Why are so many people so deluded about their sporting potential?

This, despite the fact that reaching a world-class level took literally years of my life and thousands of hours of training, Jimmy McDuff off the street believed he could stroll on court in his jeans and Adidas Sambas and defeat me.

The years of these claims, often made by some of the least athletic people I have ever met, led me to believe there’s a lot of people out there who are entirely deluded about their own sporting capabilities, as well as grossly underestimating the actual sporting abilities of elite athletes.

My belief was unequivocally backed-up this week with the release of a You Gov survey, which confirmed a lot, and I mean a lot, of people are so incredibly delusional about their sporting potential.

According to You Gov’s research, 27 percent of Britons think that they could qualify for a sport at the next Olympics if they started training now.

So, over a quarter of people in this country believe they need less than four years to reach the level required to become an Olympian. What is going on – how can people be so foolish as to believe they have what it takes to become an Olympian at all, never mind within the space of four years?

Shooting was the sport in which most people believed they could represent GB at the Olympics Games in 2028, which will be held in LA, with 15 percent fancying their chances in the 10m air rifle event; it’s perhaps unsurprising that shooting came top because, compared to almost all other Olympic sports, it has a far lower level of physicality, which also explains why archery was second on the list, with 13 percent of Brits questioned believing they could make it into Team GB’s archery team in four years.

Seonaid McIntosh is GB's top female shooter

It’s when you drill down into the results, though, that things begin to get really unbelievable.

10 percent of respondents believed they could make it to LA 2028 in badminton, nine percent in table tennis, six percent in the 100m breaststroke, five percent in the cycling sprint events and three percent in artistic gymnastics.

But perhaps my favourite result of the survey was that six percent of those questioned believe they could be at LA 2028 for the 100m.

There are almost no words to describe the levels of delusion here.

But let me try to find some.

Olympic 100m champion, Noah Lyles, won gold in 9.79 seconds. His top speed during the race was 43.6km per hour, or 27.1mph.

Noah Lyles is Olympic 100m champion

For any “normal” person to believe they could reach that kind of standard by training for the next four years is staggering.

There’s a few things that can be extrapolated from these You Gov results.

The first is just how easy and effortless elite athletes make their sports look.

Almost without exception, world-class athletes can produce an exceptional level without looking like it’s very difficult.

I’ve long been an advocate for putting a “normal” person in amongst an elite field of athletes for a bit of context because the consequence of having elite athletes, particularly in sports like running, cycling and swimming, up against each other is that they are all so economical in their style that it appears they’re not going very fast at all.

Stick one of the respondents of this survey in there and then everyone will soon begin to appreciate just how fast the elite athletes really are.

There’s also the “I could have been” crowd.

Walk into any pub in Britain and you’ll find someone who says they “could have” been a professional footballer had it not been for injury/circumstances/bad luck/ an alien invasion (delete as appropriate).

There’s a common belief, and I regularly encountered this as a badminton player, that people who were half-decent at a sport in high school thought they could have automatically translated that into becoming an elite-level athlete at that sport, if they’d really wanted to.

But put the achievement of becoming an Olympian into perspective.

Most athletes who make it to Olympic level will have been training seriously for nearly a decade, sometimes more, before they even get a sniff of Olympic selection.

And for every athlete who makes it to the Olympics in any particular discipline, there will be hundreds who didn’t make the cut, despite being very, very good athletes themselves.

Add to that the need for talent, sacrifice, dedication and also a bit of luck along the way, becoming an Olympian is very, very difficult.

It is not, as most of these muppets in You Gov’s survey think, a matter of doing a bit of training then waiting for your selection letter to drop through your letterbox.

Andy Murray made an interesting point on reading these results when he commented that these attitudes probably have a lot to do with the abuse athletes receive on social media. 

It certainly seems likely that much of the abuse stems from a lack of appreciation about quite how hard it is to reach, and then maintain, a high level of athletic performance in any sport and so a greater appreciation that there’s no way “the public” could do the job of an elite athlete would perhaps reduce the abuse somewhat.

There is, of course, always the odd exception; a stand-out athlete who can reach Olympic level in an astonishingly quick time.

But these individuals are the exception; the vast majority of people need to start appreciating quite how difficult it is to become an Olympian, and realise that there’s absolutely no way in the world they’ll be in Team GB for LA 2028.