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How does a person
become an Olympic
champion—someone
capable of winning
the gold? In reality,
a combination of
biological, environmental,
and psychological factors,
as well as training and
practice, all go into
making a super athlete.
Perhaps the most important factor involved
in becoming an elite1 athlete is genetics .
Most Olympic competitors are equipped
with certain physical characteristics that
differentiate them from the average
person. Take an elite athlete’s muscles, for
example. In most human skeletal muscles
(the ones that make your body move),
there are fast-twitch fibers2 and slow-twitch
fibers. Fast-twitch fibers help us move
quickly. Olympic weightlifters, for example,
have a large number of fast-twitch fibers
in their muscles—many more than the
average person. These allow them to lift
hundreds of kilos from the ground and
over their heads in seconds. Surprisingly,
a large, muscular body is not the main
requirement to do well in this sport. It is
more important to have a large number
of fast-twitch fibers in the muscles.
The legs of an elite marathon runner,
on the other hand, might contain up to
1Elite refers to the most powerful, rich, or talented people within a particular group.
2Fibers are thin, thread-like pieces of flesh that make up the muscles in your body.
Weightlifters such as U.S. national champion
Shane Hamman have incredibly strong leg muscles. What Makes an
Olympic Champion?
clear the lactate from their muscles faster as
they move. Thus, the average runner might
start to feel discomfort halfway into a race.
A trained Olympic athlete, however, might not
feel pain until much later in the competition.
A crowd of 30,000 runners of all ages heads streams
across a bridge during the New York City marathon.
16Unit 1 Sport and Fitness
For some Olympic competitors, size is
important. Most male champion swimmers are 180 cm (six feet) or taller, allowing them to reach longer and swim faster. For both male and female gymnasts, though, a smaller size and body weight mean they can move with greater ease and are less likely to suffer damage when landing on the floor from a height of up to 4.5 meters (15 feet).
Some athletes’ abilities are naturally enhanced by their environment. Those raised at high altitudes in countries such as Kenya, Ethiopia, and Morocco have blood that is rich in
hemoglobin. Large amounts of hemoglobin carry oxygen 3 around the body faster, enabling these athletes to run better. Cultural factors also help some athletes do well at certain sports. Tegla Loroupe, a young woman from northern Kenya, has won several marathons. She attributes some of her success to her country’s altitude (she trains at about 2,400 meters or 8,000 feet) and some to her cultural background. As a child, she had to run ten kilometers to school every day. “I’d be punished if I was late,” she says.
Although genetics, environment, and even
culture play a part in becoming an elite athlete, training and practice are needed to succeed. Marathon runners may be able to control time, but they must train to reach and maintain their goals. Weightlifters and gymnasts perfect their skills by repeating the same motions
again and again until they are automatic . Greg Louganis, winner of four Olympic diving gold medals, says divers must train the same way to be successful: “You have less than three
seconds from takeoff until you hit the water, so it has to be reflex. You have to repeat the dives hundreds, maybe thousands of times.” Training this way requires an athlete to be
1B Pushing the Limit 17
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not only physically fit but psychologically healthy as well. “They have to be,” says Sean McCann, a sport psychologist at the Olympic Training Center in the U.S. “Otherwise they couldn’t handle the
training loads we put on them. [Athletes] have to be good at setting goals,
generating energy when they need it, and managing anxiety.”
How do athletes adjust to such intense pressure? Louganis explains how he learned to control his anxiety during a competition: “Most divers think too much . . . ,” he says. “They’re too much in their heads. What worked for me was humor. I remember thinking about what my
mother would say if she saw me do a bad dive. She’d probably just compliment 4 me on the beautiful splash.”5
Kenyan athletes such 3 Oxygen is a colorless gas in the air which is needed by all plants and animals.4
I f you compliment someone, you say something polite to them to show that you like their apprearence, or approve of what they have done.5
A splash is the sound made when something hits water or falls into it.