What if

What if there were a lot of unfounded beliefs about the nutrition of top athletes? What if there were some serious doubts about the impact of body-fat percentage? More to the point, what if being fat, in the way it is understood in the general population, did not make a significant difference in some sports?

In this article even though we will use some examples from other sports we will primarily concentrate yourself on tennis. There are good reasons for it. Tennis is a sport that is seen a lot throughout the world unlike some sports that are mostly specific to some areas. For instance, baseball and football in the United States, hockey in Canada, soccer in Europe are all sports that are mostly local.

Another reason is that, in tennis, the television insists on one individual instead of a team which makes it easier to evaluate physically on a visual level. From a result standpoint the tennis player either wins or loses and you do not have to take into account the help (or lack there of) the targeted athlete gets from his or her team.

The way tennis pros dress also helps our assessment of their body-fat status. Short of swimmers, they are more easily gauged visually than most other athletes. The fact that there is a highly organized female portion of this sport is also very important. It would be very hard to find a pro sport for females besides maybe golf but some readers would argue on the real athletic value of the sport. Tennis on the other hand is safely assumed to call on most athletic qualities. You need strength, power, endurance, coordination, flexibility.

For all those reasons we will concentrate on tennis. It is also fair to say that our computer expert is currently 10th overall in Canada and has also enjoyed an ATP ranking earlier in his career. He should be able to guide us through that glimpse in the tennis world.

That being said, let us start with the principle of sound nutrition. Surely we think, an athlete needs to eat in a balanced way, eating quality food in appropriate quantities. Over a long period of time two things are to look for. One is that the athlete must not have severe deficiencies in the vitamin and mineral department. The other thing is that to play a tournament and to eventually get to a final your caloric intake must be adequate at least most the time. In light of this take a critical look at the following anecdotes:

• Carling Bassett a player from Canada who broke the top ten in her teenage years shocked everybody in the early nineties when people learned that she had been suffering from an eating disorder which included anorexia and bulimia (purging yourself). At a playing weight of 94 pounds and looking pretty much like a skeleton (mind you part of the press called her “Darling Carling” and found her very beautiful) she kept on playing clutching to her top ten ranking. She was finally taken away to a hospital where they kept her fearing for her life. The question nobody asked was this one, if nutrition is such a great part of an athlete’s regimen, why was a girl literally killing herself by starving and purging herself able to win matches consistently at such a high level. While definitely not encouraging anorexia as a means of success for a tennis player, it clearly makes the point that the impact of nutrition on performance might have been overstated. No one in his right mind could argue that Bassett was following a sound diet from a performance point of view.
• The very recent example of Daniela Hantuchova makes another compelling point in the very same direction. Hantuchova, in the 2000’s made a rapid climb to the top ten as a teenager. In 2003, rumors of anorexia started circulating. The rumors were hard to dismiss because of two things. First Daniela never discusses the widely accepted rumors (commentators routinely talked about it on the air and Brad Gilbert true to form even made a rude and cruel joke about it on T.V.) and second Hantuchova had the look of somebody coming out of Aschwitz (this is not meant as a joke bud as a good as a sad assessment of her physical state at the time). Sure her ranking fell but she remained among the top contenders of the women circuit and had some impressive wins in that period. The point here is that it would seem to be possible to be a top athlete not only by not following a sound diet but by literally starving yourself.
• John McEnroe has a different twist on the same subject. In his book “You cannot be serious” he speaks very candidly about the part nutrition (or lack there of) played in his career. While he was a junior, McEnroe talks of an average nutrition (American average) with maybe an overindulgence in deserts. While there is nothing scandalous in this it strikes me as peculiar to say the least that a future top ten prospect had no formal nutritionist following him or telling him how to eat in a very precise manner and how to eat according to his very specific needs. After all, we are constantly reminded (by nutrition experts!) how essential nutrition is to performance. After his junior years, from his own admission, he seems to be eating pretty much what he wants without any kind of system. He tells of the time when he did follow a healthy diet which seemed to help him at first because he lost some weight but while on a losing streak he discarded the diet thinking that he was too thin. As he puts it scientifically himself “I went back to eating cheeseburgers and I started winning again”. Either eating cheeseburgers is a well kept secret from cutting-edge science or nutrition does not play a deciding role with certain individuals. In his playing career McEnroe says that his weight went from 154 to 182 and that in spite of those fluctuations he was always at the top of his game (yes that applies to being ranked seventh in the world) and no clear correlation between his weight and his ranking can be established.

Another interesting topic that comes up in McEnroes book is the use of recreative drugs. He freely admits to using pot and even some times in his career”smoking way too much”. He also tells of his late buddy Vitas Gerulaitis (top 5 for most of his career) as a heavy user of various drugs. Drug goes into somebody’s body and as such should be considered part of somebody’s diet. It seems strange that drug intake does not seem to have a clear and precise influence on athletic results.

Let us examine the case of Lindsay Davenport, a girl who secured the number one ranking before when was twenty. At that time nobody could have argued that Lindsay did not have a weight problem. Not just a weight problem for a tennis star or an international model, she was clearly overweight for a normal North-american (not that there is anything wrong with it). You can make your own opinion by looking at tapes from the nineties but I would guess that Lindsay had a forty pound surplus compared to the typical female pro. At any rate a 30 pounds surplus would be a very conservative estimation.

Now, to the point, because the goal is not to be rude but to be coherent. With that extra weight to carry she was winning tournaments and also millions. Had she been 500 in the world we could have argued that she had talent but that her weight was keeping her from expressing her talent but number one is well … just that, number one.

But you say, just think how great she could have been, had she been skinny. Great point, except that Lindsay destroyed it without meaning to. While she was number two or three, she decided to lose weight, and lose weight she did. She went went from fat to a very fit (again a loss of either thirty or forty pounds) and people were anticipating great things. Did it happen? Not at all. While looking prettier (and somewhat happier) Lindsay managed to actually losing ground in the ranking. Because she did this with specialists we can assume that she did it sensibly and in many way that should have maximized success. What is interesting with Lindsay is that nobody was ever number one while being obviously fat. This has to be a major point to consider before stating body-fat ratios as an essential component athletic greatness.

Let us look at other examples of other tennis greats whose nutrition or level of fatness tend to go against conventional wisdom.

Andre Agassi got on tour as a skinny 16 year-old and immediately made a name for himself. Andre from his own admission loved junk food and ate a lot of it. In his early twenties he had weight fluctuations. Like most people he tended to go on and off good eating habits. In his thirties he definitely improved his training and eating habits. Andre is proud of his work ethics and the press never fails to mention it. He is a much better athlete than he was during his mid-twenties. Unfortunately his results are not better. Worse some of the guys who now beat him are not in as good a shape he is.

Boris Becker shocked the world by winning Wimbledon at 17 as a 6’3″ lanky teenager. The next few years saw him in the top 10 and arguably the top 5. What is interesting is that he finally caught the number one spot by winning the U.S. Open against Ivan Lendl … at a respectable weight of 210 pounds. For those who wonder, yes, you could definitely pinch an inch. Lendl facing him was way skinnier and known to be as a fitness fanatic. It did not help him. But maybe in spite of all that Becker was eating all right thing. Guess again. In his own biography Becker admits to abusing alcohol and making a huge consumption of both sleeping pills and speed. He freely admits losing a Wimbledon final to Stephan Edberg because he was trying not to fall asleep. While that statement might shock you it makes you wonder how he got to the final in the first place.

Monica Seles was a star and was always considered lean. Lean that is, until some lunatic stabbed her in the back to almost put her out of tennis forever. However, with the true spirit of a champion, she came back after more that two years and came back … with an obvious belly. At this level said the expert conditioning is key so she will have to play herself back into shape. She did not. She won her first tournament (Canadian open) and she did very well in the following U.S. Open. Unfortunately the weight to this day has not come off but she remained a very solid tenner in spite of that.

Martina Navratilova was a very big name in the seventies and eighties. She was usually number one and sometimes number two. In the eighties Navratilova was said to have revolutionized tennis by improving her fitness. She walked on court with a body-fat that had more to do with a bodybuilder than a female tennis pro. Some people nicknamed her Navratirobot and explained her success by her lean muscularity. That was the shape of things to come. Think again, she was replaced by woman like Graff, Capriati, Seles or even Davenport, women who has more fat and less muscle. While Navratilova’s success at first glimpse seem to make the point that a lean athlete is a much better one do not forget that when she first came over to America, she admittedly got quite fat by eating too much junk food. During that period she nonetheless enjoyed tremendous success as a young newcomer on the tour. While her weight got better she was not a very lean person until “extreme makeover” she submitted herself to in the eighties. It is not inconceivable that Navratilova would probably have enjoyed pretty much the same level of success had she not adopted such a strict diet. After all she had beaten Chris-Evert without the Sylvestor Stallone shape.

As a last example Mats Wilander former number one (1988) told about enjoying up to six glasses of orange juice in the morning. Why? Because he liked it. He also said that he hate pretty much what he wanted. He said he once thought of eating healthy but he did it for a week with Joachym Nystrom and they both got beat by Miloslav Mecir who apparently had been eating chocolate all week so they quit. And we think that everything they eat is scientifically planned out!

What to make of it

Most athletes are lean. It might not be because they have to. It might be because they have to. It might be because they train a lot, it might be because they are being told how to eat, a leaner athlete might be a better athlete but certain questions remain.

Could it be that body-fat affect various athletes in different ways? Is it possible that leanness has been given too much importance? Has the relatively new “science” of sports nutrition been making claims concerning its role on performance? If an athlete can use and abuse drugs and still perform at the highest level, can we rethink the importance given to anything that goes into a human body? Is it possible that because we cannot quantify it, that less credit has been given to the mental components? Is it possible that the actual view that “skinny is sexy” has spilled over in our athletic beliefs? Those are all questions to ponder with… an open mind.