To your question, yes it’s a privilege, and so what.
Intelligent
White (in America)
Good looking
Male
Tall
Funny
Pleasant disposition
All of these, mostly in this order, are traits (i.e. privilege) that we have little control over. The more boxes you check the more privileged one is, purely by happenstance.
Taller people are privileged in sports in which reach and height afford an advantage. Seven foot basketplayers aren’t the most athletic individuals in the traditional sense but I want every last one of them on my pickup team.
That said, it’s not everything, obviously. Mike Tyson is 5’10" and routinely slayed giants.
it’s not just being really short though, my understanding is little people (or whatever the current designation is) are unnaturally proportioned and this affects pretty much everything
Sometimes we need to change a sport’s rules to make things fair(er). Not saying that is true for softball, but lots of sports have concluded that they need size categories to keep things fair(er). The fact that something is allowed by a sport’s (current) rules does not mean it’s fair in any broader ethical sense.
And parking space width allows for the scooter deployment.
But still. It’s a major inconvenience being extremely short, tall, obese etc. Does the preference to move at the speed of average sized people warrant a disabled designation?
Since we’re all going to hell anyway might as well share the following.
There was a meme describing the late great Mike Leach, the college football coach and great philosopher of his time.
Anyway, it was reported that someone had to have a serious conversation with Leach about his plan to put a “little person” on the team, hand them the ball in short yardage situations, and then throw them over the line of scrimage, and evidently the defense thereby securing the first down…
They eventually convinced him that it was just not OK.
Height is an advantage outside of sport, too. For men, at least. Height is generally seen as a more physically attractive feature. 58% of Fortune 500 CEOs are over 6’ tall, compared to 14% of the general population.
Exactly, to me it carries a negative connotation as in a person has some sort of undeserved advantage in life. Whatever happened to people just being lucky?
Any elite athlete has hit the genetics lottery for their given sport. They just got lucky. There is nothing privileged about it.
I think sport’s that favor “obvious freaky sh#t” are stupid:
Basketball (freakishly tall)
Sumo (freakishly fat)
American football (many positions freakishly fat)
Car racing (freakishly rich)
Horse stuff (freakishly rich)
I suppose lots of other sports also favor freakish, but invisible attributes.
I find these sports more interesting.
Triathlon, running, cycling - (freakish blood chemistry, recovery adaptability, circulatory structure)
Sprinting (fast twitch ability, recovery adaptability).
Baseball, tennis, socwr(sprint ability + coordination + strategic awareness).
Imagining a Gronk-sized TE lined up in the QB position facing backwards, midget takes the snap between his legs, Gronk keg-tosses him for a 13 yard gain.
oof this gets us into all sorts of weeds. Is the disability self induced?
my basic instinct is if somebody thinks they need that close-to-the-door spot then they probably do, and that’s to be accepted as people being people. There’s no upside to lingering on it, even if it’s innately unfair. I’m privileged in being able to walk an extra twenty feet.
Usually the sports that are establishing categories based on size (weight) are doing so more from a safety perspective than a fairness perspective. You put a flyweight boxer in the ring with a heavyweight and that flyweight boxer won’t just lose the fight but could end up being killed. I don’t know of any sport that imposes size restrictions based on height, although I’ll be the first to admit I don’t know that beyond my own experience and would be happy to be proven wrong.
depends on how you define privilege. by definition, yes this is privilege.
for me, it’s something that you inherently have, that you didn’t earn. i have amazing strength to weight ratio. did i work out and put time in the gym to be able to rep X lbs? of course i did. but i had friends who went to the gym with me, same exact routine, put in the same effort, but couldn’t squat half of what i squatted.
that’s just genetic privilege.
i’ll never every play basketball, i’m 40 years old, i can’t even compete with 14 year old kids. i was born short, my parents are short. my best friends are all 6’3 or taller. they didn’t earn that, they were simply born with that.
privilege is everywhere, and there are so many forms of it.
On that point, my jetBlue flight home last night could’ve easily turned into Waffle House Air when the obese woman behind me blocked my son from reclining his seat. It was 9:30pm, 2h flight, another 1.5h drive on a school night (dad fail) and I told him he can recline the seat to sleep easier. I was looking back between the crack in the seat when I lifted the armrest to access the recline button, and she slid forward and dug her knee into the back of his seat. Bumped it three times, she didn’t budge.
She was with a large and obnoxious group of people and pressing the issue would’ve led to a confrontation, so I laid his head on my lap and he slept sideways.
She struck me as exactly the kind of person you see hanging a temporary handicap tag in her black Mercedes just for the parking space.
Every competitive activity rewards abilities that are on the freakish end of the spectrum. It’s just that different activities reward different abilities. We can’t really solve that problem. There is no practical way to make chess equal (in a competitive sense) for people with poor spatial pattern recognition. Same for making ping pong competitively equal for people with lousy reflexes.
But, as a society we can (and do) try to offer a wide range of competitive activities so that most (?) people can find at least one that suits them reasonably well. Shaq would make a shitty jockey, but that’s ok. He was good at something else.
To your examples, I think there is a lot to be said for activities that are multi-dimensional and thus test lots of different abilities. That means that people who maybe aren’t great at one aspect can nonetheless succeed by focusing on other aspects. That is, they can work around their relative weaknesses. So, in that sense, tennis has some virtues that sprinting lacks (putting aside the cost/socioeconomic issues).
This point drove part of the conversation from my end, which was, “what rule set do you propose. People argued that it wasn’t fair that the prize competition was for (triathlon) so now we have a duathlon rule set. It turns out what you really wanted was for people who chose duathlon because they were bad at (swimming) to have a chance to win. How do you define that in a rule set?”
Like you said, you can have size categories if that is what makes the sport more interesting, but at the end of the day, you still need to define what the category is if you are going to attach a big prize to it. I don’t think, “people who are specifically here because they suck at the other thing,” is a definable category. Or, at least if you do define it that way, you are admitting to the world that you’re really fat out of shape people who suck at the main sport.
Side note: I will admit there can be some nuance to it. For example, we have a once a year novice tournament for anyone who’s been involved for less than 2 years. There’s no rule that says an Olympic medalist in foil cannot enter the SCA rapier tournament despite having just recently joined the organization, but they wouldn’t be very popular if they did.