The Multi Sport Athlete Phenomenon
The world of professional sports is so competitive and fraught with difficulty that most people can only dream of ever playing professionally in one sport. Then there are those rare athletes that not only excel at one sport but are very good at playing two different sports or even three. It takes an unbelievable amount of hard work and determination in order to excel at one sport and much more than that to do it for two different sports. How do some people achieve greatness in different sports while others cannot even manage with one?
The ability to excel at two different sports is a combination of genetics and hard work. It inadvertently happens that the multi sport athlete, as those that can play more than one sport are called, have an athletic parent. They get the ability from their parentage but then the strength and fortitude to work well at different sports takes years of practice. Many multi sport athletes have come and gone; some from the late 1800s and early 1900s and some more recent. Who are some of these amazing athletes and who is the greatest out of them?
If we look way back in time to the early 1900s, we find arguably the most versatile and talented female athlete of all time. Lottie Dod, played many different sports and excelled at them all. Her sport of choice was tennis and she won Wimbledon five times, the earliest when she was just 15 years old. Leaving tennis she started playing field hockey and was the pioneering force behind women's hockey. Not only was she great at these two sports, she was also an accomplished golfer and archer. In 1904, she won the national championship in golf and then in 1908, she won a silver medal at the Olympics in archery, (Andrews, E., 2010). This amazing woman puts today's athletes to shame with the sheer amount of sports she excelled in. It is interesting to think about how rich and famous she would be if she was alive today and competing in the same sports she did then.
Moving to modern times arguably one of the best multi sports athletes of the modern era is Deion Sanders. Deion played American football and baseball. He simultaneously played in the NFL and the MLB between the years of 1989 to 2001. If that was not enough he was very good at both sports and is the only athlete till this day to play in both the World Series of baseball and the NFL Super Bowl, (Robinson, L., 2009). People have said that he would have been a superior athlete if he would have chosen one sport and focused on that, this is a valid point but you cannot stop someone from playing in two different fields if they want to.
Moving back to the old school, we come to maybe the greatest multi sport athlete of all time; Jim Thorpe. Not only did Thorpe play football professionally in the NFL and Major League baseball but he also won two Olympic gold medals in track and field events. After winning his medals he went and played American football for eight years and his team was named the best team of 1923 when he was playing for it. Not one to take it easy, Thorpe then went and played six seasons of professional baseball in the MLB. He had his best year in baseball in 1927 when he hit an amazing .327 for his team, the Boston Braves, (Pace, F., 2009). This type of an athlete is only born once in a lifetime and sometimes not even.
Training and conditioning are very different for a multi sport athlete. When two different sports are involved, or even more, an athlete has to dedicate enough time to either sport in order to produce the results they are looking for. Some things can be overlapped such as fitness training, which works in all sports and also nutritional requirements which would be the same for most sports.
Due to the fact that time is an issue for a multi sport athlete, strength training can take the form of manual resistance strength training exercises which can be done anywhere and do not need the athlete to go to the gym, (Strength Conditioning, 2010). It is very interesting to note that even though some requirements are the same for multi sport athletes as single sport ones, some have to be adapted and modified.
Maybe as time goes by we will see more multi sport athletes emerging in the world of sports. They are very rare though, and getting rarer because of the fact that sports today is about big money and some heavy duty competition. The more people waiting in the wings the harder it is for a multi sport athlete to come forward. In this regard the athlete has to be exceptionally good in order to succeed. We can all hope that the day will come when we see another Lottie Dod or Deion Sanders or even someone as good as Jim Thorpe emerge and take their place among the great multi sports athletes that have come and gone.
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