Three fine examples of a standard deviation – and some sage advice.
One of these days in your travels, a guy is going to show you a brand-new deck of cards on which the seal is not yet broken. Then this guy is going to offer to bet you that he can make the jack of spades jump out of this brand-new deck of cards and squirt cider in your ear. But, son, do not accept this bet, because as sure as you stand there, you're going to wind up with an ear full of cider.
– Sky Masterson, to Nathan Detroit, in Guys and Dolls
During the roughly month-long period that forms the 40th anniversary of Secretariat’s historic triple crown run, I find myself thinking about the most memorable spoken line from Guys and Dolls, which translates to: If something sounds too good to be true, it probably is.
We finally “learned” this about Lance Armstrong int January. But many of us already “suspected” (read: knew) that Armstrong was blood-doping, based on that Sky Masterson metric.
Armstrong might not have failed a single drug test, and might have sworn up and down that he was playing with an honest deck, but many of us knew that 7 Tours de France in a row - in a hyper-competitive sport rife with doping - was nothing short of a Super Soaker blast of cider in your ear. It seemed unnatural - and it was.
Which brings me to Usain Bolt. For two Olympics in a row, Bolt has won the 100m and 200m sprints by unnatural margins. (I also find it unnatural that Jamaican sprinters swept the medals in the 200m in London; Jamaica has a population of around 3 million people, which is roughly equivalent to 5 thousandths of a percentage point of the world’s population – but she has the 3 top 200m sprinters on the globe???)
Yet no one, including Bill Simmons in a lengthy no-one-gets-the-benefit-of-
Uh, why not?
And much as the horse racing gods might strike me down as I write this, the Bolt question begs another: What about Secretariat?
Secretariat won all three triple crown races by margins and times that were unheard of for 1973. I mean, watch this video of that year’s Belmont Stakes:
Here’s where standard deviation comes in.
Is that Belmont win more of a piece with Roger Maris eking out the homerun record in 1961 by one homer - or is it more in line with Mark McGuire, Sammy Sosa and Barry Bonds justdecimating the home run record? Bringing it a full standard deviation higher than it had been.
Like Bolt has done with the 100m and 200m sprints.
Like Secretariat did 40 years ago.
We know what happened in those baseball cases.
And I hope I’m dead wrong about Bolt and Secretariat.
But I find it astounding that no one is even asking the question.
