Transcript of AE 1384 - The Goss: The Fittest Sports Players Are...

G'day, you mob! Pete here, and this is another episode of Aussie English, the number one place for anyone and everyone wanting to learn Australian English. So today I have a Goss episode for you where I sit down with my old man, my father, Ian Smissen, and we talk about the week's news.

Whether locally Down Under here in Australia or non locally overseas in other parts of the world, okay. And we sometimes also talk about whatever comes to mind, right. If we can think of something interesting to share with you guys related to us or Australia, we also talk about that in The Goss.

So these episodes are specifically designed to try and give you content about many different topics where we're obviously speaking in English and there are multiple people having a natural and spontaneous conversation in English. So it is particularly good to improve your listening skills.

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Okay, so if you really, really want to improve your listening skills fast, get the transcript, listen and read at the same time. Keep practising and that is the quickest way to level up your English. Anyway, I've been rabbiting on a bit. I've been talking a bit. Let's just get into this episode, guys. Smack the bird and let's get into it!

How's it going, Dad?

Good!

Tennis.

Ah, tennis players. The fittest, apparently.

Apparently, yes.

Righto. End of episode. Bye!

Yeah. Imagine that I release a ten second episode. Enjoy. Yeah. So the, uh, let's have a look at the article here. It was. It was a really interesting one. Um, so this is on Channel Seven news. Uh, tennis players, the fittest athletes in the world. Um, as seven time Grand Slam singles champion Venus Williams said upon her comeback to the sport late last month. Do you know how hard it is to play tennis? Yeah, you're running the whole time lifting weights and just like, dying. And then you repeat it the next day. So it was interesting. I guess they, they go through- it's a pretty extensive article, so it's worth checking out if you're interested in tennis and sport.

Yeah. And the guy who, not who wrote it, but who's the provider of most of the information is a sports scientist.

Yeah.

Who happened to be a tennis player.

Who? Ah Doctor Mark Kovacs.

Yeah. Who happened to be a tennis player. But.

But it was interesting. They were comparing a lot of these things with other sports, You know these metrics VO2 max, endurance, strength and all that. And I hadn't really thought about tennis being one that required a lot of being an all-rounder in all these areas, as well as mental and for having insane endurance.

Yeah.

Like because I thought, you know, tennis is not that bad, right? And then you realise that sometimes the games can be five hours and they have to do it every single day for a month and they get a week off and then they've got the next one. And it's just an ongoing pressure thing. So you have to have good endurance to be able to actually compete at the top.

Yeah, it's endurance during the event, but it's recovery.

Yeah.

In the major tournaments you get two days recovery, but in the normal tournaments. You play every day.

Do you, are you able to...

If you keep winning!

If you're watching that, do you, are you able to see the person sort of degrade over time?

Oh yeah.

Yeah.

Yeah. By the time you get to the fifth set, they're not what they were playing in the first set.

But it also day to day? Or do they tend to rebound on a daily basis?

Their recovery is incredible. Yeah when you look at it. But yeah it's um yeah I've said it for a long time, that tennis players are probably the, whatever fitness means.

Yeah.

And you can define it scientifically with some, you know, objective measures like VO2, which is the the volume of oxygen that you are taking in in comparison with your body weight.

Yeah.

So how well you can circulate oxygen.

I guess the idea being if you've got more oxygen in there, you're going to be fitter.

You'll be able to last longer in an aerobic sport.

And I think they said what for? Like marathon runners and professional cyclists, the VO2 max is 70ml of oxygen per kilogram per minute.

Yeah.

And for tennis players who are elite, it's around the low 60s. So they're getting close to that level. Um, but.

It is a very different sport though.

Yeah. You would expect it to be higher in cyclists and marathon runners because they're just going.

It's constant.

100%, yeah.

It's just, yeah.

Whereas with tennis it's stop-start stop-start stop-start, right. But its stop-start for a long period of time.

I remember there was a, um I think they called it the world's greatest sportsperson or world's fittest sportsperson or something. Tv show that was done by an American network in the 70s.

Sumo. Sumo is one.

And they picked, um, elite sports people from a bunch of different sports and put them together and and did some. And it wasn't just, you know, do a fitness test, but they actually had a whole series of different.

Tasks.

Different sporting tasks to do.

Yeah, okay.

And Bjorn Borg, who was the best tennis player in the world at the time. He was the tennis player.

Yeah.

And he wiped the floor with them with almost everything.

Yeah, yeah.

Because- and you look at tennis, it's it's about, there's power elements.

Yeah.

There are speed elements, there's endurance elements. There's eye hand coordination elements. Which means that you're probably going to be very good at almost anything you do.

Is it. Which is a chicken before the egg? Is it people who are already good at pretty much everything become good tennis players? Or it be, by becoming a good tennis player do you become athletically good at pretty much everything?

I think it's yes, because there's, there's a there's a selection based on your inherent ability in the first place as to whether you take up a sport. Like, I played tennis as a kid and I was sort of half good at it. So I kept doing it, but I wasn't good enough that I specialised in it.

Yeah.

Um, whereas the kids..

People that are curious, right.

Yeah.

Who seems to have had that natural, raw talent.

Exactly.

But he's just never had the mental side of it to really push him to that top, top percent.

Yeah. You know.

Right, at the right at the top number one.

And so I think there's that that self-selection element. If you're very good at something just with natural ability, you will tend to go into that area and you'll keep doing it.

Yeah.

We all do it.

It reinforces..

The things that we're, that we're good at, we enjoy doing. And we enjoy doing it because we're good at it. So it spirals. And then once you get there, if you already have those abilities, then you're training at them and you get better and better and better.

It's funny how it also selects for people who are that sort of like sort of borderline autism type obsessive, um, level of interest in the sport.

Well, that's the same with any sport.

Yeah. But like..

If you want to be really good at anything.

Yeah.

Yeah. Look at autism. Part of it is that, you know, and apologies to those on the spectrum for us.

I don't mean that in a negative way.

No, but it's. But the people who are obsessive about a particular thing and become very good at it. Um, but also there is this sort of cultural, sort of environmental, cultural thing of, you know, look at Tiger Woods.

Yeah.

Tiger woods was hitting a golf ball very well at the age of three.

Yeah.

But he got introduced to that because his father was a golf player.

Yeah.

And then when he was good, his father kept going, Oh, he's good at this. And he kept reinforcing it, reinforcing it and reinforcing it.

It's the..

By the time they become a teenager, that's their world.

Yeah.

It's the only thing they can ever do.

Well, it's funny, like, for example, Gordon Ryan, who is hands down the best, um, wrestling jiu jitsu. What? Not wrestling, but jiu jitsu practitioner Nogi jiu jitsu. He's. I think he's got some record now, like 100 and none in terms of he hasn't lost at black belt. I think he might have lost once, but it's like he's won a hundred in a row or something crazy. And he's, he's just like, man, if you don't have autism, you're not going to be number one.

Yeah.

He's like, he's like, this is all I do, all I do, I get up, I do jiu jitsu, I go home, I watch YouTube, I do jiu jitsu, I read about jiu jitsu, I think about jiu jitsu. And it was so interesting listening to him and other people as well. In jiu jitsu in particular, he's like, there's just so much information. The physical side of it is like one small part of it. You need to have that. The rest of it is you need the memory and the you need to be just spending all this time thinking about techniques, applying them, and have these answers to all these different moves that people will have. And if you don't have a hyper obsession with it, you're not going to be at the top.

Yeah.

And so it is weird how it selects for people who are freakishly good at the sport, also having neurodivergent like brains.

Well, particularly particularly in a, in a sport like jiu jitsu, which has no financial.

Yeah, pretty much.

Motivation.

Pretty much. Yeah.

He's making a lot of money.

Yeah.

But the third best person in the world makes nothing.

Well pretty much.

And so because I remember, um, years ago at a, I was actually at the Australian Open tennis a hundred years ago when it was at Kooyong. And, you know, it wasn't quite the, you know, hyper event that it is now. And I was sitting out on an outside court watching a game. And Sue Barker, who I was a real fan of, was a British tennis player, just came and sat next to me watching the. It was another British woman playing and just chatting to her. Um, about you know and this is back in the 70s. So chatting to her about she was the number three player in the world at the time.

Wow.

Um, and chatting to her about, well, you know, what's your life like? What do you do? And she said, well, for the two weeks that I'm here, I will be on the tennis court practising. I'll go back to the hotel, I'll come back and I'll play. I'll go back to the hotel. Um. I'll eat. I'll go back to my hotel room. I'll wash out my socks and my undies and hang them up to rinse, and I'll go to bed the next morning. I'll get up, get dressed, go and train, and then I'll be playing again. I'll do it. And I said, do you have a social life when you're here? And she said, I don't have a social life.

In general, yeah.

I don't have a life. And she said, and she said, I make enough money to be able to do this. And this is back in the 70s, when particularly women tennis players were not paid a huge amount of money. She said, I'm the number three player in the world and I earn enough money to be able to do this.

Yeah.

The number 20 or 30 player in the world makes nothing.

Yeah.

Because it costs so much money to travel.

I didn't realise..

They travel around the world.

They were travelling 100,000km a year.

Miles!

Tennis player? Yeah. Miles. Was it?

Yeah.

It's like halfway to the moon.

They travelling around the world. They have to in order to make money. It's that you're in this trap. In order to make money, you have to keep playing and keep winning.

Yeah.

And you can't do- so every..

What is it? Gravity. The, um. Escape velocity?

Yeah.

You have to keep doing it to the point of trying to get escape velocity.

Well, now, of course, the, you know, the biggest players make most of their money out of out of sponsorships and commercial, advertising and stuff. Yeah. Um, was it Maria Sharapova at one stage was the highest paid tennis player in the world.

Not from tennis though.

And she was making $70 million a year from Nike.

Yeah.

I think it was that just just to be her? Yeah. Just so they could use her image on things. So.

It's nuts. But back to the point I think you're making about the athleticism. I think they were saying here, right. Tough as nails. It was all it was also world number one. And then number two matching up in the women's final at Roland Garros.

Garros. French.

Yeah. Eventual winner Coco Gauff also rallied following a shaky start to beat Arina Sabalenka in three sets. Yeah, Sabalenka is a phenomenal athlete. Strong, powerful moves, fantastic and you know, is able to hit the ball as hard as anyone, Kovacs said. Coco Gauff, who I've spent quite a bit of time, um, over the years, is one of the best overall athletes anyway. They were saying that she can do anything.

Yeah.

Like, women's tennis players are the best because they're tough as nails. They can handle high, high volume. Their ability to suffer in a good way is something that makes them great. And they were saying, you know, you could put them on a soccer pitch, you could have them in the NBA. They would just be phenomenal at it no matter what. Once they get to that level of of tennis.

Yeah. And I think it's because it is that it's almost the universal sport because I've said it of that earlier. It's that combination of endurance, speed, power, eye hand coordination, uh, just broad athleticism. Very few other sports are like that. A lot of other sports. Basketball is a bit like that. It's got a combination of those things a lot less around endurance because the game is shorter. And unless you're in a an elite person, you're not going to be on the court.

What's the AFL like? I would have thought AFL is...

Afl is a bit like that. Um, but again, AFL has different body types that play different roles.

Yeah. Okay.

Your average..

You're not doing..

Your average ruckman might be running around, but they're just trundling around.

The midfield is, right.

The midfielders that are running 15km in a game.

Yeah.

Um, and it's not just jogging around 15km.

With constant sprints.

It's- you're running 20 to 50 metre sprints.

That's why I guess I'm thinking about them and being like God, surely they have to be on that same sort of level where they need to be strong and fit because it's physical and a contact sport. They're kicking the handballing, but they're also having to just run such long distances.

And then jumping and the eye hand coordination stuff.

Yeah.

So again, a lot of, a lot of AFL footballers will be very similar in the sense of that cross sport. They'll be able to do lots of different sports.

Yeah.

Uh cricketers, same thing. Um, it's not an endurance in cricket, but it's that eye hand coordination thing where batting, bowling, fielding, throwing, catching all of that sort of stuff. Uh, yeah. The number of cricketers who are very good golfers or good tennis players.

Yeah.

It's that eye hand coordination.

So one of the interesting things in this article was that they mentioned, I think here, like, whereas other players would play the 11 month season and play every week or close to every week. "They", meaning the Venus and Serena sisters, um, the Williams sisters, uh, would take three months or six months off. How did they manage that and still compete? Because they were not, um. Degrading their bodies as much, right. They had time to rest.

But they were also towards the end of their career. Um, well, particularly Venus, who was. No, who was wasn't the top player in the world anymore or the top ten?

Yeah.

She didn't care about her ranking.

Uh, okay.

So, yeah.

And she just played for the fun of it. I guess she would have been rich by that point.

Yeah, exactly. She doesn't care about the ranking. I don't need the money.

Yeah.

Um, I'm happy to win the money, but I don't need to keep playing every week.

I guess that must be it, too, with someone like Serena. She's just like, yeah, of course I'll keep playing. I don't give a fuck. I got enough money to sustain me for the rest of my life.

Exactly. And when they. But when they're particularly up and coming and they're obsessed about ranking points, because ranking points get you into the tournament.

Yes, they're going to play all.

Then they will just keep playing to keep getting points. And then you have to defend your points, because every year the points that you got in that tournament last year drop off. And so you've got to go up to that tournament again or play that week again to get more points. So.

Yeah.

It's a, it's an interesting sport. But yeah playing for 11 months a year is ridiculous. So.

Yeah well there can't be many other sports like that.

No. No other sport has a..

I mean..

Season that long.

Jiu jitsu is probably like that, but not in terms of season. You would just have constant competitions every year..

Well, those..

That you can rotate around.

Combat sports, you know, boxing, MMA, jiu jitsu, those sort of things are um, you know, you choose when you're going to compete.

Yeah.

Um, and what you're going to do. So.

Yeah. Cool. Anything else to add, Dad?

No.

No?

We're done.

Done.

All right. Cool. Thanks for hanging out, guys. We'll see you next time!

Alright, bye!

Tooroo!