Sure, Michael Phelps won 8 gold medals this year, but he is only a swimmer. Jordan and Kobe are merely basketball players. And Babe Ruth played baseball. But the greatest all-around athlete to have ever lived was an Olympic gold medalist in the pentathlon and decathlon, a professional football player, a professional baseball player and a professional basketball player - and his name was "Bright Path" (Wa-Tho-Huk) - or more correctly "A path lighted by a great flash of lightning"

His "Christian" name was Jacobus Franciscus Thorpe. Born in "Indian Territory" in Oklahoma on May 28, 1888, he later attended the Carlisle Indian Industrial School in Carlisle, PA, where he was coached by Glenn Scobey "Pop" Warner, one of the most influential coaches in early American football history.

In 1912, he led Carlisle to the national collegiate football championship, scoring 25 touchdowns and 198 points. Carlisle's 1912 record included a 27-6 victory over Army. Remembering that game years later (1961), one of the Army players commented - "Here and there, there are some people who are supremely endowed. My memory goes back to Jim Thorpe. He could do anything better than any other player I ever saw" That Army player was President Dwight David Eisenhower.

The World's greatest all-around athlete will always be Jim Thorpe.

Ron

both in their prime,both equal training....

I don't think he could have ever compared with Thorpe's all around abilities at everything he ever attempted.

Ron

Jim Thorpe probably will always be the greatest all-around athlete, when judged by the standards of his own era (though you never know, some genetic freak might come along and excel in an even wider array of sports than he did). But if you judge athletes in absolute terms, you'd probably have to go with a more modern athlete. He was absolutely amazing in speed, strength, coordination, endurance, etc., by the standards of his era, and still quite good by modern standards, but he wouldn't be world class in any of those areas today. For example, his legendary Decathlon peformance converts to about 6564 points today, compared to the world record of 9026. In the 2004 Olympics, 30 decathletes registered scores and Thorpe's performance would have put him behind 29 of them.

An event-by-event look would show the same thing -- his time in the runs and distance in the throws and height in the vaults would be strong by collegiate standards, but wouldn't put him anywhere near the podium at the Olympics. Similarly, if he were to try to play football today, he'd find himself faced with much bigger, stronger, faster opponents. Judging by how he stacks up in the Decathlon, compared to modern competitors, if his football abilities were similarl, he'd be hard pressed to make a team in the NFL, much less to be a star.

That's not really a fair way to judge athletes (since, presumably, he'd have been far better with modern training methods, sports science, equipment, and nutrition), but I just wanted to point out that it does depend on whether we're measuring them in absolute terms or relative to their own eras. In absolute terms, the greatest athlete might be Roman Sebrle -- or, if you look outside the Decathlon, to professional sports, perhaps someone like Randy Moss (whose combination of strength and speed are such that he probably could have been a great decathlete, if he'd gone that way.)

Whichever context you use, I think the features you'd be looking for are great strength, endurance, speed, and agility. Most sports draw on all of those to some extent, but to make a case for someone as the greatest athlete ever, you'd want him to be great enough in all of them to make a respectable showing against specialists in those fields, which is what makes decathletes so amazing. As phenomenal as, say, Michael Jordan was, he'd embarrass himself in a power lifting contest or a Marathon, in a way a great Decathlete wouldn't. Take an elite Decathlete and Michael Jordan and have them compete in 20 randomly-selected sports that neither of them plays, and I'd bet on the Decathlete coming out on top in the majority of them.

Agreed. However, a great fast heavyweight like Ali (or Evander Holyfield, to take a lesser and more modern example) is another decent candidate for overall athleticism. To be great as a true boxer, at that weight class, you need an incredible combination of speed, full-body strength, agility, and endurance. There's a reason Ali and Holyfield have bodies like Greek Gods -- they needed beautifully symmetrical development of all their muscle groups, head to toe... and they needed to have that without a lot of fat, so they could be fast enough to get out of the way of the punches of more powerful opponents. Ali's one of those guys I think you could probably have plugged into a whole lot of other sports and, with a little training, he'd have quickly been quite good. With those nifty feet, his great vision, quick reaction time, and full-body strength, he'd have made a great running back, for example.

Speaking of running backs, Bo Jackson is another candidate. His career was cut short by injuries, but he was just such a freak of nature that he could have exceled in any of dozens of sports, if he'd chosen them.

especially the "super athletes" of today have all the advantages to excel which weren't available to those in Thorpe's era. The super athletes of today begin training at an early age and have all the advantage of diet and scientific training methods to maximize their abilities when they reach their peak.

But to reach that peak, most have to specialize to reach the pinnacle of any sport. As you noted, many would be "ordinary" if they suddenly had to compete against world class athletes in a different sport. So we are not likely to ever see another athlete who is so dominent in so many different sports. It is just a different world today.

Ron

Yep. Interestingly, it's like that even outside the world of athletics. The age of the Rennaissance Man has ended. To be world-class in almost anything you need to be a monomaniac. It's hard to picture some great inventor today also leaving behind a legacy of cutting-edge biological research and some eternal masterpieces of painting and sculpture, the way Leonardo did. It's rare to even have someone be at the top of two related fields, like rocket science and astrophysics. To distinguish yourself at a world-class level, these days, you have to obsessively specialize in one very small area, whether it be golf or organic chemistry. When civilization was still young, a guy like Aristotle could sit at the pinnacle of enough fields that today you'd find 30 different men in those roles.

True enough. Wtih the World, in general, becoming a more and more complex place, we are in the Era of the "specialist". Be it sports, medicine, science and almost any other human endeavor, the amount of specialized training needed to reach the top of your profession means that you need a single minded devotion to an ever decreasing scope of attention.

In sports, the "specialist" has raised the bar so high that others can not even hope to approach the same level of accomplishment without years of dedicated training.

Ron

I feel like I was born too late. I'd have made a good Rennaissance man. I'm a decent artist, a good lawyer, a much-better-than-average writer, a fairly gifted mathematician, a reasonably informed amateur historian, and I had natural skill with physics and engineering. But these days that just makes you a dilettante: not good enough at any single thing to make a real name for yourself there. To really distinguish myself, I would have had to lock onto a single area while young and then obsessively master it. It's hard to picture, these days, someone like WIlliam Blake (who painted masterpieces to illustrate his own poetry), much less Leonardo.

Take heart in being a Renaissance Man, personally I agree with Robert Heinlein as spoken IIRC through the voice of Lazarus Long;

"A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects."

Being a "Rennaissance Man" does have the benefit of basically giving you a larger world to live in. It pushes your horizons out in all directions, which is its own reward. I feel like I enjoy a lot of things at many different levels than I would if I were looking through the keyhole of hyper-specialization. But, whatever these personal rewards, there's no question that the society grants more prestige and the economy grants more financial rewards to the specialists.

I can be in the top 1% of humans in 100 different fields, and that makes me just a middle-of-the-packer, at best, among those who actually focus on each field. But if I obsessed over a single field, and became one of the best three or four people at that thing, even at the cost of being rock bottom in nearly every other field, the rewards would be huge. If you're one of the three or four best people on Earth at playing basketball, that's far more lucrative than being one of the 50 million best people on Earth at each of 100 different sports. Being one of the three or four best computer engineers in the world will make you a very rich man, even if you're practically retarded in every other area of life.