WHAT MAKES
AN
OLYMPIC
CHAMPION?
...
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 elite athlete is genetic. 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 fibers1
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
A
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WHAT MAKES
AN
OLYMPIC
CHAMPION?
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 90 percent
slow-twitch muscle fibers. These generate
energy efficiently and enable an athlete to
control fatigue and keep moving for a longer
period of time. When we exercise long or hard,
it’s common to experience tiredness, muscle
pain, and difficulty breathing. These feelings
are caused when the muscles produce high
amounts of a substance called lactate and can’t
remove it quickly enough. Athletes with many
slow-twitch muscle fibers seem to be able to
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.
For some Olympic competitors, size is
important. Most male champion swimmers
are 180 cm 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.
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 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 says
some of her success is due to her country’s
altitude (she trains at about 2,400 meters) and
some to her cultural background. As a child, she
had to run 10 kilometers to school every day.
“I’d be punished if I was late,” she says.
Although genes, 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 fatigue and
keep moving for long periods of 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 become 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 not only physically fit but psychologically
healthy as well. “They have to be,” says Sean
McCann, a sports psychologist at the Olympic
Training Center in the United States. “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 compliment2
me on the
beautiful splash.”
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