Reading advanced unit 9

Reading advanced unit 9

Reading

In the 2007 World Championships in Athletics in Osaka, one of the high jump competitors was a Bahamian called Donald Thomas, a man notable for the fact that he had done only eight months of intensive training in the sport. A complete outsider, no one expected him to win. Indeed, Thomas had only turned his attention to high jumping after a college bet in which he had been challenged to a high jump competition and succeeded in clearing a bar set at 2.13m wearing ordinary sneakers.

Multiple Select

1.What made Thomas's World Championships win remarkable was that

• he had done only eight months of intensive training.

• He was an amateur

• He did'nt have professional training

Multiple Choice

The author points out that Thomas wore sneakers when he cleared the 2.13m bar, and this tells us that

• high-jump athletes normally wear special shoes.

• it was a feat

• You have to wear the appropiate equipment to practice high jump

By contrast, the favourite to win the competition, Swedish high jumper Stefan Holm, had a string of successes behind him, including an Olympic gold medal in 2004. Having started high jump training at the age of 11, by 15 Holm had won the Swedish Youth Championships. At 1.81m, Holm is pretty short for a high jumper, but he compensated for his relatively short height by developing an almost superhumanly fast sprinting technique and by keeping to a punishing work regime. By the time he got to Osaka in 2007, he had exceeded the 10,000 hours of practice that Malcolm Gladwell in his best-selling book Outliers claims is a prerequisite for world-class prowess in any field.

Multiple Choice

According to Malcolm Gladwell, you need

• To have an Achilles tendon more elastic

• To train very hard

• to do 10,000 hours of practice in order to become a top athlete.

Epstein describes how, on examining Thomas, neuromuscular scientist Masaki Ishikawa, then at the University of Jyvaskyla in Finland, ‘noted both Thomas’s long legs relative to his height, and also that he was gifted with a giant’s Achilles tendon. Whereas Holm’s Achilles was a more normal-sized, incredibly stiff spring, Thomas’s, at ten and a quarter inches, was uncharacteristically long for an athlete his height. The longer (and stiffer) the Achilles tendon, the more elastic energy it can store when stretched

Multiple Select

If the Achilles tendon is very long and stiff

• it enables you to jump very high.

• You win competitions

• you become a professional athlete

Neither Ishikawa nor Hunter would suggest that the sole secret to the jumping success of Holm and Thomas is in their Achilles tendons. But the tendons are one puzzle piece that helps explain how two athletes could arrive at essentially the same place, one after a twenty- year love affair with his craft, and the other with less than a year of serious practice after stumbling into it in a friendly bet.’