But it really only happens when you compare the top to the bottom and the comparison particularly useful.
When you get the top, differences are more perception and other factors over skill/knowledge/intelligence. See: The Olympics, do you often see an Olympic competitor 10x a competitor?
Olympic athletes don't outperform average athletes by 10x. I'm sorry, but that's just complete bullshit.
The world record for 100 meters sprint is 9.58 seconds. High school athletes routinely break 11 seconds. There are one-legged people, 90-year-olds, and other highly handicapped individuals who have come within a factor of 2 of the world record set by elite professional athletes. 10x my ass.
A concept can still be generally true even if there are exceptions. It's useless anticommunication to pretend to be unaware of that. Almost no statement ever made can be said to be true without exceptions, and it would be impossible to communicate at all if you actually tried to enumarete every possible qualification to every statement. Pedantry is if anything a worse crime than hyperbole.
The 10x concept isn't "generally true", it's generally false, and reeks of ignorance and hero worship. "10x" is a quantitative claim. If you really meant 1.15x, why not say so? Is it because that sounds rather unimpressive by comparison, and therefore is not conducive to your elitist rhetoric?
The truth is that the gap between average and peak human performance is actually rather modest, and this is reflected by hard numbers wherever they are available. There is no need to invoke 10x ubermensch nonsense.
If by "competitor" we mean "everyone who competes in the sport" and not just "everyone who competes well enough to qualify for the Olympics" then yes, Olympic athletes frequently perform 10x better than some of their competitors.
Please name a single sport where the world record is 10x of what average hobby athletes perform at.
To show how ridiculous that idea is, that would make "average" 100 meters sprint times more than 1.5 minutes, and "average" long jump distances less than 1 meter.
Fencing. I’m a “hobby athlete” at fencing (Sabre) and I’d play with about a 10x point multiplier if I wanted to compete with an Olympic level athlete. We had a couple people like that at our club.
That's comparative performance vs. absolute performance. Yes, there are people who can beat others 10x more often than those others can beat them. That doesn't mean they perform 10x as well. In fact, it can be enough for them to be just slightly better in order to achieve such comparative results.
Where absolute performance is concerned (that is, performance measured against an external, objective standard), no elite athlete in any sport is anywhere close to 10x'ing their hobbyist peers. Even beating them by a factor of 2 is unthinkable in most sports.
When you get the top, differences are more perception and other factors over skill/knowledge/intelligence. See: The Olympics, do you often see an Olympic competitor 10x a competitor?