Box 6.2 Does size really matter? Bigger is not always better in sport!In the 1999 World Cup in rugby, Jonah Lomu, New Zealand’s giant winger, scored a
remarkable try against England when he surged through/our tackles before crossing the
line. Clearly, his impressive athletic hardware equipped him with prodigious strength and
speed for this task. But is bigger always better in sport? An article in The Economist
(1999) questions this assumption.
At first glance, few could argue against the claim that size matters in competitive
sport. After all, it seems that today’s athletes are generally taller, stronger and fitter than
their predecessors at the beginning of the last century. Perhaps it is this fact that explains
why so many of the athletic records set in the early 1900s have been smashed a century
later. For example, whereas the men’s world record for throwing the hammer in 1900 was
51.10 metres (set by an Irish athlete called John Flanagan), it was 86.74 metres in 2000
(set by a Russian performer named Yuri Sedykh)—a figure which represents an increase
of almost 70 per cent in the distance involved! Further anecdotal evidence to support the
“bigger is better” theory comes from the sport of baseball. For example, the legendary
Mark McGwire, who set a record for hitting home runs, is about the same height as Jonah
Lomu (1.96 m) and is only marginally lighter (weighing 250 Ib or 113 kg) than the rugby
star. But despite these two examples—Lomu and McGwire—bigger is certainly not
always better in sport. First, big athletes may be clumsier than their smaller counterparts.
For example, in sports like tennis and squash, tall players may have trouble in playing
shots aimed at their feet. In addition, tall or strong players may tend to neglect other parts
of their game. So, in modem tennis, despite the increasing prevalence of tall (over 6 feet)
stars, short players like Andre Agassi and Lleyton Hewitt have won as many, if not more,
Grand Slam titles than their taller counterparts. Of course, there are distinct advantages to
being tall and strong in sport. For example, big athletes tend to have large lungs and
powerful hearts—physical assets which increase their cardiovascular efficiency in
pumping oxygenated blood around the body. In addition, larger limbs are advantageous
in certain sports. For example, in swimming, long arms can give an athlete leverage for
speedy passage through the water. Similarly, long legs are essential for high-jumpers. Of
course, there are also sports in which a small stature and a wiry physique are mandatory.
Accordingly, marathon runners tend to be slight, if not scrawny, in build and they usually
have “slow twitch” muscles. Likewise, successful jockeys are usually small, light, wiry
and strong.
Second, there is little or no empirical evidence that top-class sports performers possess
hardware characteristics, such as unusually fast reflexes or extreme visual acuity, that
differentiate them significantly from less successful counterparts (A.M. Williams and
Davids, 1998). For example, elite adult athletes do not perform consistently better than
novices on tests of visual abilities (A.M.Williams, 2002b). The same principle seems to
apply also to younger athletes. Thus Ward and Williams (2003) found that elite and sub-
elite soccer players were “not meaningfully discriminated on nonspecific tests of visual
function throughout late childhood, adolescence or early adulthood” (p. 108). More
generally, there is little reliable evidence of expert-novice differences in simple reaction
What lies beneath the surface? Investigating expertise in sport 159