To be fair, you don’t really need any of the numbers in the article. If the only thing you know about the freeze is that he’s 1.5 seconds slower than Ursain Bolt on the 200 meters you can conclude that he’ll win basically any race he runs.
I do think you need the discussion of distributions and variance: for all I know the 200m tends to be won by fractions of a second and there are millions of people just a second slower than Bolt.
To some extend. If there’s millions of people that are nearly as fast you’d have encountered them on your school or university course, but what you see there doesn’t even come close (aside from the odd one out like the article describes). Since I haven’t, I can make a reasonable assessment of the likelihood someone is nearly as fast.
Of course I might be wrong (maybe people in my general area are just incredibly slow)? But I’d have some confidence in the assertion anyway.
