Are Europeans better athletes than Americans?

If by better athletes you mean less obese, yes.

I don't know how you would judge that considering that there are lots of major sports without equivalent participation (American football, basketball vs. soccer, rugby, or whatever).

Comparing the whole EU to the US, the EU got more medals at the 2012 Olympics, but the EU is not a country.

Some Brits were annoyed at the EU trying to claim British medals as part of an EU count.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/340201/EU-puts-itself-top-of-Olympic-medal-table-and-Britain-is-nowhere-to-be-seen

I suppose you could add up Commonwealth medals vs. the EU or the US and add together UK, Australia, Jamaica, Kenya, Uganda, etc. if you wanted to slice and dice without regard to actual independent nations.

If it's continent vs. continent you would have to add in the US, and Caribbean medals and then you get into definitional issues like whether North and South America are one continent and whether Russia counts for Europe or Asia, etc.

That's basically a garbage comment (the link) from a group of people who know that USA and China are now the primary rivals in the medal count. The Europeans have essentially been replaced by the Chinese. The EU total includes how many individual nations in the Olympics, each of which get 3 slots in every event?

Now take that EU total, and make them take the best 3 athletes in each event (NOT 50 slots or something like that) going into the Olympics and see how many medals they get.

If you limit the comparison to just Athletics, even if you count UK and RUS as part of the EU, USA and Jamaica are just 2 medals short of the EU total by my count, and North America still wins, even though EU gets many more competitor slots.

my HS kids who grew up in Europe are more fit than those who grew up in my district (NY area)

AMERICA.

/THREAD

Intellectual Game wrote:

Some Brits were annoyed at the EU trying to claim British medals as part of an EU count.

http://www.express.co.uk/news/uk/340201/EU-puts-itself-top-of-Olympic-medal-table-and-Britain-is-nowhere-to-be-seen

Some Brits are knobs who try far too hard to look for reasonss to get offended

coach wrote:

my HS kids who grew up in Europe are more fit than those who grew up in my district (NY area)

The better question is why are Europeans dominating the ruling bodies of the IAAF and IOC when North Americans are winning the medals. If they don't want to provide proper representation to USA and Jamaica (and China) when American companies are paying most of the bills (particularly for the IOC), we should have our own championships and shut them (IOC) down.

I know and have trained with many European athletes and my observation has been that many of them are more kinesthetically aware of themselves. I believe it is the nature in which many of them 'train' as young kids. Their coaches come from a time when athletics was the main sport, especially in Eastern Europe, and training was extremely focused and detailed.

The international athletes that I deal with today fit this same mold... it is VERY easy to pick them out amongst American athletes.