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NancyLebovitz comments on The metaphor/myth of general intelligence - Less Wrong
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I think a sports quotient is a bad counterexample, because it's pretty obvious there is a sports quotient: take someone who weighs 500 pounds, and another person who weighs 150; who do you think is going to win most of the time if you have them play tennis, basketball, sprinting, crosscountry running, archery, soccer...? Similarly, if someone has a gimp leg, they're going to perform badly at pretty much any sport, from table tennis (gotta stand and move around) to boxing.
The 500 pound person would win at wrestling. I think they'd win at boxing. I'm not sure about archery.
On the other hand, the gimp leg would be a handicap for every mainstream sport I can think of.
Maybe. I don't know much about wrestling. If it were like judo, I'd guess that the extra weight just makes him fall that much harder.
They wouldn't win at archery, definitely not. One of the challenges in archery is that it's tiring to lift the bow and keep it steady enough for high accuracy - even pretty fit people who first try their hand at archery will find it kills their arm and backs after 20 or 30 minutes of shooting. A fat person would have this problem in spades, as their arms get tired almost immediately and their accuracy goes to hell.
Same thing with boxing. Let the fattie tire themselves out and you can hit them with impunity. I've seen this happen in other striking martial arts.
Both judo and wrestling have weight classes.
Thanks for the information about archery.
At a given weight, jujitsu and judo, and I'd guess wrestling as well, somewhat favor stocky people of short-to-medium height: short because it's generally helpful to have a low center of gravity, and stocky because it makes you more powerful for a given height and more resistant to certain techniques. But they're also extremely physically tiring. A few extra pounds might be helpful for one of several reasons, but I'd expect a 500-pound wrestler of normal height to lose more in fatigue than they gain in mass; and indeed, we don't see many competitors at 300 pounds or heavier, despite the fact that heavyweight wrestling starts at 200 and has no upper bound.
(Source: am tall, lanky jujitsuka. I haven't studied wrestling, but I've sparred with a few wrestlers.)