Comment by sethev
17 hours ago
Not sure that disproves the point :) Most people have never been anywhere close to competing with the top 6 athletes at a high school with ~2k students.
17 hours ago
Not sure that disproves the point :) Most people have never been anywhere close to competing with the top 6 athletes at a high school with ~2k students.
There are thousands of these high schools all across the USA. The top high schoolers in California so far this year are doing 1600m in 4m7s.
https://www.athletic.net/TrackAndField/rankings/list/168546/...
OK, so let's do the math. There's about 25k high schools in the USA. Let's suppose they all have a track team, and let's assume that they all have 5 team members who can break 04:30 for 1600m. Sure, at some schools that's too few, but at others it is too many.
That gives us 125k high schoolers in the USA who can break 04:30 for 1600m. There are about 18M high school students. So of just the high school population alone, about 0.7% of them can do this.
Assuming there are the 4x as many adults that can do this as there are high school students, that gives us slightly less than 0.2% of the total US population capable of this.
I rest my case.
We just have different ideas of what constitutes "mere mortals." 1 in 150 high school students or even 1 in 500 from the general population doesn't sound super human to me at all. Talented, yes but not god like.
What do you want most to mean here?