Skills and the Olympics

Skills are our means of creating features to describe a person's capabilities. So we can say things like ``Suzy is good at art'' or ``Ah Seng is good at martial arts''.

But saying that someone is skilled in something isn't quite the full story. The reason for this line of thought comes about from the seemingly great disconnect between officials wanting to run the Tokyo Olympics despite protests to the contrary in view of COVID-10. From the athletes' camp, there are some whose risk assessment says that it isn't worth it to face potential future impingement of performance for a chance at a moment's glory, while there are those who decide that it was more important to get that chance for glory over anything else.

(I am deliberately leaving out the commercial implications for this post.)

Now then, what has that got with ``saying that someone is skilled in something isn't quite the full story''?

The single word ``skilled'' is an umbrella term for four aspects. These aspects are:

General Fitness

An evaluation of a person's general physical/mental abilities. A naturally physically/mentally fit person will usually be more skilled in an activity than someone who is less so if both of them are new to the activity.

Activity-specific Fitness

An evaluation of a person's physical/mental abilities that are specific to the activity. So in the case of say running, we are talking about whether a person has strong/durable legs or not.

Foundational Activity-specific Technique

Basic movements/thought patterns that are fundamental for the operation of the activity. The key difference between this and the ``fitness'' aspect is that it is less based on conditioning and more of a latent long-term activity-specific knowledge retention. So someone who knows how to ride a bicycle will have the foundational ``ride a bicycle'' technique which will resurface any time the said person rides a bicycle, while his/her ``ride a bicycle'' fitness may have deteriorated if he/she hasn't been riding a bicycle for years.

Task-oriented Activity-specific Technique

This builds upon the Foundational Activity-specific Techniques to fulfil a particular task. Examples of these include training for a competition, preparing for an examination, and rehearsing for a concert.

Notice that I have given the four aspects of being ``skilled'' in increasing amounts of specificity---I think that this can provide a template for people to approach the acquisition and maintenance of any new skills that they want to pick up.

General fitness is something that every doctor will raise at some point---if one's general physical/mental fitness is good, it means that the associated physical/mental system has a strong base to build everything upon. So for anyone who wants to level up all the skills that one has quickly, building up a good general fitness is a quick win. Concretely, general fitness is about improving cardio-vascular systems which allows better concentration and good endurance, which are important for the skill acquisition/maintenance process.

Activity-specific fitness refers to slightly more specific physical/mental attributes that are relating to the particular activity that one wants to have skill in. So things like finger dexterity, hand-eye coordination, cognitive training like ear training or haptic sensitivity, and the like. These are types of exercises that one often hears about when asked about ``what kind of physical/mental training can I do to improve my skill in X''. While I call these ``activity-specific'', they can be useful for some cross-training among related activities, as long as the related activities are not using the fitness in contradictory ways. For example, a sprinter probably wants to build up more plyometric movement, while an endurance runner would want a more consistent energy release over a long period of time. These two are related in the sense of using the same muscle groups, but they have rather contradictory requirements.

Foundational activity-specific techniques start referring to the combination of movements/thought patterns that drive the specific type of activity. These form the so-called core of the discipline, be it martial arts, sports, or performance arts. These are the types of techniques that when mastered, tend not to go away that quickly. Masters and grandmasters of the particular skill are usually well-known for having high levels of such foundational activity-specific techniques, and this is true even if their general fitness and activity-specific fitness may be lower due to age or injury. When neophytes want to pick up something new, this is the key set of knowledge that they really need to learn and master, even though it may be the driest thing of the particular activity. Some examples of these are basic body movement in martial arts, long tones and scales in music, and identifying perspective/source shapes in art.

Task-oriented activity-specific techniques are usually the more glamourous aspects of the activity. So a command performance of a difficult concerto, the Olympic-level competition of the athletes, the preparation of new works of art for an exhibition all fall into this category. These techniques are more situational, and may contain within them an element of choice---athletes may choose to specialise in one or two events, a musician can choose which concerto to play, and the artist can choose what medium/style that he/she wants to work with. New disciplines can be spawned off from some of these choices if they are well-differentiated with enough of a community support. Many newbies make the mistake of wanting to jump into task-oriented activity-specific techniques to ``be good''---it's wrong only if the choice was made under the impression that it will make them more skilled in the activity in general, but it is totally acceptable if they ``just'' want to do that something. So people who pick up the piano just to play Ballade Pour Adeline shouldn't really accept the claim that they are skilled at piano---they are just skilled at playing Ballade Pour Adeline. Most self-aware people will not be that shameless though, to be had.

So, after one big long-ass exposition, what's my point?

Olympic-level athletes are skilled in all the four aspects I stated. But the Olympics run only in four-year intervals, so missing out on one such Olympic means waiting another four years, for a total of an eight-year-interval. The Olympics are the pinnacle competitive ground for physical prowess, and these athletes have optimised the hell out of their training/living to ensure that they are at literal peak performance for their event in the particular Olympics. These people have taken activity-specific fitness and task-oriented activity-specific techniques to a whole new level, where the peak-level optimisation can only be maintained for a short period of time just because of how stressful it is for the body. They use a lot of resources and planning to get to where they are to compete among the best of the best, and thus the associated pressure to deliver upon the implicit promises made through such training is immense.

And that is why I can understand why some athletes just want the Olympics running so that they can compete and justify to themselves (and perhaps their sponsors) that all the capital spent on training was wholly justified.

Does this make them tone deaf to the ground sentiment? A little, but when the stakes are that high for oneself, the rest of the world seems to matter less. High-level athletes who can compete at the Olympic level are already in a world unto themselves---they are the closest we will get to god-tier humans that were heavily romanticised in the cultures with pantheons of gods. The level of competition is so intense that having the time to spend on thinking about others is likely to be considered a luxury.

Then of course there's the whole socio-economic aspect from the investment made by the hosting country of the Olympics that make the successful completion of such a hosting important for them. But that can be a write-up for another day.

Till the next update.