Myth: Boxing is the only sport where 30s era athletes handily beat modern fighters

Thats some nice trolling Sun

 

i totally agree with you

plus the fact that people hold dead people in higher regard

 

Your comparisons are idiotic, Bolt would have beaten Owens because Bolt is statistically the fastest recorded man ever - Owens was not.

Neither Klitschko is the best boxer ever.

Wlad was bleeding and certainly broke a sweat for Haye but wouldn't with Louis? Pmsl.

 

Also women from the 30's don't **** too well either.

 

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Only one way to find out. Load the klits in a time traveling delorean and send them back to a time before modern day juicing, back to the 30's or 40's to get schooled by cruiser weights...

 

Other sports aren't regulated by weight though are they?? You can look at the evolution of species all you want, but a 147lb man is a 147lb man regardless of whether he's in the 30's or the 50's. The only thing that will separate them will be skill.

I also think you need to look at George Foreman. A prime Foreman lost to Ali in the 70's, yet the old, fat version was able to win the lineal title in the 90's - a strong era for boxing. How is this possible given then advancements that have been made??

One final point I make is about your comparison between Bolt and Owens. Records are broken because that's what they're there for. I honestly believe Michael Johnson could have ran faster over 200M than Bolt has, but what incentive was there for him to do it? He was already Olympic champ and had run about 4 tenths of a second quicker than anyone else, he didn't have to push himself to go much quicker.

In contrast, Bolt had Johnson's record as a target. Don't read too much into that.

 

Madballster was absolutely correct to use Owens and Bolt as a comparison Vidic. Owen's was the fastest of all time at the time he was running, and since Madball is demonstrating progress in sports from the 1930s to now, using those two as examples is a good choice.

Alekhine was the outstanding genius of his time but, if the elo statistics are accurate, he would not even qualify for the major tournaments in modern times.

 

You act as if skill is limited to eras, when in reality as time goes on athletes get more skilled since the wealth of knowledge grows and advances.

 

Not that I disagree about anything you say, I love foreman to death, but that's a very bias sample size. You'll obviously take more notice of one prime guy from 70s beating a prime 90s guy because it's an extraordinary and rare event. But how many guys from 70s lost to 90s prime fighter? Well, tons...it's that you barely notice them. Fact is, it still doesn't answer which era is superior h2h. If you gather enough data, you'll always find at least one guy from the past era beating one from a modern era...but past prime fighters will lost MOST of the case, you just ignore it because it's expected.

This is very poor reasoning. I could use the same logic and say that Bolt could have ran faster than X(the next record holder) but didn't have the incentive because he's already the record holder and didn't need to push himself...and so on and so on until we have this infinite regression...

Fact: Today's athlete's are (on average), smarter, stronger, faster, and better trained/prep than the generation from the earliest generation. The difference in boxing is that these "superior super athletes" are not as heavily invested in the sport, and rather invest their talents in football, basketball, tennis, etc.

 

It's cute how people want to impose a narrative of linear progress across all sports but utterly unrealistic. It's especially inapplicable in the case of boxing where a) the talent pool has likely been shrinking over the past generation or two and b) there's an actual decline in the number of knowledgeable trainers, resulting in a concurrent decline in the number of boxers legitimately educated on solid fundamentals. On the latter, simply pointing to the existence of video technology does not mean that fighters today are operating from anywhere close to the knowledge base that guys in the past possessed.

I don't agree that Dempsey beats Lewis, but simply sticking one's fingers in one's ears and shouting "SPORTS EVOLVE" over and over again does not make for a good argument against that premise.

 

Lennox Lewis would knock the living **** out of Dempsey.

Dempsey is still an ATG though.

 

I don't get the talent pool is shrinking argument. In fact, more so than ever, the talent pool is actually growing. World championships were decided between whoever was the consensus american champion and the consensus european champion in the 30s. That to me is a very limited and very american worldview.

Then we see the 70s and 80s where latinos are now coming out of the woodwork. Then in the 90s and 2000s, a resurgence from the Asian contingent comes. And now in the new millenium, Cuba is coming out and entering into the pros. The talent pool hasn't shrink. It just moved away from America.

 

I believe the total number of boxers in the world has declined overall though, especially if we look just at guys making their living primarily off of boxing. Obvously we can say that there are loads of unsanctioned bouts that occur, but I'm not really sure we could then use the existence of those fights to argue that the talent pool is overall greater today, especially if participants in such fights have no chance of advancing further in the sport.