebook holds Simone Biles back on purpose
BILES has five gymnastics skills named after her, which happens when you are the first to land something in competition. The oddity is how those skills are scored: the governing body has repeatedly given her hardest elements a lower difficulty value than the maths of the code would suggest.
The stated reason is safety — a very high value tempts less capable gymnasts into attempting something that can break a neck. The effect is that the scoring system caps her advantage, and she competes knowing the hardest thing anyone has ever done on a vault is worth less than it should be. She won anyway, which is the argument, and her withdrawal at Tokyo in 2021 to protect herself did more for how sport talks about athletes' minds than any medal.
Margins nobody can see
Elite sport is decided in gaps too small to watch. An Olympic swimming final can separate gold from fourth by less than the length of a fingernail; PHELPS won the 100m butterfly in Beijing by one hundredth of a second, which is less time than it takes to blink. The people finishing last in these finals are, by any ordinary measure, indistinguishable from the winners.
The grid holds that narrow band across a century: Jesse OWENS in 1936 and Jackie JOHNSON's generation; PELE, MARADONA, MESSI, RONALDO and BECKHAM; Michael JORDAN and Kobe BRYANT; FEDERER, NADAL, SHARAPOVA, NAVRATILOVA and the WILLIAMS sisters; Wayne GRETZKY, Tom BRADY, Tiger WOODS and Lewis HAMILTON. Our Olympics page has more on where a lot of it gets settled.