Humans like to measure things, and we like to be right… we insist on both nearly all the time, in fact. We often also like sport. Yet, in the sports I follow, there is no one player who can unequivocally be named the Greatest of All Time (GOAT).
The GOAT debate is always engaging, since it paints more of a picture of the person or persons making their case, rather than the athlete or team they are advocating for.
To my mind, there’s no real way to find one athlete who is better than all others, because no athlete ever has the same journey. Why is this important? Because a girl playing sport will always have more barriers to performance than a boy of the same age, socioeconomic status, and innate talent. Kids starting off playing the same sport will have very different paths by being born in different countries- and I’m not even speaking of the differences between developed and not so developed nations – think of the difference in coaching availability for a young tennis player in Spain to one in, say, New Zealand.
Let’s talk about what makes an athlete good.
i. Win-loss % – The most important standard to determine whether an athlete is good or not. Clearly, athletes who play team sports have a disadvantage, and their personal records will determine whether they have contributed to the team’s cause through their career or not.
ii. Inherent Talent – How fast a person can run, how their body works, how they process the knowledge about sport and apply it through the filter of their own personality are all usually inbuilt, and very individual to any person.
iii. Coachability – Are they open to learning new skills?
So aside from exceptional results in the criteria discussed above, what makes me think of a player as a great, or even a GOAT aspirant? Here’s my (nominal) list:
● Biomechanics – How an athlete moves is imprinted in peoples minds. All athletes in a sport learn the same movements, but how those movements interact with any of their
● Motivation – The best of the best are self motivated, and much more so than the regular person. They constantly wish to improve, and they work to do it.
● Ambition – The more ambitious an athlete is, the higher up they climb.
● Focus – They have their eyes on the prize and nothing can distract them from it.
● Sportspersonship – They’re not nasty. They care enough about their sport that they understand their opponent’s effort. Also, they enjoy their opponents’ successes, at least purely from a love-of-their-sport point of view, even if it encumbers them with additional scoreboard pressure.
● Transcendence – Athletes who transcend their team, their sport, their nationality. They have fans across all lines.
● Provocating other fandoms – If you know, you know. Athletes have reached the pinnacle of their sport infuriate fans of other GOAT contenders in the same sport, especially if they play in overlapping timelines.
● Popularity – They bring new fans and new players to their sport.
● They transform their sport – they change how their sport is played. The way they approach the sport and play it is so transformative, their colleagues change how they play and coaches and think tanks have to alter their baselines and expectations from other players.
While all spoortspersons are (correctly) judged on results, there are some who get better results. My second list are the qualities that propel good athletes to great ones.
Chasing Tales 