[cogman10]

> Some people are indeed much better. Anyone who played sports as a kid understands this.

Anyone with a little bit of nutritional knowledge knows that having a nutritious diet is a major part of athletic competitiveness. Poverty limits or eliminates the ability of a parent to provide nutritious meals.

There's certainly going to be a level of natural talent that exists, but everyone who comes from poverty are playing with major handicaps.

Poverty makes small children.

[DanHulton]

And the time of the year you're born, too! Holy shiiit this fucked me up as a kid.

I always thought I was just "bad at sports," but I was born in August, so I was playing against a lot of kids who had up to like 11 months of development on me. That's _huge_ when you're a little kid.

A lot of those kids were "indeed much better." Because they were nearly a full year older!

[jack2312]

Yeah, there are studies that have been done on this. It's called the 'relative age effect'. It can have an effect into adulthood as well, when a one-year age difference may be less significant. This is because in their earlier years, the children who are a half-year older and more developed will generally see more success, thus getting more opportunities to play, thus getting more practice and coaching, thus leading to more success, etc...

(For more info, see this article [0]. Interestingly from that article, and I didn't know this before today, younger athletes in their cohort who make it to the later stages of their sport are more likely to be "super elite" athletes, probably because they were able to overcome the challenges of playing with bigger athletes in their childhood years.)

[0]: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/why-athletes-birthdays-...

[sneed_chucker]

Lots of top athletes come from either poor countries or from poverty within non-poor countries.

NFL teams are full of players who grew up in poverty and ate fast food and processed junk during the formative years of their lives.

[cogman10]

There are a bunch of studies around the impact of poverty on athletics. Take this article with a bunch of them [1].

I'm not sure what point you are trying to make. Just because you can show that "hey, some poor people are awesome athletes" doesn't negate the fact that by and large you can predict who is even participating in sports based on their household income.

I'd also like to challenge you to provide numbers. What percentage of top athletes came from poverty? Not poverty nations, or cities, but actual poverty.

[1] https://journals.lww.com/acsm-csmr/fulltext/2021/09000/dispa...

[PH95VuimJjqBqy]

I can also tell you I was homeless as a child and went to college on an athletic scholarship.

there's some truth here but it's being overblown.

[bluedino]

Genetics probably play the biggest role when it comes to natural abilities. Height, strength, explosiveness, body proportions, endurance.

[AlexandrB]

This is inconsistent with the fact that average height has increased significantly over the last two centuries[1]. Our genes have not had time to change in that span, but our environment, including access to nutrients, has changed radically.

[1] https://ourworldindata.org/human-height

[bluedino]

Taller than average people are most successful in certain sport. Basketball, volleyball, etc

Shorter than average are very rare in most sports except for some niche positions.

[achenet]

gymnastics and olympic weightlifting actually both favor shorter statures.

[gosub100]

the parents bear responsibility too, they are the ones responsible for feeding their kids. Poverty gets in the way, but poor parental choices and neglect share the blame. (I know personal responsibility is too passé these days, so sorry to bring up the topic).