Is there any commonly known sport, game, or activity you can become world-class in without having any talent?

Skydiving.

All you need is enough cash, the passion to spend hours a day in the wind tunnel, a location where the weather is good enough to jump year-round, and a willingness to take calculated risks. There is a small amount of luck involved, but it's nothing like wingsuit base jumping where you're pretty much guaranteed to die in an accident if you do it long enough.

hard worker with zero talent wrote:

I'm thinking ultrarunning, horse racing, curling, and maybe NASCAR or poker. Though it would be debatable on whether ultrarunning is "commonly known".

Thoughts?

Generally that would be distance running. It's a sport for people that basically have no talent or skill other than putting one foot in front of the other for a very long time.

Motor sports is the only grouping of high profile sports I can think of. Of course, the top 2 or 3 (in F1 Max and LH) are talented, but the rest? All you need is above average (but not exceptional) reactions and stamina, and all the rest is connections and look reasonably good to be an ad pitchman.

Depends on what you mean by 'World Class'. Is a PGA Tour Pro WC? If so, golf is a good example of a major $ sport that can be learned. Evidence? Look at the numerous sons of stars that become pro's. Not as good as Dad, of course, but still pro. A rule of thumb is that if sons/daughters can become 'world class' also, exceptional talent is not needed.

Jo72 wrote:

Modern pentathlon obviously has little depth. Nevertheless, one needs to be far above average talent to even plausibly try fencing, shooting, riding and also needs decent aerobic capabilities for the swimming and running.

The two younger twin sisters of the German pentathlon olympic gold medalist Lena Schöneborn, Debbie and Rabea Schöneborn, switched to running about 3-4 years ago because it took less training time than pentathlon and got to ca. 1:11 2:27 in HM/Marathon within those 4 years, with Debbie getting 18th in the Tokyo Olympics.

Nico Motchebon got a world indoor medal in the 1993 and 5th in Atlanta 1996 with a best of 1:43.91 and he was a modern pentathlete (qualified but not participated in 1992 Olympics) before switching.

That fields lack depth does not mean one does not need quite a bit of talent for the top.

The gold medal winning female in modern pentathlon at the tokyo olympics has a 5k pb (road, no track pb listed) of around 18 1/2 minutes. She was one of the standout runners in the field. The male winner just isnt a runner at all and has no pbs listed. Maybe modern pentathletes were a better standard before the sport was taken over by ambitous parents trying to get their moderately talented kids to the olympics?

Modern pentathletes tend to be reasonable club level swimmers who take up the other sports to a mundane standard. The swimming is at a higher standard than the other sports. The showjumping is supposed to be at 1 meter 20, but most of the obstacles are lower, and the standard of preperation of the athletes in this discipline was so terrible, it caused an international outcry and has been removed from the sport for the nect olympic cycle. And unlike in the actual sport of showjumping, modern pentathles dont even have to train and prepare their own horses, (well, except for Jessie Springstein, that is).

Modern penthlon is such a badly organised sport that it doesnt yet know what its replacing horseback riding with yet! But in the world of MP, what does it matter if you have less than 3 years to get to olympic level in a as yet unknown sport! If its cycling, it is obviously going to lead to claims that any world ranking triathlete from a horse riding background would easily win medals, since the standard of fencing is low and even modern pentathletes learn shooting as an add on.

So modern pentathlon for sure as it seems not to be at the standard of most other olymoic sports but only so long as you have a parent who is prepared to give up their life to being involved in selecting the team at national level and organising the sport so that competition levels remain low.

Nothing of what you wrote invalidates my examples of former pentathletes who became international or at least continental class runners, in fact (much) better as runners then they were pentathletes. The Schöneborn twins ran ca. 16:40 basically from their pentathlon training and 3-4 years later sub 33 min 10k and ca. 2:27 marathon, getting them top 6 nationally and rank 18 in Tokyo for one of them.

Motchebon was a national class track and field athlete as a teenager and later 5th at the Atlanta Olympics 800m and in between he qualified in modern pentathlon for the 1992 Olympics but was not the best nationally.

I think modern pentathlon is a rather nonsensical sport and would not miss it for a second if abolished but these examples suggest to me that they are not such poor athletes overall.

Jo72 wrote:

Nothing of what you wrote invalidates my examples of former pentathletes who became international or at least continental class runners, in fact (much) better as runners then they were pentathletes. The Schöneborn twins ran ca. 16:40 basically from their pentathlon training and 3-4 years later sub 33 min 10k and ca. 2:27 marathon, getting them top 6 nationally and rank 18 in Tokyo for one of them.

Motchebon was a national class track and field athlete as a teenager and later 5th at the Atlanta Olympics 800m and in between he qualified in modern pentathlon for the 1992 Olympics but was not the best nationally.

I think modern pentathlon is a rather nonsensical sport and would not miss it for a second if abolished but these examples suggest to me that they are not such poor athletes overall.

Why do people answer so much in the first person on this board, as if they are some kind of deity on the subject?

I'll try using less words, so you can understand:

The German athletes that you mention were poor riders. German pentathletes tend to be poorer riders than their British or Irish counterparts because the German system predicates a series of riding exams in a very controlled environment and competing at low levels until certain more difficult exams are taken, whereas the British system generally produces riders who compete at or above the height of MP in the Olympic Games as children. (this isn't to say that Germans don't produce elite level riders, of course they do, but they have to specialise at an earlier age).

The German rider who caused the problems for MP in the Tokyo Olympics wasn't technically a bad rider at all, but she lacked experience of different horses and how to cope with the problems that the horse she was given presented. The horse still jumped but she couldn't get the best result out of the horse because she paniced and tensed up. She had no back up plan in place for what happened. She simply didn't prepare well enough.

Even so, the standard of swimming and running, just 2 of the disciplines in MP, overall tends to be much lower than that of the equivalent sports in triathlon.