With the Summer Olympics underway, inevitably you know someone — or maybe you’re the one — who thinks they have what it takes to bring home the gold.
In fact, a 2021 survey showed 40% of Americans think they are fit enough to compete in at least one summer or winter Olympic sport.
Well, the Wall Street Journal has just made it easy to show how unreasonable that is.
The paper compared the times of various athletes who placed last in their respective events at national competitions (and chances are, even they are still fitter than you) versus the times being clocked by their Olympic counterparts.
For example: Team USA sprinter Sha’Carri Richardson could run an additional 50 meters before the average sprinter crosses the 100-meter mark.
Team USA’s Katie Ledecky swam the 400-meter freestyle in 4:00.86. An amateur competitive swimmer would take a minute and a half more to finish — that means Ledecky would be drying off and checking her social media while the average swimmer still had three lengths of the pool to go.
While finishing the New York City marathon is indeed an impressive achievement, the average finishing time for men was 4:26:40, which works out to an average pace of 10:10 per mile.
During February’s Olympic trials, marathon runner Conner Mantz clocked 26.2 miles in 2:09:05 — an average pace of 4:55 minutes/mile.
Long story short, stick to watching the Olympics from your couch.