Stardate 20030916.1616

(Captain's log): Regarding this post about Anna Kournikova's failure to win a single major tournament in her career, Henry writes:

While it is true that Anna receives endorsements which exceed those of players ranked above her, I've always felt that the non-tennis media misstates the case concerning her actual results. At one time she was ranked in the top ten in the world in singles, and reached the Wimbledon semi-finals. Moreover, in doubles she was a multiple grand slam champion with Martina Hingis and, I believe, another partner or two. If she never plays again, many players would envy such a record. Frankly, the "not winning a tournament" was in her case a bit of a fluke, not proof that she was some sort of second rate player. It is more analogous to some of the great players in team sports whose teams never win a championship -- sometimes it happens.

It seems to me that there is no news story to point out that a very, very good international player (Kournikova) who happens to have looks and flair can make more in endorsements than the best player of the moment (S. Willaims). The story only "works" if the media implies that Kournikova is somehow barely qualified to be on the Tour.

Maybe the real issue is the somewhat bizarre status of women's professional sports -- odd that the women's pro soccer league, in a sport dominated by the U.S., which many young girls love to play (and parents love to have them play, by the way!), literally folds due to lack of support. When William "The Refrigerator" Perry received endorsements far in excess of his ability as an offensive lineman, I don't recall many (or any) stories which commented in any way on the endorsements he received as compared to some other NFL linemen.

From what I've read there's more to it. One of the reasons she didn't do better is that she wasn't willing to go through the kind of strength training she really needed. There's no question it would have improved her game, but it would have done so by building muscle mass, and she didn't want that to happen.

Most of the tennis players better than her are more muscular. They don't have the kind of muscle mass that men have or that women have who abuse steroids, but they do have more than what most people think of as "normal" for healthy women. Our cultural image of women doesn't require them to be weak, but it also doesn't include bulging muscles.

Every sport favors certain physical characteristics, and that tends to be reflected in the body shapes of the people who are best at it. In distance running excess muscle (particularly in the upper body) is a major disadvantage, because it increases the runner's weight and oxygen consumption without any compensating advantage. World class male marathon runners have somewhat muscular legs but always are very lightly built above the waist. Bicycle racers have similar builds, although not quite the same because the requirements of the sport are somewhat different. (Because they use their arms to support themselves as they ride, their upper bodies tend to be a bit more heavy.)

Generally speaking, those who are more heavily muscled tend to have worse stamina, and that's why distance runners and bicyclists don't tend to be really heavy-set. And that is why soccer players aren't usually really muscular. They're not lean and lanky like distance runners, but they're also not built like football players. In general, stamina and strength trade off, and for any given sport there's a sweet spot. In these, it's well over on the "stamina" side.

Gymnastics generally doesn't require much stamina, but emphasizes strength-to-weight ratio almost to the exclusion of anything else, because most of the events are based on the gymnast jumping or lifting their own bodies in various ways. The majority of men's gymnastics events emphasize upper body strength. Floor Exercise and Vault use both the arms and legs about equally, but the legs contribute much less to performance in the Single Bar, Double Bar, Pommel Horse and Rings. That's why top male gymnasts are very heavily muscled in the chest and arms and are extraordinarily lean, and also why they're all quite short. Gymnasts (like Bart Conner) are usually in the range of 5'6" or are even smaller. A taller man might be absolutely stronger, but he'll also weigh more and his limbs will be longer, and shorter men are better able to optimize the ratio of strength to weight.

On the other hand, competitive weight lifting rewards absolute strength in both arms and legs, and top weight lifters tend to be much larger and very heavily muscled everywhere. They're also usually somewhat flabby. The training regimen that gymnasts have to go through to keep fat off also reduces their strength somewhat, but for them it's a good tradeoff. But weight lifters don't care about that, and would be less competitive if they tried to do the same thing.

Football obviously emphasizes strength, but requires somewhat more stamina than weight lifting. But it's still well over on the strength end of the stamina-strength tradeoff, which is why football players don't look like soccer players. And different positions in football have different requirements. A lineman relies more on strength, a wide receiver more on stamina, and that's why receivers average shorter and less heavy.

And we all know what basketball players and jockeys and Sumo wrestlers look like.

Some of these things involve genetic predispositions, and different racial groups vary in many of them. Hispanics average shorter than blacks or Nordic whites, which is why they are particularly successful as jockeys. Blacks and northern European whites average taller and more muscular than other racial groups, which is why they are more successful in basketball and football. And that's why Hispanics are more common in the lower weight classes in Boxing.

As a practical matter, almost all of these kinds of successful sports figures are freaks (or "statistical outliers" as a friend of mine put it). That term is often used for people who are deformed, but I'm using it properly to refer to people who are well outside the norm statistically.

They usually begin with statistically unusual builds and physical characteristics, and then undergo training regimens which make them even less normal. When you meet someone who is a top performer in these kinds of sports, they stand out. They're all healthy, but they are all very far from what we think of as "normal". They will seem exotic.

Of all the major sports, the one which seems to have the most balanced requirements is baseball, and that's demonstrated by the very broad range of physical characteristics of the men who play it professionally, especially those who excel. I don't know of any sport where there's as much variation in height and weight, for example, and when you meet a baseball player, unlike most other sports professionals he generally looks like a man who is optimally developed without being freakish. Baseball requires both arm and leg strength about equally, since it involves running, throwing and batting. The one thing it doesn't require to the same extent as most other sports is stamina. Most baseball players who are on the field spend most of the time standing around, without the kind of sustained activity present in other sports. There's no single aspect of the game which particularly favors some particular physical trait over others, the way basketball favors height or the way jockeys benefit from slight build. That's why baseball players don't look like basketball players or jockeys.

It's also why, once societal racial barriers were finally eliminated, baseball ended up with a greater racial mix than most other sports. No single racial group has a genetic advantage. (Soccer and other sports which primarily emphasize stamina also tend to have a very broad racial mix, since no single racial group has a genetic advantage when it comes to stamina.)

Like Baseball, Tennis uses the legs and arms equally because the tennis player needs to run to the ball so he can hit it with his racket. However, Tennis requires a lot more stamina than Baseball, and that tends to filter the physical type a bit more, favoring somewhat less muscle. Nonetheless, male tennis players are not a lot more unusual looking than baseball players, and tend to be equally muscular in both arms and legs.

Women's gymnastics is critically different from men's gymnastics in that the legs are more important than the arms. Both are used, but women don't use their arms anything like as much as the men do. (Though the Uneven Bars events uses the arms more, it doesn't emphasize upper body strength the way the Rings or Double Bars do. Mainly what's important is the strength of the woman's grip.)

That's reasonable given the fundamental differences between men and women, and the events in gymnastics were deliberately designed to be different for the two sexes. But since strength-to-weight ratio is still critical, it turns out that girls are better adapted for gymnastics than women, and that's why there haven't been any women competing in "Women's" gymnastics in the Olympics for decades. (Also, the low amount of body fat that gymnastics rewards interferes with puberty in human females.)

In tennis, the fundamental physical optimization for women is the same as for men, since unlike gymnastics it's the same sport for both sexes. And as with the men, top women players need both strong arms and strong legs, in addition to great stamina.

Top women tennis players are therefore more heavily muscled than the average woman, especially in the arms. And because of that they look like freaks, like most sports professionals but unlike most male tennis players.

We tend to think of muscle mass as a male trait, and so it is. Most men put on a lot of muscle when they go through puberty; it's one of the side effects of the massive increase in testosterone levels which cause puberty.

The steroid drugs that some people (of both genders) use to increase their muscles are chemical analogues of testosterone and work by stimulating the receptors which testosterone naturally stimulates. Those receptors are present in everyone. Women who use steroids usually suffer a lot of peripheral health effects, because steroids also stimulate other testosterone receptors. This often causes their voices to deepen and in some cases stimulates beard growth. It's also very common for such drugs to interfere with menstruation and ovulation. Some of these effects stop once the drug is discontinued, but some of the changes are permanent.

Women can be quite strong, but they don't generally have the kind of bulgy muscles (especially in the arms) that we usually think of as a masculine trait. But even without drugs women can develop a lot more muscle in their arms than most women normally do if they're willing to put in the work, especially in weight training. Top female tennis players pretty much have to do so in order to compete.

This is another case where genetics plays a role, and generally speaking black women have an easier time of it than women of other racial groups (though like all things that varies enormously from individual to individual). The Williams sisters are large women to begin with, with heavy frames, and are very strong. Serena is 5'10" (178 cm) and weights 145 (66 kilograms); Venus is 6'1½" (187 cm) and weights 169 (77 kilos). They're superb tennis players and attractive women, but they aren't what most of us think of as "feminine" because we associate that kind of physical build with masculinity.

And they're both freaks. Both Venus and Serena are heavier and taller than the average American man, let alone the average American woman.

Kournikova is 5'8" (173 cm) and weighs 123 pounds (56 kg) which makes her taller than the average woman but places her well within the normal weight range for someone of her height. Her talent in the game got her to the level she was at, but any improvement beyond that would have required her to bulk up. That would have made her a more formidable tennis player. It also would have made her less "beautiful", and from what I've read, that was a sacrifice she wasn't willing to make. Her coaches wanted her to do it, and she refused.

Her partner Hingis is an inch shorter but 7 pounds heavier. Capriati is half an inch taller and 12 pounds heavier. Seles is 2 inches taller and 23 pounds heavier. None of those women are fat. Rather, they're more muscular than Kournikova was willing to make herself.

It's her choice, of course. It's her life and her body and her career. But there's good reason to believe that she could have improved further, enough to actually be able to win at least once or twice, if she'd been willing to build herself up.

But because she wasn't, she never did get good enough to take actually beat the other top players who did, and that means her career failure to win even one major singles tournament is not just a fluke. It shows that ultimately she wasn't dedicated enough to do what was needed to become a champion.

Others have written in to say that in doubles she and Hingis did actually win a couple of times, but I'm not persuaded that this is quite the same. There's more going on in doubles, and a good player can carry a less good one, or be carried by a better one, and excellent cooperation might compensate for inferior physical strength.

But eve