Let's say I wanted to compete in the Summer Olympics by 2016, and I was basically willing to put all my non-poker time between now and then into training, what would be fair odds of me making it?

Consider that I'm 31, a U.S. Citizen, and not particularly athletic generally or particularly skilled at any event that I know of.

Same question for winning a gold medal.

I am thinking that all sports would pretty much be impossible based on your description of yourself except for the following:

Sailing
Shooting
Equestrian
Archery

I think for shooting and archery it would take about 15 minutes to determine if you had any world class potential in those sports, and it would definitely be a longshot.

Sailing and Equestrian, I don't really know much about. Obviously either would require significant investment (buying a boat or a horse and a bunch of things to jump over).

So.....I would say without significant investment you are at least 1000-1 against competing for the U.S. You are also at least 100,000-1 against winning a gold medal.

Your chances would improve for the competing part if you were competing for a smaller or less developed country. Also, your chances would improve if you say...doped yourself with your own blood, then you might stand to do well in cycling

I think you would stand a pretty good chance if you could compete for some small country that doesn't have much of an Olympic presence.

This is not entire impossible, even though I'm a U.S. citizen. Some small countries are willing to bend the rules for Olympic hopefuls.

Depending on how much you weigh, I would think your best bet may be coxswain in rowing 8's - the less you weigh generally the better (but there is a minimum of 121.25lbs in uniform for mens). You don't really have to be athletic at all but there are skills you have to develop:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coxswain_(rowing)

I'm too big I think. Plus that's pretty hard to get into, since they don't take people off the street, you pretty much have to come up through the system.

pete -- see what people think of your idea in this thread

Man, spoil my fun. Besides, I think winning a metal would be several orders of magnitude harder than making a team.

Making it to the Olympics is a reasonable idea, just go to a country with like >100k ppl and qualify there.

There is no way you could win a gold medal. These people train all their lives for the Olympics and only a select few win gold.

Also, you'd be 39. gl with that one.

> means greater than
< means less than

Also, I think if you really really really wanted to make a team by 2016, it would be virtually impossible for that not to happen.

I think you could pretty much guarantee making a team if you put enough effort into it, but your odds of getting a gold medal are obv gonna be ridiculously low.

This. Go get citizenship in Belize or something and you can make the games if you train really hard. But your not going to win anything.

Not every country gets to send athlete's. There are caps per continent and that automatically makes sure you need to be in the top 2-5 of the sport on the continent. Good luck with that.

0 unless poker becomes an olympic event

and even then 0