I think you're right about the disparity applying elsewhere, but I disagree with your example of athletes. Beating an opponent consistently is not the same as beating an opponent by a factor of 50. For example: I'm no sprinter, but Usain Bolt runs less than 2x faster than me. And there are thousands of athletes who are a few percent slower than the best. They don't even get to the Olympic qualifiers.
On the other hand, I've seen productivity vary drastically among knowledge workers. It would be interesting to see studies involving actual numbers, since I think 10x between average and best is an exaggeration. Worst and best, maybe. But a lot of that is because the worst programmers can cause more problems than they solve.
I'd argue that in the case of something like sprinting, looking at it in a linear way isn't going to get you much. I don't know much about it, but it seems to me that every time you cut X seconds off your time, it's that much harder to get down to X2. If you looked at it from some sort of a logarithmic basis, I find it really unlikely that Usain Bolt is just* 2x faster than you.
(I'm not really sure why I felt the need to write this rant. It was an itch I had to scratch.)
It may surprise you, but healthy adults don't differ much in terms of physical ability. If you measure watts output or steps per second or anything quantifiable, it's going to be less than an order of magnitude difference, never mind a 100x difference.
I can run 100 meters in 15 seconds. That's 6.7 meters per second. Usain Bolt can run 100 meters in 9 seconds. That's 11 meters per second. 11.11/6.67 = 1.67 times faster. If Usain could somehow cut 5 seconds off his time and do a 4-second 100 meter dash, he'd be moving along at 25 meters per second. That isn't quite 4x faster than me. Such a feat would certainly be much more than 4 times as impressive as me running, but it wouldn't be more than 4 times as fast.
If you used some other yardstick, you could come up with some other number. Usain Bolt is the fastest sprinter alive. That makes him one in 7 billion. There are likely millions of faster runners than me. I'm maybe one in 100. 7 billion divided by 100 is 70 million, therefore Usain Bolt is 70 million times better at sprinting than me.
Sound silly? I think so too.
When measuring programming ability, we don't grade on a curve. It doesn't matter how much (or little) effort you had to expend. All that matters is the result and how long it took.
On the other hand, I've seen productivity vary drastically among knowledge workers. It would be interesting to see studies involving actual numbers, since I think 10x between average and best is an exaggeration. Worst and best, maybe. But a lot of that is because the worst programmers can cause more problems than they solve.