What makes a sporting ‘superhuman’?

How do the likes of Michael Jordan, Lionel Messi and Serena Williams so emphatically outperform others across their career? That is, what makes a ‘sporting great’?
For many, the answer is simple: great physical ability coupled with great psychological ability (be this in terms of automatised routines, selective attention, creativity, or risk-taking). Yet this response merely points to a spectrum of abilities, from novice through to accomplished practitioner and ending with sporting excellence. Rather than appealing uniquely to psychological or physical abilities, this paper argues that a phenomenological investigation yields novel insights into the mysteries of sporting greatness (and, indeed, greatness more generally). Specifically, sporting greats have a unique sense of self – in the form of unusually fixated self-projection and indefatigable self-belief – combined with ‘factic’ disposition towards sporting excellence. This allows certain persons to not only perform exceptionally within the rules of a given sport, but to re-write ‘sporting scripts’ – the very scope of action possibilities – on their own terms.