We have touched this subject
several times. Nations want athletes to perform
well and they put money into it. Now a day’s
performance in a test as well as in a race have to do with environmental factors
which produce or not a competitive culture.
This is something well study to the point of creating an “adversity score”
when taking a test as the SAT. From the
point of view of Human Rights, it is a big step, but let see how the involved parties play out; sometimes the pendulum swings to the other side and catastrophe
appears also. This is something we live
in Mexico with the new government and happened after the Mexican Revolution. The
rate exchange for the Mexican peso was one peso for two dollars before the
Mexican Revolution (1910). The production decreased to almost nothing except
for oil and raw materials after the Mexican Revolution; we still depend on these two. The worst part is that
Mexicans live in the same conditions more than a 100 years later. I grew up in one of the poorest states in
Mexico and did my medical residency in New York, when these factors were not
taken into account! It took more than 30
years to challenge the “white privilege.”
The point is not to lower standards but to know that other factors are
playing a role and we should improve conditions to make the floor even, or at
least to know that somebody is competing with a handicap and have a competitive
level. We have paratriathlon for the physical
conditions, but the social ones are handicaps of the same degree. I started
with an average percentile my medical residency and finished residency at the 87th percentile (standardized test).
The Environmental
Context Dashboard includes information about students' high schools, including
the rate of teens who receive free or reduced lunch, and their home life and
neighborhoods, such as average family income, educational attainment, housing
stability and crime.
The
dashboard "shines a light on students who have demonstrated remarkable
resourcefulness to overcome challenges and achieve more with less," said
David Coleman, chief executive of the College Board, which administers the SAT.
"It enables colleges to witness the strength of students in a huge swath
of America who would otherwise be overlooked."
The scores
won't be revealed to SAT test-takers, but schools will see the numbers when
reviewing college applications.
Fifty
colleges and universities, including Yale, Florida State University and Trinity
University, took part in a pilot program last year to test what some observers
are calling an "adversity score."
We were asked in an
interview why the central Americans and south Americans have not successful triathletes
and apparently everything is in place for athletes; meaning Federations,
tournaments, high performance centers, etc.
Obviously, the interviewers did not have knowledge that performance depends on the
family and environment as it is vision in the “adversity score.” Garry Kasparov, the one that lasted 20 years
as a Chess World Champion, says that intuition is the big player in performance, and intuition is learned by experience in the environment. Perhaps, fear of snakes is innate, but the rest we have to learn experiencing.
We have the subject of "adversity score" as a lecture in our
team:
To even the floor, we started forming a subculture 20 years ago to overcome the problems mentioned
above. We want to develop and teach a better
intuition to be competitive at the highest standards.
