You mentioned Ali. Ali is a far better fighter than the current crop of HWs. A prime Ali would be a clear favourite against Joshue, Fury or Wilder. Not to mentioned Fraizer, Norton, Patterson, Holmes, Shavers, Foreman, Tyson, Bowe, Holyfield, Lennox so on.
Actually I think Lennox would beat him - Ali's habit of trying to slip by leaning back would be a very bad tactic against Lennox. Probably wouldn't be good against Vitali Klitschko either, though Ai's footwork would have kept him out of trouble for the most part there. And that's assuming there hasn't been the same kinds of increases in speed and strength in guys like Lennox or the Klitschko's as there have been in measured sports.
I'll grant you the baseball and basketball examples, because I don't know anything about it. Still, if following the trend of other sports, most of it is part improved living conditions, part technology and part getting the specific body types for a sport right.
I agree that's a big part of it - same as MMA from 1992 to 2017. But in basketball, baseball, hockey, and NA football (don't enough about soccer to comment) there's also been huge refinement in technique from say 1990 to today. Coaching, even for kids (perhaps especially for) has become much more scientific, much more efficient. Again, same as MMA.
You mentioned Owens time would lose in most high school races, yet you fail to realise the context. I've written about this extensively before, but I'll gladly do it again. Owens ran on a cinder/dirt track, without starting blocks (basicly holes in sand) and with shit shoes. Rest assured that if he had ran today, he would have been one of the best in the world. This video talks about that and more, it's pretty interesting:
I don't think the would have beat Bolt necessarily, because Bolt is out of this world.
With today's training and equipment he'd definitely be one of the greatest - that's the whole point in looking at people in terms of their time and conditions, rather than by absolute standards. By absolute standards his times are slow, even for cinder tracks. Put Owens in todays, with today's coaching, nutrition and so on and he'd be one of the best. Give him access to some of the PED's people have been caught with in track and he'd be right up there with Bolt. But again, that's my point. You have to look at the best of a time/conditions, not comparing them in absolute terms.
I'm not talking about some inherent athleticism or ability, I think those are such fuzzy notions that they're meaningless. I'm talking about direct comparison of performance, and I'm saying its only meaningful to compare athletes to their contemporaries, because conditions change so dramatically.
Speaking about T&F and the supposedly MASSIVE increase in athleticism, don't you find it odd that the mens long jump hasn't been beaten since 1968, hammer throw since 1988 and high + triple jump since 1996? Looking at the womens records, it's even more pronounced. Half of the world records in athletics are 20-40 years old. There is nothing new going on in the T&F world. If anything, other sports are only catching up.(
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_Olympic_records_in_athletics)
Several studies suggest that we just about reached our physiological potential around 70/80s, and that scientific and technological progress is the thing putting us over the edge.
Absolutely. Which again backs my point - comparison's are only meaningful between same conditions and times, because different scientific/technological means play a huge role in absolute comparisons. Athleticism? I've no idea what that means. Outcome? Well, that can be measured, but never under even close to identical conditions when years have passed between. So comparison is only useful relative to time period.
The physics example is poor. Sure, some random dude can solve problems that Newton and Einstein couldn't, but that is ENTIRELY because of them. Einstein basicly turned everything we know about physics on its head. He changed the entire landscape of the universe. Yes, knowledge, theories and evidence is accumulated, and thus we're standing on the shoulder of giants and can increasingly solve more challenging problems, but that doesn't speak to our ability and it's not relevant to the athlete discussion.
The point actually carries over to MMA. A major reason MMA technique has evolved is because of what was discovered by the best fighters of eariler times in MMA. For example, post-Fedor MMA looks different than pre-Fedor MMA for no small part because of what Fedor did - others copied him, just as they copied all the best.
Point being, the improvement of athleticism and evolution of athletes is vastly overrated. It is however, in a sport like MMA, much more organised now that it was 20 years ago.
I've never talked about athleticism, because I think its a very hard to define quantity. Any high level coach in any sport will tell you the biggest determiner of high level success is mental - meaning the nervous system. The next is coordination - again the nervous system. But almost no common definition of athleticism includes the nervous system. I've only talked about performance, because that can be measured and/or compared.
Most sports have been analysed to a great extent the last couple of decades, using computer aided technologies that were never possible before. This has led to significant improvements in performance. Does that have anything to do with athleticism? I've no idea, the word is too vague to be useful. Does it mean performances are better? Yes. Should that play a role in comparing the greatness of different eras? No, greatness is related to success against contemporaries. To take an extreme example, the Roman Legions would be slaughtered by any modern army. Most people would say they were a great army, but on Sherdog people would say they were can crushers.
