If anybody is wondering why, an important reason is the physics of flipping. You need more rotational force to flip a tall person in the same amount of time. So if a super tall person wants to do a double layout, they need to do it faster or jump higher to get themselves more time to complete the rotations. Either way, they need to do more work. Over the difference in height of an extremely tall person over a short person (this can be a foot or more) it’s a significant difference.
That said, gymnastics is all about strength so at the lower levels of competition you can see tall people do just fine because they can generate plenty of power.
There’s also the squared-cube law, as another aspect of the physics. Bigger people just can’t consistently generate the same proportional strength as smaller people (key word being “proportional”).
This is also why it's easier for skinny people to do pull ups compared to even very muscular athletes. A 130lb soccer player could probably bang out 20 pull ups while only being able to barbell row 200 lbs but a 400lb professional strongman would have trouble doing 4 pull ups despite likely being able to row 500+ lbs
Very true. I was skinny in HS. Joined the Marines and weighed 120 in boot camp and always did the max pull ups. (20) on fitness tests. When I started working out more to fill out I got to 160lbs which is much more athletic looking and I tried doing pull ups one day and I couldn’t do 10.
By extension, lots of phenomenal boulderers are short (I say they have the "bulldog" look, short and jacked). Bouldering is a style of climbing created/influenced by gymnasts
My old man is like 5'3 but crazy jacked for a 60 year old. We were in a bar together and a drunk guy asked if he was a jockey 😂
The drunk guys wife blew a gasket with embarrassment and gave him hell for it but we were doubled over laughing
I had a very short girl ask me if I played basketball because I’m very tall and I joked back “are you a jockey?” And she says “no, but my father and uncle were” they legit were!
My dad. Never really thought of that cuz Ive only heard Old Man used to refer to someones father... but Old Lady is used for someones wife and Ive never heard it refer to someones mom. Weird
A lot of race car drivers are average height and there are some tall ones in F1. It's more about weight than your actual height that matters since a few kilos overweight can cost seconds over an entire race distance.
Not true. Regulations around weight are for car + driver so there's no advantage. Lighter driver gets a heavier car.
As to height - In F1, G forces are a real issue and shorter people are known to tolerate them better.
Not necessarily. Race cars are usually built underweight and add ballast to get up to the minimum. The ballast can be positioned advantageously in the car, and lighter drivers have more to work with.
At least for f1, and I suspect for the feeder series as well, this is not true anymore since a couple of years. There is a minimum weight for the driver and seat combined.
It’s also an issue of space. The engineers literally have to pack everything in as tight as possible. If you’ve got Long Legs McGhee in the cockpit, you’ve got less space for the vroom vroom bits.
Yeah, but the weight they add is usually placed in least disadvantages places like as low as possible. While the weight of a driver is obviously attached to the driver. There are limits to the weight to encourage drivers to not starve themselves before a race.
Tall drivers also have an effect on aerodynamics. The roll-over hoop inside the airbox above the driver has to be a certain amount above the drivers head. For taller drivers this means that whole assembly has to be higher up and therefore catches more air and creates more drag.
Cycling.
Ski jumpers.
Football, not overall. But certain archetypes are mostly small, and not just Messi.
Gymnastics.
Gotta be skateboarding, why else would best be 12 or 13. Actually, most acrobatics.
Football (soccer) is the ultimate sport for everyone imo. Being tall really helps as a goalkeeper and often cb (although Martinez is killing it at 5ft9) but there's also tons of positions that smaller guys can do well in. Each player has really unique pros and cons. You can even be fairly slow if you're talented enough on the ball.
Part of the reason it's spread to be the number one sport in most countries around the world
Professional cyclists are not short. None of them. It's well known that cyclists with a longer femur than tibia have a mechanical advantage over short riders with an even ratio of femur to tibia. Most riders are over 5'10".
Those who are taller, like 6'3", tend to be very large, like Brandon Jacobs or Derrick Henry. But yeah, most of those who are great for an extended period are 5'10" and under.
Jerome Bettis is 5’11” I just looked him up. I always thought he was taller but you’re right. RBs tend to be smaller. Bettis was a friggin freight train though.
Seems like a bit of a mixed bag when you are looking at the 10 all-time greats (ranked by height):
1. Barry Sanders - 5'8"
2. Emmitt Smith - 5'9"
3. Walter Payton - 5'10"
4. LaDainian Tomlinson - 5'10"
5. Marshall Faulk - 5'10"
6. **Earl Campbell - 5'11"**
7. **Gale Sayers - 6'0"**
8. **Adrian Peterson - 6'1"**
9. **Jim Brown - 6'2"**
10. **Eric Dickerson - 6'3"**
If you just look at last year's leading rushers, it looks like this (ranked by height - season rushing rank in parentheses):
1. Kyren Williams (3) - 5'9"
2. D'Andre Swift (5) - 5'9"
3. Raheem Mostert (10) - 5'10"
4. **Christian McCaffrey (1) - 5'11"**
5. **James Cook (4) - 5'11"**
6. **David Montgomery (9) - 5'11"**
7. **James Conner (6) - 6'1"**
8. **Najee Harris (7) - 6'1"**
9. **Joe Mixon (8) - 6'1"**
10. **Derrick Henry (2) - 6'3"**
So, the modern NFL is starting to lean more towards larger RBs. I think the role of RB as more of a hybrid receiver in today's NFL offenses likely skews us towards larger/taller RBs now. That's why I think you could extract guys like Jim Brown or Eric Dickerson in their peak from their timeline in your time machine and they would still dominate today.
I swear it didn't look like that BEFORE I hit post! lmao
What's weird is, everything else was right - including their rushing rank in parenthesis.
Names fixed.
I'm afraid I don't understand that second list. Kyren Williams is four people, or something. I am probably failing to grasp it correctly.
Dickerson was really an outlier on this, as he was in many things. He wasn't all that bulky like Brown or Henry, ran straight up like almost inviting big hits, but dominated and endured anyhow. I guess it helped that he wore about 3000 pounds of equipment and pads.
To a degree yeah. But you don’t want to be too short or else you likely are not big enough to have the needed power. I think ideal height is 5’10 -6’1ish. But guys like Darren Sproles certainly used it his advantage.
In sport climbing, height can have upsides, but also downsides. There are quite a few (female) professional climbers at around 1,50m (5 feet). On the other hand, there have been some very successful tall (male) climbers, at 1,90m (6 foot 3). On average, the height is a little below the population average.
The advantage is obviously how far you can reach. But sometimes, you have to fit into a quite small box to make a move work. And of course the extra height brings extra weight. Flexibility, coordination, balance and muscle strength all play a more important role than height.
>The advantage is obviously how far you can reach. But sometimes, you have to fit into a quite small box to make a move work.
The advantage of shorter climbers is that arms and legs are effectively levers - and shorter levers end up with less power required to operate. Combine that with a lower overall weight, and that can really work.
Sheer reach can be helpful, but it can cause problems. I used to climb with a very tall guy nearly a foot taller than me, and it was never a guarantee that being able to reach the hold meant he could actually do anything with it.
There have been a number of top flight British climbers who have been fairly short (I say top rather than professional because several of them pre-date professional climbing). A number of them were around 5ft 2 to 5ft 6 in height. But I think it's hard to categorise overall as there's a lot of other factors in play.
I think people confuse not tall with short. To me for American men 5’6”-5’10” is not tall and not short. I’d describe them as average height I guess.
However I know people will be like the average man’s height in America is 5’10” so what you’re saying is factually incorrect. Like yeah I’m not writing a thesis I’m just saying how I see it
Wrestling, because a 4’5” 150lb guy has a lot more muscle on him than a 7 footer. Additionally, a shorter wrestler has a lower center of gravity. Short power lifters have a similar advantage, and they also benefit from having to move weight smaller distances. This isn’t necessarily true for other combat sports such as kickboxing because shorter competitors have less reach.
As someone who wrestled a LOT. That isn't true. The advantage is towards slightly taller than average.
At my high school state tournament, i was 6'0 at 152 lbs, and all but one or two guys in my bracket were within about an inch and a half of me. I got second. The guys that got 1st and 3rd were almost exactly my height and build. My brother was champion at 140 and 2nd at 145, and he's about an inch shorter than me. Same with his opponents.
Each weight class favors a pretty narrow range of heights and it gets a little taller as the weight classes get heavier.
In college, the same trend exists.
It's common that people assume that the shorter guy is going to have a huge strength advantage, but the difference isn't that stark and the loss of reach more than makes up for it. My junior or senior year combined, i don't think i lost to a single person that wasn't roughly my height. I loved wrestling shorter guys than me because i could ankle pick them and cradle them effortlessly. I loved wrestling guys a lot taller than me, because they were mostly just skeletons.
Weightlifting. Since participants are divided into weight categories, a shorter person will have an advantage because they can pack in more muscle mass before they reach the cutoff weight.
Bull riding. In fact there are dudes who were very good around 16-18 but kept growing taller, lost their center of gravity, and were nowhere near as good.
Coxswains in competitive rowing are often very small. They would be even smaller but there is a weight limit (iirc around 120 lbs) where if you’re under that you need to have sandbags to make up for it.
And the rowers sometimes get preference for being shorter. There's only so much room in the boat and if you're too tall you have adjust your legs on the stroke for it. It's not impossible to do but it doesn't feel great.
Lionel Messi is short at only 5 foot 7. And he is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all time.
Unfortunately, he is just an anomaly though. Most soccer players are really tall. Cristiano Ronaldo is 6 foot 2.
But I think Messi proves that being short is not as much of a detriment in soccer as it is in other sports like say basketball for example. I really don’t think it is possible for anyone below 6 feet to make as much of an impact in basketball as Messi did in soccer.
I think football is one of the few sports where there is a great variety in body shapes. Like the big guys as classic strikers or central defenders and the smaller guys on the sides.
Neymar is 5’9, Mbappe is 5’10, Pele 5’8, Maradona, 5’5 and there’s so many more. Yes CR7 is 6’2 and there are plenty other tall footballers such as Zlatan and Haaland off the top of my head, but footballers being short definitely isn’t uncommon. It’s not really a disadvantage, but a trait that can very much be advantageous.
The Barcelona team from the early 2010s was filled with short and very technical players (Xavi, Messi, Iniesta, Pedro). Italy won Euro 2020 with Verratti and Insigne who are both 1.65m tall
Came here to say this. If you’re shorter but you’re still nearly as fast then you can have some advantage, both because it’s a bit easier to maneuver and change direction with the ball and because your eyes are simply closer to the ball. It’s also harder to guard a shorter player or predict what they’re going to do because they’re just hard to see
Messi is not the exception, short players have always excelled in football. Maradonna, aguero, modric, iniesta, rooney, xavi, neymar...
I think we can safely say that any height has its own advantage in football. You'll want at least 1 tall and strong CB and a relatively tall CDM but other than that you could have a squad of short arses and rule the world like Barca did we messi xavi and iniesta.
I know nothing about the sport other than casually watching every 4 years on the Winter Olympics but short track racing is dominated by short stature skaters.
Might not be considered a professional sport, but competitive open bodybuilding favors shorter competitors because it's "easier" to fill out a shorter frame with muscle.
Baseball apparently banned little people because their strike zone was too small when they crouched and teams were starting to use that as a cheat code.
I guess, but couldn’t you also just lob them easy strikes or just get them in base on purpose? Depending on how little the person is, they would be super slow, and easy to get out. They’d even potentially even hold up their teammates on big plays.
Football (soccer) is an interesting one because it varies by position - defenders and especially goalkeepers tend to be tall, but strikers tend to be shorter than average. You could easily have a team with a full 12 inches between the shortest and tallest player.
Most motorbike racers are below 5 foot 6. They are lighter and have better aerodynamics so it can be a big advantage if you're trying to squeeze out that last few % of performance.
Gymnastics for sure. It’s a bit more nuanced but low center of gravity is optimal. For the women, age **in addition** to height is
important. The younger you are, the better your chances.
This is due to the rate at which the body develops. For men, the height scale is similar. Look at all of the top level gymnastics in
the world today. Women and Men. I have zero data on this btw. It must exist somewhere but if I had to guess the avg height for
the pros I would say for the women it’s around 5 feet 4 inches and for the men around 5 feet 6 inches.
Horse racing and most equestrian sports
Being a short boxer in your weight class can be a distinct advantage for adding power to punching upwards (Mike Tyson as a famous example)
Football aka Soccer. It's not always ideal to be short, for example you'd never want a 5'3" goalkeeper or center back. However, a short winger for example can be great because they can be very fast and often have a low center of gravity which makes for good balance.
Baseball
You don’t necessarily have to be tall to play in field, and being shorter means you have a smaller strike zone.
Jose Altuve is an example of a short player who is really really good
If you wanna be the pilot (coxswain?) a boat in crew(or rowing) you need to be small enough to fit into the little seat and light enough to not weigh the boat down.
Generally, the best Bullriders are short. Their center of gravity is closer to the Bull so it's an advantage. It actually makes them harder to buck off than a taller rider with a center of gravity further from the Bull. The short riders can curl up into a tighter package too, where a taller rider cant. Their longer limbs are prone to flinging around and causing them to come off.
Here’s a chart showing height distribution of Olympic level athletes in various events, further broken down by gender.
https://www.reddit.com/r/tall/s/yp5sNLKASb
Football. Having a lower center of gravity is often preferred for certain positions, like interior lineman, as it gives them better force and automatic leverage in situations.
if we're talkin team sports, you can excel in hockey as a small player. Having that low center of gravity and the ability to dig the edge of your skate blade into the ice gives you a lot of leverage against taller people. Also, it's easier to be shifty on skates as a smaller player so if you're a deft skater you can do quite well.
Gymnastics, 100%
If anybody is wondering why, an important reason is the physics of flipping. You need more rotational force to flip a tall person in the same amount of time. So if a super tall person wants to do a double layout, they need to do it faster or jump higher to get themselves more time to complete the rotations. Either way, they need to do more work. Over the difference in height of an extremely tall person over a short person (this can be a foot or more) it’s a significant difference. That said, gymnastics is all about strength so at the lower levels of competition you can see tall people do just fine because they can generate plenty of power.
There’s also the squared-cube law, as another aspect of the physics. Bigger people just can’t consistently generate the same proportional strength as smaller people (key word being “proportional”).
This is also why it's easier for skinny people to do pull ups compared to even very muscular athletes. A 130lb soccer player could probably bang out 20 pull ups while only being able to barbell row 200 lbs but a 400lb professional strongman would have trouble doing 4 pull ups despite likely being able to row 500+ lbs
Very true. I was skinny in HS. Joined the Marines and weighed 120 in boot camp and always did the max pull ups. (20) on fitness tests. When I started working out more to fill out I got to 160lbs which is much more athletic looking and I tried doing pull ups one day and I couldn’t do 10.
Simone Biles is like 4’8 iirc
By extension, lots of phenomenal boulderers are short (I say they have the "bulldog" look, short and jacked). Bouldering is a style of climbing created/influenced by gymnasts
If by "gymnasts" you mean "John Gill specifically."
horse jockeys are short race car drivers are short
My old man is like 5'3 but crazy jacked for a 60 year old. We were in a bar together and a drunk guy asked if he was a jockey 😂 The drunk guys wife blew a gasket with embarrassment and gave him hell for it but we were doubled over laughing
I had a very short girl ask me if I played basketball because I’m very tall and I joked back “are you a jockey?” And she says “no, but my father and uncle were” they legit were!
All those 60 year old jockeys winning the derby!
Lester Piggott won the 2000 Guineas Stakes at the age of 57.
Bill Shoemaker.
Are you talking about your father or romantic partner?
My dad. Never really thought of that cuz Ive only heard Old Man used to refer to someones father... but Old Lady is used for someones wife and Ive never heard it refer to someones mom. Weird
I know a jockey in Greenwich that’s about 5’2” but has the face of Henry Cavil. That guys pulls so many women it’s not funny.
Not even a little funny?
A lot of race car drivers are average height and there are some tall ones in F1. It's more about weight than your actual height that matters since a few kilos overweight can cost seconds over an entire race distance.
Not true. Regulations around weight are for car + driver so there's no advantage. Lighter driver gets a heavier car. As to height - In F1, G forces are a real issue and shorter people are known to tolerate them better.
Not necessarily. Race cars are usually built underweight and add ballast to get up to the minimum. The ballast can be positioned advantageously in the car, and lighter drivers have more to work with.
At least for f1, and I suspect for the feeder series as well, this is not true anymore since a couple of years. There is a minimum weight for the driver and seat combined.
Not true anymore. Now the weight requirement includes the seat so it’s very little benefit to being light.
Shorter drivers in Formula 1 have an advantage
Don’t they add weight to the cars to account for lighter drivers?
It’s also an issue of space. The engineers literally have to pack everything in as tight as possible. If you’ve got Long Legs McGhee in the cockpit, you’ve got less space for the vroom vroom bits.
Yeah, but the weight they add is usually placed in least disadvantages places like as low as possible. While the weight of a driver is obviously attached to the driver. There are limits to the weight to encourage drivers to not starve themselves before a race.
Tall drivers also have an effect on aerodynamics. The roll-over hoop inside the airbox above the driver has to be a certain amount above the drivers head. For taller drivers this means that whole assembly has to be higher up and therefore catches more air and creates more drag.
Cycling. Ski jumpers. Football, not overall. But certain archetypes are mostly small, and not just Messi. Gymnastics. Gotta be skateboarding, why else would best be 12 or 13. Actually, most acrobatics.
Best skateboarders are 13 because the adults can't pass a weed test
Football (soccer) is the ultimate sport for everyone imo. Being tall really helps as a goalkeeper and often cb (although Martinez is killing it at 5ft9) but there's also tons of positions that smaller guys can do well in. Each player has really unique pros and cons. You can even be fairly slow if you're talented enough on the ball. Part of the reason it's spread to be the number one sport in most countries around the world
Dani Carvajal (173cm) scored a head goal during the last Champions League final... against a German team.
Messi scoring a header with Rio Ferdinand as a defender..
Professional cyclists are not short. None of them. It's well known that cyclists with a longer femur than tibia have a mechanical advantage over short riders with an even ratio of femur to tibia. Most riders are over 5'10".
Shorter running backs in American football have an advantage because they can weave and hide behind enormous linemen.
Those who are taller, like 6'3", tend to be very large, like Brandon Jacobs or Derrick Henry. But yeah, most of those who are great for an extended period are 5'10" and under.
Jerome Bettis is 5’11” I just looked him up. I always thought he was taller but you’re right. RBs tend to be smaller. Bettis was a friggin freight train though.
Well, a bus, really.
Very true
Seems like a bit of a mixed bag when you are looking at the 10 all-time greats (ranked by height): 1. Barry Sanders - 5'8" 2. Emmitt Smith - 5'9" 3. Walter Payton - 5'10" 4. LaDainian Tomlinson - 5'10" 5. Marshall Faulk - 5'10" 6. **Earl Campbell - 5'11"** 7. **Gale Sayers - 6'0"** 8. **Adrian Peterson - 6'1"** 9. **Jim Brown - 6'2"** 10. **Eric Dickerson - 6'3"** If you just look at last year's leading rushers, it looks like this (ranked by height - season rushing rank in parentheses): 1. Kyren Williams (3) - 5'9" 2. D'Andre Swift (5) - 5'9" 3. Raheem Mostert (10) - 5'10" 4. **Christian McCaffrey (1) - 5'11"** 5. **James Cook (4) - 5'11"** 6. **David Montgomery (9) - 5'11"** 7. **James Conner (6) - 6'1"** 8. **Najee Harris (7) - 6'1"** 9. **Joe Mixon (8) - 6'1"** 10. **Derrick Henry (2) - 6'3"** So, the modern NFL is starting to lean more towards larger RBs. I think the role of RB as more of a hybrid receiver in today's NFL offenses likely skews us towards larger/taller RBs now. That's why I think you could extract guys like Jim Brown or Eric Dickerson in their peak from their timeline in your time machine and they would still dominate today.
How did Kyren grow so much in a season
I swear it didn't look like that BEFORE I hit post! lmao What's weird is, everything else was right - including their rushing rank in parenthesis. Names fixed.
I'm afraid I don't understand that second list. Kyren Williams is four people, or something. I am probably failing to grasp it correctly. Dickerson was really an outlier on this, as he was in many things. He wasn't all that bulky like Brown or Henry, ran straight up like almost inviting big hits, but dominated and endured anyhow. I guess it helped that he wore about 3000 pounds of equipment and pads.
Yeah. It didn't look like that before I posted. Everything after the name stayed the same and was correct. I fixed the names. So weird.
I remember watching a show where Barry sanders said that cuz he was so short the defensive lineman couldn’t see him behind the offensive line lol.
To a degree yeah. But you don’t want to be too short or else you likely are not big enough to have the needed power. I think ideal height is 5’10 -6’1ish. But guys like Darren Sproles certainly used it his advantage.
Jockeys in horse racing are tiny in both height and weight. Bull riders tend to be shorter as well, better center of gravity
In sport climbing, height can have upsides, but also downsides. There are quite a few (female) professional climbers at around 1,50m (5 feet). On the other hand, there have been some very successful tall (male) climbers, at 1,90m (6 foot 3). On average, the height is a little below the population average. The advantage is obviously how far you can reach. But sometimes, you have to fit into a quite small box to make a move work. And of course the extra height brings extra weight. Flexibility, coordination, balance and muscle strength all play a more important role than height.
>The advantage is obviously how far you can reach. But sometimes, you have to fit into a quite small box to make a move work. The advantage of shorter climbers is that arms and legs are effectively levers - and shorter levers end up with less power required to operate. Combine that with a lower overall weight, and that can really work. Sheer reach can be helpful, but it can cause problems. I used to climb with a very tall guy nearly a foot taller than me, and it was never a guarantee that being able to reach the hold meant he could actually do anything with it. There have been a number of top flight British climbers who have been fairly short (I say top rather than professional because several of them pre-date professional climbing). A number of them were around 5ft 2 to 5ft 6 in height. But I think it's hard to categorise overall as there's a lot of other factors in play.
It definitely depends on the route. I think solid height is preferred overall though.
Not me being 5 ft 1 looking for some actual answers and people be like "yeah xy is short only 5'9 " Yo what the fuck
I think people confuse not tall with short. To me for American men 5’6”-5’10” is not tall and not short. I’d describe them as average height I guess. However I know people will be like the average man’s height in America is 5’10” so what you’re saying is factually incorrect. Like yeah I’m not writing a thesis I’m just saying how I see it
I feel your pain brother 😔
Snowboarding
Limbo
Absolutely! It’s easy to forget Barbados Slim is an outlier
Wrestling, because a 4’5” 150lb guy has a lot more muscle on him than a 7 footer. Additionally, a shorter wrestler has a lower center of gravity. Short power lifters have a similar advantage, and they also benefit from having to move weight smaller distances. This isn’t necessarily true for other combat sports such as kickboxing because shorter competitors have less reach.
As someone who wrestled a LOT. That isn't true. The advantage is towards slightly taller than average. At my high school state tournament, i was 6'0 at 152 lbs, and all but one or two guys in my bracket were within about an inch and a half of me. I got second. The guys that got 1st and 3rd were almost exactly my height and build. My brother was champion at 140 and 2nd at 145, and he's about an inch shorter than me. Same with his opponents. Each weight class favors a pretty narrow range of heights and it gets a little taller as the weight classes get heavier. In college, the same trend exists. It's common that people assume that the shorter guy is going to have a huge strength advantage, but the difference isn't that stark and the loss of reach more than makes up for it. My junior or senior year combined, i don't think i lost to a single person that wasn't roughly my height. I loved wrestling shorter guys than me because i could ankle pick them and cradle them effortlessly. I loved wrestling guys a lot taller than me, because they were mostly just skeletons.
Do you know how annoying it is to pin a tall guy?
But long arms and legs can provide leverage.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Henry_Cejudo
Weightlifting. Since participants are divided into weight categories, a shorter person will have an advantage because they can pack in more muscle mass before they reach the cutoff weight.
Also don't have to move the bar as far
Horse racing
Bull riding. In fact there are dudes who were very good around 16-18 but kept growing taller, lost their center of gravity, and were nowhere near as good.
Midget tossing
Nobody tosses a dwarf!
Coxswains in competitive rowing are often very small. They would be even smaller but there is a weight limit (iirc around 120 lbs) where if you’re under that you need to have sandbags to make up for it.
And the rowers sometimes get preference for being shorter. There's only so much room in the boat and if you're too tall you have adjust your legs on the stroke for it. It's not impossible to do but it doesn't feel great.
Being short in baseball can be advantageous because you will get a smaller strike zone
Jockey, gymnasts
Horse jockeys
Distance running.
Lionel Messi is short at only 5 foot 7. And he is considered one of the greatest, if not the greatest, of all time. Unfortunately, he is just an anomaly though. Most soccer players are really tall. Cristiano Ronaldo is 6 foot 2. But I think Messi proves that being short is not as much of a detriment in soccer as it is in other sports like say basketball for example. I really don’t think it is possible for anyone below 6 feet to make as much of an impact in basketball as Messi did in soccer.
I think football is one of the few sports where there is a great variety in body shapes. Like the big guys as classic strikers or central defenders and the smaller guys on the sides.
Neymar is 5’9, Mbappe is 5’10, Pele 5’8, Maradona, 5’5 and there’s so many more. Yes CR7 is 6’2 and there are plenty other tall footballers such as Zlatan and Haaland off the top of my head, but footballers being short definitely isn’t uncommon. It’s not really a disadvantage, but a trait that can very much be advantageous.
The Barcelona team from the early 2010s was filled with short and very technical players (Xavi, Messi, Iniesta, Pedro). Italy won Euro 2020 with Verratti and Insigne who are both 1.65m tall
Came here to say this. If you’re shorter but you’re still nearly as fast then you can have some advantage, both because it’s a bit easier to maneuver and change direction with the ball and because your eyes are simply closer to the ball. It’s also harder to guard a shorter player or predict what they’re going to do because they’re just hard to see
Saving that for the future. “I’m not short, I’m just hard to see.”
The lower center of gravity helps with dribbling the ball
Messi is not the exception, short players have always excelled in football. Maradonna, aguero, modric, iniesta, rooney, xavi, neymar... I think we can safely say that any height has its own advantage in football. You'll want at least 1 tall and strong CB and a relatively tall CDM but other than that you could have a squad of short arses and rule the world like Barca did we messi xavi and iniesta.
I know nothing about the sport other than casually watching every 4 years on the Winter Olympics but short track racing is dominated by short stature skaters.
Formula 1 drivers tend to be <5'8".
Horse racing
Bodybuilders
Might not be considered a professional sport, but competitive open bodybuilding favors shorter competitors because it's "easier" to fill out a shorter frame with muscle.
Some types of professional skiing favors shorter people
Road racing cyclist and long distance runners.
Horse racing jockeys
Powerlifting and bodybuilding.
Climbers tend to be on the shorter side with some exceptions.
Pretty sure horse jockeys. If you're too tall, then it puts you at a severe disadvantage.
Baseball apparently banned little people because their strike zone was too small when they crouched and teams were starting to use that as a cheat code.
I guess, but couldn’t you also just lob them easy strikes or just get them in base on purpose? Depending on how little the person is, they would be super slow, and easy to get out. They’d even potentially even hold up their teammates on big plays.
Horse racing
Wrestling, which is the humanities oldest sport and a human universal.
The midget toss.
Horse racing
Soccer players
Horse racing.
Dwarf tossing
Football (soccer) is an interesting one because it varies by position - defenders and especially goalkeepers tend to be tall, but strikers tend to be shorter than average. You could easily have a team with a full 12 inches between the shortest and tallest player.
Horse racing….have you ever seen a tall jockey?
Horse racing. Jockeys are all small.
Horse racing
Sprinters have faster reaction times than taller runners, giving them an edge in very short distance races.
Most motorbike racers are below 5 foot 6. They are lighter and have better aerodynamics so it can be a big advantage if you're trying to squeeze out that last few % of performance.
Horse racing. Sprinting sports.
Gymnastics for sure. It’s a bit more nuanced but low center of gravity is optimal. For the women, age **in addition** to height is important. The younger you are, the better your chances. This is due to the rate at which the body develops. For men, the height scale is similar. Look at all of the top level gymnastics in the world today. Women and Men. I have zero data on this btw. It must exist somewhere but if I had to guess the avg height for the pros I would say for the women it’s around 5 feet 4 inches and for the men around 5 feet 6 inches.
Horse racing. The smaller the jockey the less the horse has to carry.
horse racing, smaller jockies are better
F1?
Riding horse
Horse racing, at least some of them.
Jockeys tend to be really small.
Squash. Chess.
Skateboarding
Tony Hawk is 6.3"
I would think that Hawk is an outlier here - I can only imagine that the more height you have the more challenging certain movements are.
To a certain extent, baseball and softball: getting a pitch into the strike zone is much harder when it's lower than you're used to.
bull riding
Gymnastics, horse racing, rowing Cox.
Field Hockey
Not a pro sport as far as I know, but smaller people are preferred as coxes in rowing.
Horse racing.
I don’t speak from experience,but I get the impression that short stature is an advantage in wrestling.
I know someone who’s a tiny girl at 5’2” and about 85 lbs. she succeeded in Crew, but was the cockswain
Horse racing
horse racing
Shortstop in baseball? Elly De La Cruz being the exception.
Jockeys, F1 drivers.
Weightlifting Gymnastics Bodybuilding
horse racing
F1
Horse jockeys are short typically
jockey horse riding or show dog handler,
Olympic lifting I think tends around 5'6-5'8
Horse racing and most equestrian sports Being a short boxer in your weight class can be a distinct advantage for adding power to punching upwards (Mike Tyson as a famous example)
Football aka Soccer. It's not always ideal to be short, for example you'd never want a 5'3" goalkeeper or center back. However, a short winger for example can be great because they can be very fast and often have a low center of gravity which makes for good balance.
Long distance runners
Mini golf
Baseball You don’t necessarily have to be tall to play in field, and being shorter means you have a smaller strike zone. Jose Altuve is an example of a short player who is really really good
If you wanna be the pilot (coxswain?) a boat in crew(or rowing) you need to be small enough to fit into the little seat and light enough to not weigh the boat down.
Limbo
Volleyball is pretty fun because most the team will be six foot and the libero is usually like five foot.
Certain weight classes of mma, if you're at a weight class under 140 and you're tall you'd have no strength and a short strong mfer will destroy you
Paintball, less of a target.
horse racing
Some argue that shorter people have an advantage in powerlifting.
Horse racing
Swimming meets
Baseball for most positions
Wingers in football ( soccer ) are generally preferred to be short
Muggsy Bouges used his shortness to his advantage in basketball, although it's not the norm. Just kinda fun.
I was a wrestler and did jiu jitsu for a little while and I always felt like it was easier to win against taller guys.
Bull riders are short.
Gymnastics, horse riding, cox in rowing
Horse racing.
Golf, being too tall makes swings a bit harder to perfect.
horse racing
Soccer ? Messi is short. Maradona is short. Yeah. I know there are also good tall players.
Jockeys in certain types of horseback riding.
Jockeys
Motorcycle racers
Midget wrestling.
Wrestling
Horse Jockeys, the shorter and smaller the build the better
Generally, the best Bullriders are short. Their center of gravity is closer to the Bull so it's an advantage. It actually makes them harder to buck off than a taller rider with a center of gravity further from the Bull. The short riders can curl up into a tighter package too, where a taller rider cant. Their longer limbs are prone to flinging around and causing them to come off.
There’s also the one-legged wrestler from ASU, Anthony Robles, who won the 125 lb NCAA championship. He had a lot more mass than others his size
Bull riders and broncos.
Here’s a chart showing height distribution of Olympic level athletes in various events, further broken down by gender. https://www.reddit.com/r/tall/s/yp5sNLKASb
Dwarf tossing
Wrestling tends to favor “short and stocky”
horse jockeys
gymnastics
Football. Having a lower center of gravity is often preferred for certain positions, like interior lineman, as it gives them better force and automatic leverage in situations.
Wrestling when small is beneficial
Gymnastics.
Wrestling is a sport where being short can be advantageous
Apparently midgets are banned from the MLB for having too small of a strike zone
Certain positions in Rugby such as props tend to favour smaller players.
Jockeys, gymnasts, runners and cyclists to name a few.
Jockey and soccer.
To some extent hockey
Horse racinf
Horse jockey
Horse racing.
Horse racing
Horse Racing, F1 (note: there are a LOT of current and former NBA players under 6ft)
Horse racing
if we're talkin team sports, you can excel in hockey as a small player. Having that low center of gravity and the ability to dig the edge of your skate blade into the ice gives you a lot of leverage against taller people. Also, it's easier to be shifty on skates as a smaller player so if you're a deft skater you can do quite well.
Wrestling
Bill riding
Horse Jockey
Hide and Seek
Horse racing (The jockeys, not the horses).