Roblog

Via Matt Webb, from his broader (and fascinating) post about the nature of work and what the roboticisation of domestic labour might take from us, comes this topical and counter-intuitive nugget about Olympians. How is it that they bring themselves to do the presumably mad levels of hard work and training that are required to get to the tops of their games? Well, because they enjoy it:

“The very features of the sport that the ‘C’ swimmer finds unpleasant, the top level swimmer enjoys. What others see as boring – swimming back and forth over a black line for two hours, say – they find peaceful, even meditative, often challenging, or therapeutic. … It is incorrect to believe that top athletes suffer great sacrifices to achieve their goals. Often, they don’t see what they do as sacrificial at all. They like it.”

It’s from a 1989 ethnographic study on Olympic swimmers by Daniel Chambliss. The central premise is that levels of sports are discontinuous, and that, while putting in more and more effort can make you better within a particular level of performance, it isn’t what progresses you to the highest heights:

“Having seen that ‘more is better’ within local situations, we tend to extrapolate: if I work this hard to get to my level, how hard must Olympic swimmers work? If I sacrifice this much to qualify for the State Championships, how much must they sacrifice? We believe, extrapolating from what we learn about success at our own level, that they must work unbelievably hard, must feel incredible pressure, must sacrifice more and more to become successful. Assuming implicitly that stratification in sports is continuous rather than discrete (that the differences are quantitative) we believe that top athletes do unbelievable things. In short, we believe that they must be superhuman.”

Neither talent nor hard work are good explanations for their success. Instead, Chambliss argues, the cause is more qualitative than quantitative; the extremely successful do different things rather than more things, and keep doing them to a habitual and mundane degree.

“After three years of field work with world-class swimmers… I wrote a draft of some book chapters, full of stories about swimmers, and I showed it to a friend. ‘You need to jazz it up,’ he said. ‘You need to make these people more interesting. The analysis is nice, but except for the fact that these are good swimmers, there isn’t much else exciting to say about them as individuals.’ He was right, of course. What these athletes do was rather interesting, but the people themselves were only fast swimmers, who did the particular things one does to swim fast. It is all very mundane. When my friend said that they weren’t exciting, my best answer could only be, simply put: that’s the point.”