Best Ever: Part 1
Best Ever?
I am going to put up an occasional blog for a discussion on the’ best ever’ for various sports and sporting subjects. Do not turn away, this is not going to be a “the correct answer is Pele is the best ever footballer” type post but more some opinions on the amount of lazy, nonsensical drivel that is spouted whenever these subjects crop up. Statistics are unlikely to be applied to make a case for an individual or team but some form of mathematical debate will be discussed on occasions to help offset the narrative of some misguided popular opinion.
Usain Bolt
Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter the world has known as a current 100m world record of 9.58 seconds suggests but is he the best ever? The Olympics are coming to London next year, in case you were unaware, where the motto , introduced at the Paris 1924 Olympiad is “Faster, Higher, Stronger“ implying a constant quest for improvement is their target. The current Olympic champion is Usain Bolt- is Bolt, a highly paid full time athlete with various trainers and coaches who are aware of the importance of diet and nutrition, rest and recuperation, biomechanical advancements and elite physical training better than Carl Lewis or Jesse Owens?
At the Beijing Olympics he got to run on a track that was not a mix of dirt, clay and cinders such as those that Owens ran on in Berlin or Roger Bannister broke the 4 minute mile on but, thanks to materials engineering was produced by a company called Mondo who developed their track at their research and development centre and glued their new rubber surface onto asphalt at their production sire near Beijing. All athletes in 2008 got to run on this “fastest ever track” meaning there was a level playing field and Bolt’s superiority over them cannot be questioned, but times alone with no additional thinking, whilst not irrelevant, cannot be the sole factor in athletic comparisons.
In modern society, salaries, housing prices and lifestyle standards can be compared across different ages mainly via inflation data so although you are highly likely to earn more than your parents did we can also tell whose salary was higher ‘really’. Is there a sporting inflation that can be applied to comparisons over time for sporting achievements?
Football
Ex-Manchester United goalkeeper Peter Schmeichel once angered old school football fans and caused a media storm by claiming after their Champions League victory that the Sir Matt Busby team of 1968 would be beaten 10-0 by the then 1999 champions. What price would the supremacy be between these teams if we simply popped them aboard the Star Spreads time machine? Would anyone really claim anything other than an easy win for the bigger, faster, stronger more well drilled modern team with their stereotypical pasta diet than the full English breakfast before training brigade from a generation previous?
If you have any doubts about the speed difference between the modern game and the compressed space that the modern game is played in, simply look on You Tube at the 1966 world cup final to see what appears to be a charity game or an over 35’s veterans match where both defences stand on the edge of their own box allowing the remaining players to stroll around. This is not saying that the 1966 world cup winning team featuring such footballing legends as Moore, Charlton and Banks are not ‘better’ than a modern team but simply that any comparison without allowances for time and any advancements in sport over 50 years would simply be wrong.
