"Talent is overrated" - Geoff Colvin

As usual, people want to make this a "nature vs. nurture" debate and force each other to pick sides. We have a dozen threads on this. Talent matters. Hard work matters. Luck/Circumstances matter too.

We know that the floor and the ceiling of someone's athletic potential is largely determined by their genetic talent. Your maxium potential is defined as how good you could be if you did all the perfect training in the perfect environment for a decade or more. This upper limit of your potential is determined by nature and genetics. However, how close you get to that upper limit is largely determined by how hard (and smart) you train. Make enough bad choices and you might never get there.

Again, people act like this is so hard to understand but if you would just read The Sports Gene by David Epstein, you'd be able to move on from this Gladwellian debate and start new, more interesting threads.

I see what you are saying. You just picked the wrong "slow" time. A non-talented person can't train long enough to run 16:40 without getting injured.

If you had said 21 minutes, then maybe. That is sub-7 pace though, so lots of guys will struggle with that.

Dude, I am in decent shape, ran in college, still run like 50 mpw, and I am training to break 6:00 in the mile, not 5:00. It is hard. I have no wheels.

Yes, I am very old, but by your logic, it should still be "easy." But running a 75 (lap) would literally kill me. My speedwork is done in the 80s and it feels like I am cruising. If I can't do it, do you think non-runners can do it?

For non-runners, a 7 minute mile would be like a flat-out sprint.

Like OP predicted, all the "talent" believers have littered the thread with ridicule and repetio ad nauseam, but no proof. They don't even know specifically what the "talent" actually is.

Suppose nature really did make someone faster. Okay, how?

Genetics? Okay, which genes? What do they do? Crickets.

Longer leg to body ratio? Higher/lower percent "fast twitch" muscle? Bring on the bro science, I'll be glad to shoot it all down.

For distance runners, lower body weight? May be on to something there, but that's nurture, not nature. Raise your kid in Kenya on their diet and see how much they grow up to weigh.

Bottom line, "talent" just means someone's good and you don't know why. It doesn't mean there is no reason, it only means YOU DON'T KNOW. It's a declaration of plain ignorance. To stop there instead of trying to find the reason is just plain stupidity.

You'll probably find, if you dare look into it methodically, that the "responders" are the ones whose previous lifestyle suited them to their event. Like that soccer player sub 5 mile thread. Grow up playing soccer and you've probably already trained most of the fundamentals.

The Warsaw Pact olympians understood all this, btw. Trained their champs from a very young age, that's how they won. Not the dope, everyone doped.

East German judge gives 0/10.

^ like I said first thing, ridicule and repetitio ad nauseam. Pathetic.

Soviet and East German athletes were pulled out of elementary school into the state-sponsored programs, to be trained by experts. That easily crushed the west's model of farting around until high school.

Even so, an expert coach can usually find a prospect at any high school. Rupp didn't have "talent," he had Salazar.

Even more than beauty talent doesn't have to justify or explain itself. It's obvious that some are much faster than others before they start training - on school sports day when that skinny little 7th grader who'd never played a sport before runs a sub 60 quarter mile and isn't even winded. The high level of talent required to perform at a high level isn't a question either. The very few exceptions prove the rule, not the other way around.

The only question is the relative contribution of other things. This changes over time. The athletes who were the first to use interval training performed better than those who didn't, but then everyone else started using a variation of it and caught up. Another example is shoe technology. Do white runners benefit more from super shoes than African runners? Skilled sports might tilt towards nurture over talent. It takes years for even a talented baseball player to be able to compete in the major leagues so his success might be relatively more nurture than talent

At age 13, the 50th percentile is 8:06 and the 85th percentile is 6:50.

From age 13 to 17, the median guy improved by 62 seconds and the top 15% guy improves by 44 seconds.

What's the ceiling of a guy who ran 8:06 at age 13?

No it wouldn't. Well, maybe it would if you went to the local fat camp and only picked those who're female, morbidly obese, and over age 40. But even then, I wouldn't be too sure.

So far, this is the closest thing that's come up regarding a case where someone trained optimally for years and couldn't get a really crappy time.

But that's not a lack of talent, that's a lack of opportunity. If you had 54.x 400m speed, sub 18 5K endurance, and a 5:08 TT mile, you could definitely have broken 5, and probably by a good margin. All you had to do was get into a whole bunch of mile races either during HS or shortly after. But you didn't get to race the mile more than maybe once or twice, which is why your HS PR is from a time trial and not a race. And your adult times definitely convert to a 4:xx mile if you age-grade them.

You definitely need a quite high portion of talent to run a 4:20 mile. Also you have the scientific fact about 15% of the population lack possibility to respond to maxVO2 training.🧙‍♂️🇸🇪

The OP wanted data…

And yes we DON’T know if the slower runners are training optimally or not…but neither do we know whether the faster runners are either.
The point is that there is a range of ability, regardless of training / diet/ lifestyle habits etc…which can only be explained by varying levels of natural ability, ie “talent”.

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Is that really a fact? Can you point to a study?

You are right, some know the answer. You don't.

A lot is genetic. More than most appreciate. Take a look at The Sports Gene

We know a lot about what makes up natural biological talent because people have been experimenting on the body. Look at how PEDs are used to deliberately affect performance by changing the body chemically: strength, speed, recovery, weight, endurance, and pain tolerance. Can someone without natural top talent become competitive because of a PED created talent? Lance Armstrong. Jose Canseco.

Even a person’s reaction to PED use is genetically influenced.

Some will thrive on certain PED’s, and some will suffer bad side effects and gain little from it. It is seen in the bodybuilding community all the time. It’s also seen in mainstream medicine. Some people have bad reactions to certain medicines and have to be put on something else because of it (Bruce Lee is said to have died from an allergic reaction to aspirin).

Even now, after all these years, I can't figure out whether Bad Wigins is trolling or not. It just seems so improbable that someone with such consistently moronic takes could still figure out how to spell, punctuate, and use a keyboard.

For what it's worth, the state-sponsored Eastern Bloc sports programs didn't just pick every tenth kid and turn them into champions. They literally originated the study of early talent identification. Their whole system was predicated on finding talented kids who would them undergo optimized training. They didn't waste time trying to turn sow's ears into silk purses.

As for Rupp, the reason Salazar approached him out of the blue was that, after watching him play soccer, he believed that Rupp was unusually talented. He didn't just pick a number from the Portland phone book and then put his magic training to work.