[umvi]

Indeed, and given the costs to become the very best, it's often a choice like this. Say you need to hire athletes with in experience swimming, running, and gymnastics to design some classes for your school. Would you rather hire:

- 3 gold medal Olympians, each of whom have medaled in the 3 areas

- 1 bronze medal Olympian who has single-handedly medaled in swimming, running, and gymnastics?

[wuunderbar]

Let's not fool ourselves into thinking being bronze level is what it means to be a generalist. That's still performing at an unbelievably high level.

[ahmedalsudani]

It’s an analogy.

[bcrosby95]

> - 1 bronze medal Olympian who has single-handedly medaled in swimming, running, and gymnastics?

Has anyone ever achieved this? It sounds like you're saying you would rather hire 1 person that doesn't exist rather than hire 3 people that do.

[mlyle]

Not exactly that, but there's the various combination events-- most especially the pentathlon (fencing, shooting, swimming, riding, cross-country running).

But even look at decathletes -- they usually rarely medal in individual event sports these days, and their personal bests are pretty far off the mark. Asthon Eaton got two decathlon golds, but each of his personal bests would be at the back of the standings of the individual athletic events at the Olympics. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ashton_Eaton#Outdoor

Or triathletes. Basically no one who is a world-class runner is a world-class swimmer, or vice versa. But you can be confident that a world-class triathlete is a pretty damn good runner, swimmer, and cyclist.

[joombaga]

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_athletes_with_Olympi...

Doesn't look like it.

[rytis]

But look at the year: most of them seem to be pre 1950's. Does that still apply?

[joombaga]

Does _what_ still apply?

[hkmurakami]

I do have a strange fascination with Modern Pentathlon. Basically none of those athletes are truly "world class" in any of the 5 disciplines if I understand correctly, but they're the best at the combination of all of them.

[maverick2007]

I worked for a D1 track and field team while I was in college and I found the Pent/Hep/Decathlon some of the most fascinating sports with how coaches approached which athletes to submit. Some coaches (like the one at my college) chose to submit true generalists, athletes that wouldn't usually win an individual event but would get points in most of them. But other coaches favored submitting athletes that had distinct specialties, assuming they'd win that event and then get points in a couple of the other events. It's been a while so I don't exactly remember which approach seemed to work better but I found the strategy fascinating!