[Goose]

Gary Player famously said "I get luckier the more I practice". A great performance by any athlete is always a combination of being at the right place at the right time and having the skill level to take advantage of it. You can't separate the two things. Prechtel could have got food poisoning the night before and not played at all. She didn't. That was luck. Every game and every sports season has events that one could argue were improbable. Yet they happen. In many cases, people argue that "If you played that game over 100 times, team A would win 99 of them". That may be true, but is unknowable. The "real" result is all that matters. As somebody on this board said recently, "history has no subjunctive".

[Goose]

Gary Player famously said "I get luckier the more I practice". A great performance by any athlete is always a combination of being at the right place at the right time and having the skill level to take advantage of it. You can't separate the two things. Prechtel could have got food poisoning the night before and not played at all. She didn't. That was luck. Every game and every sports season has events that one could argue were improbable. Yet they happen. In many cases, people argue that "If you played that game over 100 times, team A would win 99 of them". That may be true, but is unknowable. The "real" result is all that matters. As somebody on this board said recently, "history has no subjunctive".