Barbara Walters: Office Linebacker.
Who knew that Barbara Walters was a tackling legend? On Friday Sage Steele, formerly of ESPN, didn’t have to be waterboarded to share an anecdote about getting bodied by the then-84-year-old when she appeared on The View in 2014, alleging that Walters shoved her into a trash can backstage.
Steele explained how she got destroyed by an old lady on The Megyn Kelly Show.
“It was Barbara, Whoopi and myself in the dark green room off to the side. I was probably about four feet from the wall and the trash can, and Barbara was standing over here in front of me. She just started to back up toward me and looked at me and got close and elbowed me, and it pushed me back into the wall and the trash can. I was like, ‘What did [she] just do to me? This 140-year-old woman just tried to like tackle me.’”
This got me thinking: How dangerous was octogenarian Walters? Walters was 5’5, 125.4 pounds prior to her death in 2022, according to the website CelebrityTall. It might not be a perfect source when it comes to Barbara’s weight, but it’s a good enough point to work from.
We all know that people tend to lose height as weight with age. According to Harvard research the average person loses roughly 1-2 percent of their body weight per year after the age of 60, and roughly a half-inch of height per decade after the age of 40. This means that if we work backwards we can determine Walters’ measurables on that fateful day on The View in 2014.
We’ll split the difference of body mass drop and say Walters lost 1.5 percent per year. This means in 2014 she was 5’6, 143 pounds. That on its own means very little, but thankfully Steele gave us a critical reference point: The four feet that Steele traveled when she was bodied by Barbara.
Steele asserts that Walters didn’t take some sort of Terry Tate-style run up, but rather was traveling at approximately her walking speed. The average walking speed of a woman aged 80-89 is 2.13 miles per hour (or 0.95 meters per second), which we’ll use as our baseline here.
Considering that force = mass x acceleration, this means that Barbara Walters generated 60.32778521 N of force in her elbow — or just over 13.8 pounds of force.
Let’s be a little more generous here, and imagine that Walters generated maximum acceleration with her elbow to up the force. It’s difficult to calculate, but we can safety multiply the force by three, which equates somewhere around the punching speed of a woman Walters’ age at the time. That means she generated 181 N of force
If we operate off the same measurements from CelebrityTall, but this time for Sage Steele — we learn that she’s very slender at 134.2 pounds, meaning that old ass Barbara Walters HAD A WEIGHT ADVANTAGE OVER STEELE DESPITE BEING IN HER 80s! In addition, Steele is 5’11, so Walters had a lower center of gravity to really throw some oomph into that elbow.
Still, we’re talking about 40.46 pounds of force here. A 47-pound child sprinting full speed (11.2mph) into you generates 23.26 pounds of force. This means that Sage Steele couldn’t handle two children running into her.
If Steele was mid-stride, or off-balance it would affect the force needed — but it’s still stunning to imagine that Walters, at walking pace, using her elbow, could ever deliver enough force to push anyone four feet.
Let’s assume this is totally real though. What would happen if instead of a Barbara Walters elbow, it was an NFL defensive back who hit Steele? If 40 pounds of force can send Steele four feet, an NFL DB who generates 1,600 pounds of force in a tackle would send Steele flying 160 feet through the air.
Call me a skeptic, but I’m starting to think this story was bullshit.
