The World's Greatest Athlete? WSJ says Sid's #6

http://online.wsj.com/article/SB121392004594090355.html?mod=todays_us_weekend_journal

With the Olympic Games approaching, The Wall Street Journal set out to answer this parlor-game question: If Earth had to send one man to the Intergalactic Olympics, who should go?
WSJ reporter Reed Albergotti visits with decathlete Bryan Clay to see how a mere working stiff measures up to what some consider the best all-around athlete.

Identifying the world's greatest male athlete turned out to be easy to argue but difficult to answer empirically. No matter how impressive, world-class athletes mostly excel at single tasks. Olympic gold medal weightlifter Hossein Reza Zadeh can, in two quick motions, lift 580 pounds over his head, the equivalent of a year-old heifer. Marathon world record holder Haile Gebrselassie can run a mile in an astonishing four minutes, 45 seconds, and repeat the performance 26 times in a row. Put either man on a tennis court or pitch them a 95-mile-per-hour fastball and they might whiff as badly as any weekend hacker.

Sports physiologists don't have a system to rank all athletes. University of Texas exercise physiologist Ed Coyle said doctoral students have tried in the past "only to have their professors shut them down after months of continuous work."

The Journal sought to identify the world's greatest athlete with an approach that, while not completely scientific, took a number of measures into account. A panel of five sports scientists and exercise physiologists was given a list drawn up by the Journal of 79 male athletes. Candidates had to be active in their sport and among the all-time best. (Women will be featured separately in a future article.)

The panel weighed individual performance stats, along with their subjective judgments about the relative difficulty of each sport, to give an overall grade to the athletes. (See "How We Did It" for details.) The judges graded athletes on speed, reflexes, stamina, coordination, as well as power, strength and size. The finalists, they said, exhibited a wide range of athletic skill in highly competitive environments.

There were some surprises. Tiger Woods, a dominant figure in professional sports, didn't crack the Top 10. Panelists said they didn't give golfers much weight when assessing overall athletic ability. Michael Phelps, one of the greatest U.S. swimmers of all time, also missed the top tier because, the judges said, swimmers generally don't perform well out of the water. Such endurance athletes as marathoners and Tour de France cyclists also failed to impress. Too one-dimensional, the panel said.