I’ve often been struck by the fact that, although being tall is considered an advantage in most American sports, the greatest (or second greatest, depending on who you ask) player of all time in the most popular sport on earth — Maradona — was well below average in height (he’s 5’5″, while the average Argentinian male is about 5’8″). And that’s always made me wonder about what advantages shorter people might have in various arenas. So this caught my attention:
If a person touches your toe and your nose at the same time, he says, “you will feel those touches as simultaneous. This is surprising because the signal from your nose reaches your brain before the signal from your toe. Why didn’t you feel the nose touch when it first arrived?”
It may be that our sensory perception of the world has to wait for the slowest piece of information to arrive, Eagleman says.
[….]Because for the taller person it takes a tenth of a second longer for the toe-touch to travel up the foot, the ankle, the calf, the thigh, the backbone to the brain, the brain waits that extra beat to announce a “NOW!” That tall person will live his sensory life on a teeny delay (at least as regards toe-touching). This, of course, could apply to all kinds of lower-extremity experiences — cold or heat against the skin, tickles, rubs, hitting a soccer ball — the list goes on and on.
Eric U.
I was watching my son’s soccer game the other day, and I was struck by how 3 of the 4 best players on the field were short. As in so short they looked like they were in the wrong age group. The other kid is a little above the average height, but his knees will probably fail when he’s 20, so that doesn’t count.
Bill E Pilgrim
That must explain the delay in reacting when well-endowed porn stars have sex.
I thought they were just bad actors.
“Does that feel good?”
“Just a sec, I’ll tell you… ah, there. Yep, great.”
Davis X. Machina
Peter Crouch.
Brick Oven Bill
Mayans were not made tiny by the hand of God, in my opinion. Do not believe everything you hear in home-school.
I think it is because Mayans evolved in the rain-forest. I have tried to climb through these rain-forests on several occasions, and not being short myself, found it very hard to maneuver. This would have made it hard for me to feed myself in the rain-forest environment, back in the day. The littler guys scampered around pretty good though.
I most likely would not have made it to puberty, and my particular genetic code would have quite possibly vanished from this earth, forever. It seems to me that my theoretical shorter friends back then would have been more likely to propagate their genetic codes.
If there were a sport about collecting food in rain-forests, I suspect that Mayans would excel at it. Bushmen too.
Cerberus
There is also the aspect that tall people tend to be more awkward in finessed lower body movement, so while a tall person may have the advantage for things like headers, he won’t have the ball control skills of a shorter man.
That’s why Peter Crouch, the giraffe from England, is an exception rather than the build of most midfielders and strikers.
It’s also often why height is more seen in defenders and goalkeepers, because there is less need for finesse on the ball and more of a role for leveraged strength and height for headers and jumping across goal.
But I hadn’t thought about the toe nerve thing as a potential aspect as well. Interesting theory.
Phaedrus
I’ve also found that smaller people seem to hold together better – their knees work longer and they don’t seem as injury prone as big galoots.
wasabi gasp
You just put the hand of God to a topic ripe for contrarian masturbation.
Not to mention how tiny that might make some things appear.
DougJ
No, I put it up because it’s the name of one of the most famous goals Maradona ever scored! Maybe the most famous goal in soccer history (probably not, but it’s in the top 10).
Cpl. Cam
This is ridiculous of course. Sensory perception travels through your nervous system at virtually the speed of light. If you think it takes light “a tenth of a second” longer to go a few extra feet you need some remedeal physics courses ASAP.
wasabi gasp
@DougJ: Ah, my complete lack of knowledge about almost anything sports related has just kicked me in the ass.
burnspbesq
Maradona: cheating drug firms.
Diego Simeone: the greatest diver of all time.
And thugs too numerous to catalog.
Argentina is the Dick Cheney of international football.
Halteclere
The advantages a shorter soccer player has are similar to the advantages a shorter point guard in basketball has, at least in terms of the dribbling in each sport. Just as a basketball spends less time out of the hands of a short point guard when dribbling (the time the ball takes to go from the hand to the floor and back to the hand), a shorter soccer player touches a ball more often when racing down the field than a taller player. In both cases there are more opportunities (over a given slice of time) for the player to make corrections on the ball and less opportunity for someone else to steal the ball.
Unlike basketball players, though, soccer players don’t have to shoot over a taller opponent.
Soccer, baseball and maybe Hockey are the only sports I can think of where height is not a significant indicator of player success.
ColoRambler
Nerve impulses travel a lot slower than the speed of light. A typical speed range is about 1 to 100 meters/second depending on various things.
Dennis-SGMM
Short People
They got little noses, tiny little teeth,
They wear platform shoes on their nasty little feet…
Thlayli
The current holder of the title “Best Player in the World”, Cristiano Ronaldo, is 6-1 — which is enormous by soccer standards.
sgwhiteinfla
Bo Jackson was the greatest athlete ever.
That is all.
Wile E. Quixote
Shorter people can handle high G’s better because the distance between their heart and their brain is less. This is one of the reasons you don’t see a lot of really tall astronauts or test pilots out there, it’s not just because aircraft cockpits and space vehicles have small interiors.
in canaduh
Short people are also more bitter in general. I dont trust short people
Wile E. Quixote
@Cpl Cam
No my friend, I think that you need to take some remedial physics courses ASAP, along with a remedial spelling course and a remedial course in biophysics. Nerve impulses are electrochemical in nature, not purely electrical. Neural propagation speeds in myelinated neurons can reach 100 meters per second, neural propagation speeds in unmyelinated nerve cells travel at about 1 meter per second.
Or you could just read back issues of The Flash that had the “Flash Facts” section that compared how fast various things moved. I remember learning about the speed of neural propagation this way back in the 1970s (And who says that comics can’t be educational?).
Even if nerve impulses travelled at the speed of light distance a shorter distance because of height could still be a factor. My boss at the UW used to have a piece of wire about a foot long on a piece of paper signed by Admiral Grace Murray Hopper. Hopper, a mathematician and computer scientist would hand these out to people as the physical representation of a nanosecond because light will travel about one foot in one billionth of a second. As chip speeds have gotten faster and gone into the gigahertz range component placement has become more important. If you had a computer motherboard where the signals to and from the memory had to travel over a distance of a foot you’d be introducing a delay of 1 nanosecond into every memory access, which doesn’t sound like much, but considering that the average CPU speed these days is 2Ghz, which translates into a clock of 0.5 nanoseconds that can really affect things.
Crusty Dem
Arrgh. The eternal BS of the short neuroscientist. The extra 0.4 m between someone very tall and very short is neurologically trivial. Since all the initiated action is happening on myelinated motorneuron axons travelling at ~100 m/s, you’re talking about a temporal delay of 2-4 ms for sensory information or motor output (and since the muscles are in the thighs and calves, it’ll be even less than that). Considering that you’ll be reacting visually to the ball (in the soccer example) and the minimum delay in the visual system is on the order of 100 ms, I don’t think the 2-4 ms are going to make a huge difference..
Sarcastro
“Football is not for ballerinas!”
Claudio Gentile was my hero.
Not even God could score on the Azzurri when Juve’s enforcer knocked Him on His ass every time He crossed midfield.
LeaningTowardUndecided
I sincerely hope neuroscientist David Eagleman’s research budget is as short as the value of his neurobabbling in the cited article. File under “Too Trivial to Matter.”
TruthOfAngels
The greatest? Pssh. Not even the greatest Argentinian.
That was Alfredo di Stefano.
oh really
I wish you had informed my knees of that observation. Five knee operations and a lifetime on opiates tells me there is a flaw here somewhere. In your on-going research you can include me as not supporting your hypothesis.
Of course, now that I’m getting old and SHORTER, my knees keep getting worse, not better.
On the other hand:
Great, now I can stop envying the Dutch, since they’ll all be dying in their thirties before long.
Medrawt
As primarily a basketball fan, height in and of itself – the actual distance the top of your skull is above the floor – isn’t that important. Height’s instead a convenient shorthand that does a decent job of compressing the things that actually matter: how much you weigh, how long your wingspan is, how high you can jump (which, itself, what’s really important is how high you can reach when jumping, not how far your feet get off the floor). None of those are things that matter in futbol; weight and bulk do matter in football, plus you do have QBs (and point guards) with greater height enjoying a visibility advantage to improve their decision making. I can’t speak for baseball overall, but aren’t pitchers trending bigger? The prototypical ace of the last twenty years, at least, is basically a hoss – 6’4″ or 6’5″, 250 lbs. But again I assume that’s because those bigger guys (are perceived to?) have more durable shoulders.
Andy K
@Thlayli:
Pretty tall for a guy who plays near the front, but fullbacks are generally taller. Chelsea’s John Terry is 6’2″. Ronaldo’s teammates Rio Ferdinand (6’2 1/2″), John O’Shea (6’3″) and Nemanja Vidic (6′ 2″) are all taller.
And when Man Utd. faces Barcelona on Wednesday for the Champions League title, Ronaldo will be seeing a lot of his former Man Utd. teammate Gerard Piqué (6’4″).
Andy K
@Medrawt:
Arm strength has more to do with stamina, so a sub-six footer with a strong arm can theoretically pitch as deep into a game or a season as Randy Johnson.
The difference between short and tall pitchers is in the physics of the pitching motion. When other factors are equal, longer arms and legs generate more speed on a pitch.
Andy K
@Brick Oven Bill:
You missed the reference to Maradona’s controversial goal versus England in the 1986 World Cup. When questioned by the press if he had illegally touched the ball with his hand, Maradona coyly replied that the ball was guided in by God’s hand. Maradona has since admitted that he did punch the ball in with his own hand.
neddie jingo
Sports that reward a low center of gravity (footie, skiing — in my own experience) give the person of smaller stature a distinct advantage. Not much to do with the distance a neurological transmission has to travel; more to do with the ability to recover from an unexpected jostle. OTOH, a heavier person (i.e., more muscular athlete) will drop down a ski-hill more quickly. Not a matter of Galilean physics, more Newtonian. So the ideal skier is a short, but very muscular, individual.
someguy
Haven’t stood in a room with an NHL team lately then, have ya? The average height is >6’1″ Same as MLB. The one study I found of pro footballers in Europe indicates that a generation ago, the average height was between 6’0″ and 6’1″. It will be taller now due to improved nutrition and a general trend, world wide, toward greater height. Pele is a shade over 5’8″, which was average to tall at the time for Central/South Americans.
FWIW, max VO2 capacity and natural blood hematocrit levels are the main physical predictors of superior performance in athletes in aerobic sports, though some sports favor a particular mix of fast twitch to slow twitch (and adaptive fast twitch) muscle. In soccer, agility, superior lateral vision and a couple other quirks are good physical predictors. Genetic ability only gets people in the door though. I suspect most coaches of elite athletes would point to drive and an ability to ‘read’ the game as the key predictors of success, two attributes that are nearly impossible to measure.
Nat
Ah, a thread I like.
I was privileged to get a half hour conversation with Grace Murray Hopper back in the ’80s. My boss was a reservist who served in her office when on active duty and arranged for her to speak here in Austin. She was a motor mouth and wore him out, I surmise. I wanted to meet her and he bailed for the bathroom when I arrived and that was the last I saw of him. My conversation with her consisted of ‘pleased to meet you’ and she did the rest. She gave me a handful of nanoseconds that are in the drawer in front of me.
As for soccer players, bigger is better these days. Check out the central defenders in the EPL. They are all very big and fast. Some of those guys would make good NFL strong safeties. It is not a surprise that the strikers are bigger as well. But Peter Crouch is painful to watch. The Czech Koller is bigger and more ponderous but can be surprisingly effective.
Soccer, like basketball, is a much rougher game now and size and strength are much more important. Watching soccer (like basketball) from 25 years ago is like watching a completely different sport.
Thlayli
Thinking about this further…
One of the most skillful and technically gifted players I’ve ever seen was Socrates, who is 6-4.
The dominant player at the turn of the last decade was Zinedine Zidane, who is 6-1. The dominant player at the turn of the decade before that was Ruud Gullit, who is 6-3.
In the present day we have Luca Toni (6-4) and Zlatan Ibrahimovic (6-3).
Creamy Goodness
Gymnastics. Bull riding. Thoroughbred racing.
Phoebe
A lot depends on what is asked of you in a particular sport, of course. But I’ve noticed that short people seem more coordinated in general. But that observation was made when young, which is a little unfair because the taller ones then generally only got tall recently, and fast, so they’re weren’t used to it.
LD50
Turkish Oil Wrestling?
Jamey
Maradona the second greatest? In your dreams.
Also: Height makes right in hockey–and I say this as a 5′ 6″ center/wing.
Jamey
Neddie Jingo:
Being smaller is a competitive disadvantage In downhill events. Here, size matters. The best GS/Super G/Downhillers are all >6’/200lbs. Strength, leverage, weight/mass: these are the things that serve to propel a skiier faster, all else being equal.
Now cycling, that’s another story. Smaller and lighter can mitigate and often defeat the “advantage” of being bigger and stronger.
Strength-to-weight.
NutellaonToast
I’d say Maradonna’s height, if it gave him any advantage at all, gave him the advantage of being able to change directions more quickly. It’s the same with corner backs and wide receivers. The latter are tall to catch balls, the former are shorter or else they can’t keep up with the rapid course change of the WR.
NutellaonToast
@Cpl. Cam:
Electricity doesn’t travel at the speed of light. It travels at the speed of the charged particles drift. This is much less than the speed of light. Charges in the nerves are conducted with ions that move nowhere near the speed of light. They move at the speed of diffusion. The same goes for neurotransmitters in the synapse.
Don’t talk when you’re dumb.