What's the Goldilocks Height?

Here we see Askel Svindal one of the tallest current World Cup Racers next to Marcel Hirsher one of the smallest and Ted Ligety who is average. They are all talented racers even with varying heights.

Growing up I always wanted to believe that with hard work anything is possible.  I believe that much less as I get older. Unfortunately as much as we want to believe anything is possible, especially in the world of sports, the fact remains that some people are limited. But the question I have is what genetic factors make you good at ski racing?

I recently read The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Performance by David Epstein. While many books look to disprove the role of genetics in elite performance Epstein sought to prove it. It is an excellent read and I highly recommend it.  While Epstein never spoke about ski racers he did find some startling evidence of the influence of genetics in sports. This idea intrigued me. I had never heard about any studies in ski racing, although a fellow athlete once told me that femur length is critical to ski racing success. I don’t know about that but I wanted to know more about what genetic traits affected ski racing success.

One genetic trait has been studied in length with regard to athletic success: height. In Ericsson’s study he mentions height and cites a study of Olympic athletes at the Montreal games and says that while different heights are an obvious advantage in certain sports (ie basketball and gymnastics) the average height of athletes at the Montreal games was the same as that of a control group of students. This implies that while people may not be cut out for particular sports there should always be a sport that will favor their height.

Unfortunately I don’t know that this is really the case any more. Over time the height of athletes in most sports has trended toward the extremes. In the first modern Olympics it was believed that the average sized man was the right size for all athletic endeavors, not too tall, not too short, not too muscle bound or lean. Since that first Olympics much has changed. Gymnasts have gotten smaller, basketball players taller. But what about ski racers? Ted Ligety is 5’11’’ and Anna Fenninger 5’5’’ -- fairly average heights. So does being tall give racers an advantage?

This led me to make an extensive search of the internet. I compiled the height of as many Olympic medalists in ski racing as possible. Some, especially those of early ski racers, were unavailable but I did find enough that I could compile some usable data. The results led to some interesting answers and even more questions.

The average height for a male Olympic medalist in ski racing is (can I get a drum roll please?) about 181cm equivalent to about 5’ 11’’. While this is slightly higher than the U.S. national average (176), it is closer to Central Europe’s average male height. The shorter countries in Europe run around 176 and the taller 180 or 181.  The shortest male medalist is Heini Hemmi who won gold in the ’76 games in GS. There aren’t many close to him with American Andrew Weibrecht coming in as the shortest current medalist (and one of the shortest all time) at 168cm (5’6’’). The tallest medalist is Michael Walchofer at a towering 192cm or 6’4’’. Almost half of male medalists lie between 178 and 183cm.

Now for the ladies. Interestingly it seems that while male heights have stayed fairly steady throughout the sport’s history female height has increased somewhat over time with an average of about 168cm or 5’6’’. Again this is slightly higher than average but still well within the range of a normal person. The shortest ever was Barbara Cochran at 155cm and the tallest was the well-known Maria Höfl-Riesch at 180cm. More than half of female medalists lie within 165 and 172cm. Women’s ski racing also has a broader range of heights than men with racers from Tessa Worley to Lindsey Vonn doing well.

Does this mean that anyone can be a great ski racer? Well maybe, maybe not. Ski racing definitely discriminates against the lower third of the height spectrum with fewer and fewer racers at those heights. I think that one critical piece of being a good ski racer is having weight to carry you down the hill. The shorter athletes on the circuit now (like Weibrecht and Gut) have fit as much muscle weight onto their smaller frames as possible.  Unfortunately accurate weight information on ski racers is not available (since the weight information that exists is self-reported and in many cases not credible).

Another interesting finding was the comparison between events. Interestingly on both the men and the women’s side GS was the shortest event but all events stayed roughly around the same number. I don’t think the difference was significant. There isn’t really a different ideal height for speed vs. tech, even though figures like Svindal and Miller might lead you to believe otherwise.

There are certainly issues with being too tall or short in ski racing. Unlike most sports that have trended toward the extremes ski racing trends just above average height with fewer and fewer outliers as time progresses. So most people can be ski racers assuming they can add muscle weight to their frame, but we are not without our own form of genetic discrimination even in the realms of height.

10,000 What?

As we move into the fall many of us ski racers are beginning to think about summer camps. Did we do enough? Did we put in enough hours? Some of us may have thought of this as a way toward achieving the 10,000 hour rule. Now you may have thought ‘is she going to talk about the ten thousand hour rule with regard to ski racing?’ The answer is yes, yes I am.

A few years ago I attended a Western Region camp and listened to a lecture by Dr. Lester Keller. He spoke of the ten thousand hour rule and asked how long it would take to achieve such a number. After some mental math that I will admit to being incredibly suspect I came up with how long it would take ski racers to achieve the 10,000 hour mark: 100 years.

In February I read a few articles that reminded me of the 10,000 hour rule. Most argued that the 10,000 hour rule had made parents crazy and was detrimental to athlete development. I thought back to the camp I had and the issue fascinated me so much that I felt I needed more research on the subject to do a proper blog. What I found couldn’t fit in one blog so I have decided to do a series of them, one blog per week on attaining excellence in ski racing. Check back every Friday. Outliers popularized the 10,000 hour rule, his book was based on Ericsson’s research.  I am a busy girl so reading those plus a number of books also on the subject of expert performance took  some months.
Now part of why all of this took so long was that I felt I had to actually go back and read where all of this came from, namely all 37 pages of Anders Ericsson’s study: The Role of Deliberate Practice in the Acquisition of Expert Performance. Although Malcolm Gladwell’s best selling book

Before we begin I think we should define deliberate practice. In his study Ericsson describes it in these terms: “The most cited condition concerns the subjects' motivation to attend to the task and exert effort to improve their performance” (Ericsson, 1993) My interpretation: deliberate practice is difficult. “In addition, the design of the task should take into account the preexisting knowledge of the learners so that the task can be correctly understood after a brief period of instruction” (Ericsson, 1993) The task should neither be too hard nor too easy and should make sense to the learner. “The subjects should receive immediate informative feedback and knowledge of results of their performance. The subjects should repeatedly perform the same or similar tasks”(Ericsson, 1993) You should get coaching and you should do it repeatedly.

So in my mind this narrows deliberate practice in ski racing down to training, in gates or freeskiing (not for fun but actually as a method of improving oneself doing drills or focusing on technique). It does not include slipping, powder skiing (although we can discuss the merits of this, we must agree that it is not deliberate practice), riding chairlifts, sitting at the top of the course, working out, etc. If I add up my own numbers from last year I took approximately 600 runs either in a course or freeskiing/doing drills. This means that for perhaps the first time in my life my mental math while listening to Dr. Keller was correct. Assuming that every year was like my last it would take 100 years to reach the 10,000 hour mark.

So even if you committed to more training time than I did there is no conceivable way you could reach Gladwell/ Ericsson’s number. Part of the reason that no one ever reaches 10,000 hours in ski racing is that we spend a lot of time on chair lifts and slipping etc. There are basic limitations to how many runs we can get in a day. I think that any coach strives to make the most of training time available but the reality is that you can only do so much skiing at high intensity, especially at many of the elevations we train at (like Colorado and Chile). Ski racing is inherently a demanding sport. We push the limit of our anaerobic capacity and fight extreme forces. This combined with the already present issues of chairlift time and hill preparation make a day with 8-10 runs productive, even if we only added 10 minutes of deliberate practice to our running total.

In the past I have seen some athletes who trained considerably more than others. Most of these athletes either lived or moved to Mt. Hood for the summer and trained frequently all summer. I never saw this approach work out. Athletes who did this either hurt themselves or simply dropped off the next year. I attribute this to a lack of physical fitness, although some of it may also have been mental fatigue. The fact is that as ski racers we need a higher level of strength, power, and cardio fitness than can be achieved while skiing full-time. We must take time off of skis and we must use this time to increase our fitness (most skiers’ cardio drops off somewhat during the season) and prepare for the skiing ahead.

In conclusion ski racers cannot get 10,000 hours of skiing. That is not to say that deliberate practice or training isn’t important -- it just means that ski racing doesn’t fit into Gladwell’s numbers. In the original study Ericsson only mentions 10,000 hrs of practice once (so technically no Gladwell didn’t make the number up as Ericsson has said to the public, but Ericsson did not emphasize the number). Ericsson seems to be more of a fan of the 10 year rule and repeatedly says that it takes ten or more years to become proficient at a given subject. This is a rule we can live by if we discount our early years. It seems that once we fully commit to skiing and spend 12-20 hours (not of deliberate practice but just hill time) it takes ten years until we are proficient (in the top 30) on the World Cup. This is not to say that by doing ten years of this practice we will become World Cup skiers but rather World Cup skiers have spent that much time doing full time training.

In conclusion Malcolm Gladwell never thought of ski racing when coming up with his chapter on deliberate practice. We are an unusual sport in this regard although I can think of other sports that would face similar problems. I can certainly assure you though that you have not nor will you reach 10,000 hours any time in the near future.