Usain Bolt is too tall to be a world-class sprinter. Mike Friedman is too heavy to be an elite cyclist. Stefan Holm is too short to be champion high jumper, and Erin Donohue is too short and stocky to be a star middle-distance runner.
Yet all of them are Olympians, and athletic anomalies, bucking conventional wisdom and somehow rising to the same arenas as Michael Phelps, He Kexin and Dara Torres.
Friedman, 175cm tall and with a weight of 77kg, knows he does not look like most of his tall, lean teammates.
“I have an odd-shaped body, that’s for sure,” Friedman said in an interview here, days before he competed on Tuesday for the US track cycling team.
But he added: “I can time-trial pretty good for a fat kid.”
If such unusually shaped athletes can succeed at this elite level, exercise researchers have asked, then what does that say about the physical qualities needed to be an Olympian?
No one answer exists: These anomalous athletes each have ways of compensating for what others may consider the disadvantages of their dimensions. Yet their success also challenges the expectations of exercise science. There are logical explanations, but they go only so far.
The complete answer, said Edward Coyle, an exercise physiologist and director of the Human Performance Laboratory at the University of Texas, “is kind of a mystery.”
Different sports require different bodies. At one extreme are events like the hammer throw. Its athletes are huge — tall, powerful and thickly muscled, like the gold-medal winner Primoz Kozmus of Slovenia, who is 188cm tall and 112kg.
At the other extreme are distance and middle-distance runners. They are generally tiny, with twig-like legs and no obvious muscles on their upper bodies, the way Kenenisa Bekele of Ethiopia is. Bekele is 165cm and 56kg, and on Sunday he repeated as the Olympic champion in the men’s 10,000m race.
“Within a sport, athletes tend to be more alike than unlike,” said Robert Malina, an emeritus professor of kinesiology and health education at Texas.
There are, of course, those who do not fit the prototype, even at the Olympic level. Bolt, the sprinter from Jamaica, lowered his world record in the 100m on Saturday last week, sailing past his shorter, more muscular competitors.
Holm, a high jumper from Sweden, is just 180cm, “a dwarf” in a sport in which the average height is 193cm, said Francis Holway, an exercise and nutrition researcher in Buenos Aires.
Yet Holm was defending his gold medal when he competed on Tuesday night in the high jump, finishing fourth after clearing 2.32m.
Donohue, who placed eighth for the US on Thursday in the 1,500m heats, is 170cm and 65kg — heavier than all three men on the US Olympic team in her event.
Holway, who works for the soccer club River Plate, analyzed the variation in track events at the 2005 world championship in Helsinki, Finland. In general, he said, athletes in each event tended to have similar heights and weights. He said the greatest variability was among women throwers, perhaps because it is not as socially acceptable for women to take up the hammer throw or the shot put. With fewer athletes competing, those who have less-than-ideal body types have a greater chance.
Such competitive selection for elite athletes begins early, Malina said. Boys who mature early have a natural advantage, except for distance runners, who tend to mature late. Malina noted that maturing early was usually associated with muscle strength, speed and power.
Girls who mature late have an advantage because they tend to have more linear bodies, Malina said; they tend to be thinner, with longer legs and narrower hips. Those traits are an advantage in most women’s sports.
But, Coyle said, “you have to remember that every event is made up of different parts.”
Someone who has a physical disadvantage in one aspect of an event may be able to excel in another.
Bolt’s weakness is in the start of the race; he said that he and his coach were always working on it. He does not have the short, muscular legs that allow runners to burst out of the starting blocks and accelerate quickly. But he has an advantage later in the race because his longer legs let him create velocity for a longer period during each stride.
“If you can overcome your slow start, it is better to be tall,” Coyle said.
Bengt Saltin, a professor of human physiology at the University of Copenhagen, said Bolt was so fast that he suspected he might have a hidden physiological advantage. The way his leg muscle inserts into the bone may give him what Saltin called a longer lever arm, and that could give Bolt unexpected explosive strength.
“Fractions of a millimeter in the lever arm will make a difference,” Saltin said.
Holm, the high jumper, said people had been telling him he was too short for the sport since he was 15. But he loved jumping.
“It was the only sport I was really good at,” he said.
And he is stubborn.
“If someone tells me, ‘You can’t do that,’ I have to prove them wrong,” he said.
Being short, Holm said, allows him to run faster in his approach to the bar. And he is able to clear it, he added, by arching his body so he bends over the bar more than his taller competitors.
Holway noticed another attribute in Holm. He said Holm was less lanky than the other high jumpers, but the more powerful muscles in his lower body helped him jump higher. The ideal high jumper, Holway added, would look like Holm but be taller. The world-record holder for the high jump, Javier Sotomayor of Cuba, had that combination of traits, Holway said.
Donohue, the 1,500m runner, is perhaps the most puzzling to exercise researchers.
“She runs like a big person — heavily,” Coyle said. “There is less bounce in her step. She is kind of slow in reacting. She looks like she is muscling her way through the race.”
To understand how she does it, Coyle said, he would have to test her in a physiology lab. He suspects that she is unusually economical when she runs.
Donohue has her own thoughts on the matter.
She says she knows she is large for a runner, something that she cannot help noticing when she stands next to someone like her teammate Shalane Flanagan, who won bronze in the 10,000m on the first day of the athletics program.
“My shoulders are twice as wide as Shalane’s,” Donohue said of Flanagan, who is 165cm and 47kg. “There is no way I would ever look like that.”
But in the 1,500m, she said, speed and strength are important, so she can use the extra muscle that comes with her weight to push her way through a race.
She has been running since she was very young, she said, and has developed great endurance. She typically runs 130km-145km a week and has never had a serious injury.
Winning the 1,500m usually comes down to which runner can sprint the fastest at the end.
“I have the endurance to get to that point,” Donohue said, “especially against smaller girls who may not have the strength.”
Friedman, the cyclist, competes in track races, in which a bigger body and larger muscles can help. But thinner cyclists have the advantage of being more aerodynamic; their bodies catch less air, slowing them down less as they race.
In the Madison race on Tuesday at the velodrome in Laoshan, Friedman and teammate Bobby Lea, who is 188cm and 77kg, placed 16th.
Friedman said he was able to figure out how he compensated for his size in 2006, when he saw photographs of himself racing. He then understood why he had heard so many comments about his weird riding style.
“I crunch up in a little ball far on the tip of the saddle,” he said.
His short arms allow him to ride that way.
“I get really compact,” he added, noting that it was why his nickname was Meatball.
But what works in track races will not help in road races, in which being heavier can slow a rider on hills and mountains. And Friedman, who is also a road racer, says he knows he has to take off some weight, something that is always hard for him. But he has a plan to change his body for the road-racing season.
“I’m going to Colorado and I’m going to ride 100, 120 miles [160km to 190km] a day in the mountains,” he said, adding that he would do that day after day for a couple of weeks.
His goal, he said, is to lose 15 pounds (7kg).
“You can change a lot in two weeks,” Friedman said.
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