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Elite Athlete

I am looking for a definition of an Elite Athlete.  I am curious as to if an elite athlete has certain feats that they have to be able to accomplish.  Can an Elite Athlete do 100 pushups consecutively and 20 pullups?  Would it be a person that can swim a mile, run a 5k at any time or bike 40 miles?  Can an elite athlete bench press 150% of his body weight ten times?  Does an elite athlete have a body fat percent under 9%?

Or is an Elite Athlete someone that excels at a particular sport.  An athlete is simply defined as someone that participates in sport regularly.  To that extent is a Hood Workout or Crossfit a sport?  Bodybuilding and weightlifting are sports. 

For every Super Model there are thousands of Models.  For every Elite Athlete there are probably thousands of regular athletes. 

How would you define an Elite Athlete?

This entry was posted on Tuesday, August 5th, 2008 at 2:15 pm and is filed under Motivation, Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

4 Responses to “Elite Athlete”

  1. jw Says:
    August 5th, 2008 at 10:47 pm

    Well, why don’t you look up what elite means in a dictionary, and then apply that to an athlete.

  2. LeGo Says:
    August 6th, 2008 at 12:32 am

    True, so in that case, the word elite would mean dominant. So basically someone that dominates in a sport.

  3. thefightgeek Says:
    August 6th, 2008 at 2:45 pm

    I think the word ‘elite’ has lost a lot of it’s original meaning.

    IMHO an elite athlete is one that performs consistently better than 95% of his or her peers (or thereabouts).

    I think Hood workouts and crossfit are training methods not sports.

    cheers

  4. LeGo Says:
    August 6th, 2008 at 2:56 pm

    I was trying to put a bit of metrics to the performance. Like what is that 5% of the population able to do that others are not. Where does the bar get set? I like that definition though and agree with it. What I am trying to do is define my goals with a word. I thought Elite Athlete would be what I wanted to become, but I could not define it.

    I agree that crossfit and hood workouts are not (traditional) sports (and I am probably playing with semantics too much), but they do become competitive. A lot of the hood workouts that we see on the pullup bar really look like the uneven bars in the olympics. I would love to see a hood story in the olympics. And most crossfit events are done for time/competition. Ping pong is going to be in the olympics…

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