It’s also a healthy correction for the nerds-versus-jocks dichotomy which was so common for years. There are a non-trivial number of people who actively questioned someone’s technical competency if they were athletic or assumed that the only way to be a successful academic was to grind everything else out of their life.

My experience is that high-achievers in one area are often high-achievers in other areas as well. For academics as well as athletics, individual ability matters, but the discipline and work-ethic that most high-achievers have translates across fields.

Yes - also simply the circumstances: if you’re in a position to do either well, you probably don’t have serious chronic health problems, family demands, poverty, etc. That doesn’t make it easy but it makes it possible to focus on something more than survival, much as how coming from a financially stable family makes it easier for someone to take a gamble on a startup rather than a safer job at a big company.

There's https://news.mit.edu/2019/student-john-urschel-math-football... .