I dont understand why you need clarity. An athlete plays a sport, and the best is determined by what you do and how you play in that umbrella. It is obvious its not a measure of athletic talent. How is it not obvious?
Michael Phelps ranked the best athlete of the 21st Century by ESPN
- Thread starter Jplaya2023
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Ryan Lochte lol. Breh won 12 Olympic medals, set world records in multiple events, had his own reality show, and was such a doofus that most people are gonna remember him more for his fukkups and failures rather than his swimming.
Most people in their mid-40s or older will remember Matt Biondi too, he was a huge name in those '88 Olympics, and Mark Spitz because he was the "past great" whose name was always tied to Biondi. But that's about it. There was some giant Russian who I remember was always completely unbeatable in the sprints but it's not like I can remember the name (looked it up, it was Aleksandr Popov).
Always giving themselves unearned merit
NOBODY GIVES A fukk ABOUT SWIMMING
BUT I KNEW THEY WERE GONNA
FIND SOME WAY TO GIVE IT TO A WHITE PERSON.
SHOULDA BEEN FLOYD.
HOW THE fukk FLOYD AT 25
BEFORE PPL LIKE DIANA TAURASI?
This isn't crazy, but I would have went Tiger or Serena over him.
Rest of the list is crazy though
Rest of the list is crazy though
I mean, sports like tennis or golf don't have "world championships". They have majors and they only have four a year. Phelps was winning more medals at a single world championship than a golfer or tennis player could win majors in a year, sometimes two.
That said pretty much every tournament they played every year is essentially a championship. They're facing the best in the world every time. Looking at it that way, both Serena and Tiger have much more than Phelps' 49 individual international title wins. I do realize there are non-Grand Slam tournaments that some of the best players voluntarily sit out. This isn't meant to be a 1 to 1 comparison. Just a way to compare a few hard to compare sports in terms of winning.
krackdagawd
Inspire.
Mayweather 
with an elite O-Line
again, it should go to single player, not someone who played for a team.
give Brady a shytty defense, and a shytty line and he aint doing shyt but getting concussed.
SImone, Tiger, Phelps, Mayweather did all of this on their own. single talent.
Saysumthinfunnymike
VOTE!!!
Brady's teams won a lot. He didn't play defense. He didn't play special teams. He wasn't the coach. Barry Bonds is the most dominant player in team sports maybe of all time...
Athleticism the way you're talking about is difficult to define. By what criteria do you think Tiger or Phelps isn't athletic?
Phelps in his prime was training six hours a day burning 1000 calories an hour. He had to eat 10,000 calories as his normal daily diet just to maintain 8% body fat. In the 2008 Olympics, he competed in 17 races over 9 consecutive days.
Swimmers have zero margin for error - they can't gain a little bit of extra weight or slack off on game day because they're playing a weak team. They can't go out there slow and still get the win cause their o-line is giving them more than enough time. They have to be at the absolute peak, every time, because winning is measured in tenths of a second (sometimes hundredths) and if you're only at 95% that day, you will lose.
On the other hand, this is the guy who ran a 5.24 forty at the combine and had a 24-inch vertical (and that's when he was a fringe QB candidate desperate to get drafted, it's not like he was a known quantity dogging the tests cause he didn't need them).
Of course, by mid-career he'd improved dramatically, right?
I'm clowning, of course there were better pics and Tom Brady is a great athlete by some measures. But it's hard to arbitrarily claim he's a better athlete than Phelps just because he plays a sport that's more popular in America. Don't give me that "evading defenders" bs when he has five guys solely committed to protecting him - in any actual 1-on-1 physical competition of any sort, Brady would get destroyed by every single defender in the NFL.
Tiger Woods's training day was to run four miles, do 40 minutes of stretching, two hours of lifting, then hit balls for 2-3 hours, then practice his short game, and end the day with another four mile run. Then sometimes he would play tennis or basketball in the evenings for additional cardio. He was regularly competing at the Navy Seals BUD/S obstacle course, running the combat stress shooting course, training in combat martial arts, doing the PT Pyramid workout (one pullup, two pushups, three situps, then two, four, six, up to 10, 20, 30, then back down), running four miles at 8.5 minutes each in combat boots. Woods could bench press 255 lbs at just 6'1" 185 lbs, which is likely similar to what Brady could bench even though Brady outweighed him by 30 pounds.
This is Tiger Woods right now at 48, after all his back/knee injuries and car accidents and multi-year rehabs, and he still looks more ripped than Tom Brady did at 38.
Simone Biles?
What you did in your sport. Its always been that way.