Truth or fiction: Athletics Weekly claims most elite runners have fall birthdays

I thought this was true across all sports

You can't ignore the large amounts of African athletes born on January 1st, the fastest day of the year

No idea if it is true but certainly Kenenisa, Mo, Rupp and Daniel Komen did just fine anyway.

Why are they using a sample size of like 20 people? The thesis sounds perfectly reasonable & Gladwell explored this concept with Hockey players already, but this is just poor methodology. You should look at the top 100 or 1,000 runners in a particular event and calculate % from there.

I could write this same article about any 3 month period and cherry pick people to do it.

Somewhat true, but cut-off dates really vary by sport and location so you can't generalize it to the fall. Where I live for example, the cutoff is october 1st, so all the kids born in august/september are younger than everyone else (usually school sports). October, november kids do have a big advantage. In some sports (usually non-scholastic leagues), the cutoff is Jan 1st, so the kids born in January/February are advantaged, and those born in Nov/December are disadvantaged.

fake news. the fastest distance runners in the world are from the rift valley, and most dont even know when their own birthday is, or have "fake" birthdays like Kipchoge.

Grant Fisher April 22

The article however does not make a strong argument since it looks at a small sample and primarily British runners. Seems weak.

I thought David Esptein proved all of this was not true. Or am I misrembering and that was for some other Gladwell assertion?

I need to have David on the podcast.

Yes, the most common birthdays are in September athlete or not from a statistic I read once.

I'm an elite runner and my bday is in December.

The article looks like just a bit of fun (note the light-hearted astrology pay-off line at the end). AW has run a version of this a few times over the years. It started with the fact Coe, Ovett, Cram and Elliott have birthdays within a few days of each other (which we have to admit is interesting?) and has now been expanded to include athletes like Jakob Ingebrigtsen.

September 16 birthday. I wasn't the oldest in my class, but one of the youngest. I also had top grades in everything but athletics and only took up running as adult. So maybe my anecdotal evidence supports the hypothesis: youngest in class > sucks. But I think the jump from 'born in autumn' to 'oldest in class' is hardly justified. I mean the rule 'kids aged X start school in fall' is as simple and logical as 'kids born in year X start school in year Y' (which was my case), and with all the tales about East Africans running 10K to school and back every day it is difficult to assume there could be a hard-defined 'school age' for them at all.

It's one way of keeping warm I guess.

The most common months for birthdays in North America are August and September so I thing late summer would be the most common. Autumn doesn't start until end of that window.

Coaches know this, but can't do anything about it. When our kid started showing signs of being good, the varsity coach asked us when his birthday was. When we told him, he said "great, it's about time I get a fall athlete."

Yes, he did. I have a theory that Outliers was written at a low enough reading level that a level of public morons could read causing it to weave itself into pop-science in a way we may never be able to unwind. Every time I hear mention of "ten thousand hours" or any of Gladwell's other bland anecdotes, I remember how stupid the average person is.