But you can see that athletes of today are better than in the past. For example, look at Jim Thorpe’s Olympic numbers....he wouldn’t win high school track events these days let alone gold medals. Today’s athletes are bigger, stronger, faster and thirty years from now the athletes will be better than they are now.
"Bigger, stronger, faster"? As far as the AMERICAN male goes, I see the trend going in the opposite direction. Supplements and numbers may skew the paradigm for a few more years, but overall, I DEFINITELY see it trending downward.
I work out in a lot of gyms in a lot of places and am pushing 70. All I can tell you is that even after having COVID, I'm still out lifting and out performing most of these kids in their teens, 20s, and 30s. And I'm not anywhere near in the same galaxy as good as I was at their ages.
On top of that, the overall size of the average American male seems to be getting smaller. A lot of these younger guys are Asian and Hispanic. Say what you want, but they are just shorter and not as physically strong.
That's one of the reasons the PAC 12 is having such a hard time recruiting quality linemen. The high influx of Asians, Mexicans, and Central Americans, combined with the exodus of Whites, and the relatively low Black population, is making it harder to find the size of quality athlete required to play line at the Power 5 level on the West Coast. It's not just me saying that. It has been a topic of discussion on the PAC 12 Network.
We are going to have to more and more look to other countries for all those "quality athletes" you are talking about. Because in the USA, unfortunately, our male population is trending towards being physically shorter and softer.