Random Athletes Generator

So you drew an athlete

You wanted an athlete and the tool up top gives you one, or several if you raise the number, from a list I keep by hand, each name tagged with a sport and a country. This is the broadest pool on the site. A pull might be a footballer, a sprinter, a chess grandmaster, a surfer, a Formula 1 driver, a wheelchair racer or a cricketer.

The tool is the simple part. What this list quietly raises is the most unanswerable question in sport, and it is worth sitting with, because it is the reason a tool like this exists at all.

What does the word even cover?

Look at the names beside each other and the category starts to wobble. Usain Bolt is an athlete, obviously. Is Garry Kasparov? He is on this list. He spent his life sitting at a table. But he trained physically for matches because stamina decided them, he was the best in the world at a fiercely competitive discipline, and his sport is contested at the highest level under immense pressure. Is a golfer an athlete? A darts player? A racing driver, who withstands forces that would make most people pass out, but is sitting down?

There is no clean line, and the people who insist there is usually just mean their own sport. What every name here shares is not muscle. It is that they took a narrowly defined competitive task and pursued it further than any other human being of their generation. That is the only definition that holds. It is why the list mixes Messi with Kasparov, Wayne Gretzky with Kelly Slater, Tom Brady with a Norwegian cross-country skier, and why a random pull can throw the two of them together and start a genuinely interesting argument.

The greatest athlete in the world

That phrase is not a figure of speech. It was said to a specific man, and he is on this list.

At the Stockholm Olympics of 1912, Jim Thorpe, a member of the Sac and Fox Nation, won both the decathlon and the pentathlon, the two events designed to find the most complete all-round athlete alive. When King Gustav V of Sweden presented his medals he reportedly said: you, sir, are the greatest athlete in the world. Thorpe then went home and played six seasons of Major League Baseball, played professional American football, helped found what became the NFL, and played professional basketball too. He was, in a literal sense, elite at three sports.

A year after Stockholm, a newspaper revealed he had once been paid a few dollars a week to play semi-professional baseball. He was stripped of both gold medals for violating amateur rules. It took until 1982 for the IOC to reinstate him as a co-champion, and until July 2022, seventy years after his death, for it to restore him as the sole champion of both events. The decathlon winner is still informally called the world's greatest athlete, and the phrase traces directly back to him. Draw Thorpe from this tool and you have pulled the answer to the question the tool poses.

Why you cannot compare across sports

Pull two names from this list and you will immediately want to rank them, and you will immediately find you cannot. The problem is that every sport measures greatness in a different currency, and the currencies do not convert.

Some sports are measured against the clock, so Usain Bolt's greatness is a number, an absolute, indifferent to who he ran against. Some are measured in trophies, so Lionel Messi's case is built on what his teams won, which depended on ten other people. Some are measured in dominance over peers, which flatters an athlete who happened to compete in a weak era. Some are measured in longevity, which flatters whoever's body lasted. Michael Phelps has twenty-three Olympic golds, but a marathon runner could not win twenty-three if they were perfect for a century. Wayne Gretzky's records in ice hockey are so far beyond his rivals that they look like typing errors, and they mean nothing to a person who has never seen ice.

So the honest answer is that there is no answer, and the argument is the point. That is the entire pleasure of a tool like this: it hands you Serena Williams and Ayrton Senna and lets you spend twenty minutes discovering you have no shared unit of measurement.

Fame is not the same as greatness

One more thing to hold in mind while you pull names. A list like this is inevitably weighted towards fame, and fame follows money, television and language. The sports that made their competitors famous, football, basketball, tennis, athletics, produced most of the names here. The sports that did not, produced fewer, and their greatest figures are missing or thinly represented.

There are athletes on this list who dominated their sport more completely than Messi dominated his and whose names mean nothing to you. Birgit Fischer won canoeing golds across twenty-four years. Marit Bjørgen has more Winter Olympic medals than any human being. And there are famous names here whose records were later stripped, or who were caught, or who are argued about, because any honest historical pool contains people the sport would rather forget. Treat a pull as an invitation to look somebody up, rather than as a verdict on their standing. The interesting name is usually the one you do not recognise.

What a random athlete is good for

• The cross-sport argument. Pull two names and try to rank them. It never works, and it is always fun.
• Quiz and trivia prep. This is the broadest pool on the site, which makes it the hardest quiz to prepare for.
• Teaching and school projects. Draw an athlete, research their sport, their era and what they had to overcome.
• Fantasy drafts and pools. Assigning athletes to a group for a game, a bracket or a sweepstake.
• Finding somebody new. Draw a name you do not know, from a sport you do not follow, and go and watch them.

Questions about athletes

Who is the greatest athlete of all time?

There is no answer, because each sport measures greatness differently: against the clock, in trophies, in dominance, in longevity. The title world's greatest athlete traditionally goes to the Olympic decathlon champion, a phrase that traces to Jim Thorpe in 1912.

Why is Jim Thorpe significant?

He won the decathlon and the pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics, then played professional baseball, American football and basketball. He was stripped of his golds for having been paid to play semi-professional baseball, and was only restored as sole champion of both events by the IOC in 2022.

Why are chess players and racing drivers on the list?

Because the useful definition of an athlete is somebody who pursued a narrowly defined competitive discipline further than anyone of their generation. Where you draw the physical line is largely a matter of taste, and arguing about it is half the fun.

Can I pull several athletes, or narrow the pick?

Both. Raise the number for a few at once, with none repeating in a single pull, and use the text boxes to narrow things, such as a keyword the entry has to contain, which is handy for filtering by sport or country.

References

1. International Olympic Committee. olympics.com
2. Encyclopaedia Britannica, Jim Thorpe. britannica.com