Which sport/activity is the LEAST dependent on talent, and MOST dependent on how HARD or how MUCH you work at it?

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A composer somehow plays an exquisite diddy on the piano like magic, I guess that just proves my point. Moran!

Juan Diario wrote:

comedyrelief wrote:

Golf,

Any sport where John Daly can be considered an elite athlete proves you don't need athletic talent. Just enough of an economic hurdle to keep most of the world's population from competing. Same can be said for most of the white guy sports.

Who said anything about athletic talent? John Daly has worked so little that he weighs more than a Cincinnati airport TSA agent, and yet he's one of the best golfers ever. Living proof that there are people out there so talented that they need only expend a tiny bit of effort to surpass millions of talentless hard workers.

Wrong and wrong. John Daly won 3 tournaments in his entire pga career. He is not and would not be considered one of the top 500 players ever. He lost his tour card several years ago and was getting into tournaments on sponsors exemptions.

Golfers may not have "athletic" talent, as you call it. But they have incredible hand eye coordination. There are probably 100X as many young kids trying to be golfers than runners. And why wouldn't they? The purses in golf are incredible. Most any PGA tour win is now worth at least a million, and a major win is worth close to 2 million. The most successful runners in this country make a tiny fraction of the golfer who is 100th on the pga money list.

800 dude wrote:

It's obviously true (or should be), that if you take a group of people working very hard and very intelligently at a particular sport, the differences in performance will mostly be down to "talent" or rather genetics.

Which genes specifically?

"talent" is a word for whatever unknown factor makes someone good. It is fallacious in the extreme to proceed from there to belief in a wild guess like genetics being that factor, particularly when you don't even say what genes.

and the answer to OP's question is cycling. Not difficult to get good at if you work hard and spend lots of money. Probably why it is such a big-money sport with many categories of competition.

Bad Wigins wrote:

and the answer to OP's question is cycling. Not difficult to get good at if you work hard and spend lots of money. Probably why it is such a big-money sport with many categories of competition.

So anyone could win Le Tour?

rich whitey sports wrote:

Any sport for rich white people. Sailing, golf, polo, and many of the winter sports, including hockey. They require more money and access to the right facilities in the right location. Many people who have the talent to dominate those sports never try it in their lifetimes.

Chris Rock said it best: "Motherf*ck Wayne Gretzky! Wait till you see Lebron on some skates!"

To be good at hockey you must be talented. There's plenty of people who work there asses off but will never as be as good as someone who is just naturally talented. If you don't have hockey "sense" you will not be good

Bad Wigins wrote:

800 dude wrote:

It's obviously true (or should be), that if you take a group of people working very hard and very intelligently at a particular sport, the differences in performance will mostly be down to "talent" or rather genetics.

Which genes specifically?

"talent" is a word for whatever unknown factor makes someone good. It is fallacious in the extreme to proceed from there to belief in a wild guess like genetics being that factor, particularly when you don't even say what genes.

What? You can measure heritability pretty easily with high statistical power with twin and adoption studies. Lumping in maternal effects and 'imprinting' (whatever that means w.r.t. little understood epigenetics), it's a pretty sane conclusions that if environment is similar (i.e. elite athletes all live roughly similar lifestyles), that genetics is the separating factor.

Good one wrote:

rich whitey sports wrote:

Any sport for rich white people. Sailing, golf, polo, and many of the winter sports, including hockey. They require more money and access to the right facilities in the right location. Many people who have the talent to dominate those sports never try it in their lifetimes.

Chris Rock said it best: "Motherf*ck Wayne Gretzky! Wait till you see Lebron on some skates!"

To be good at hockey you must be talented. There's plenty of people who work there asses off but will never as be as good as someone who is just naturally talented. If you don't have hockey "sense" you will not be good

You need to be talented, but there are tons of people who probably have the talent and don't have access to ice rinks. Canada has a fraction of the population of the US but a much higher proportion of hockey "stars". If America cared as much about hockey as it did football then the NHL would be dominated by black guys since Canada barely has any black people and the US has a lot.

If NBA scrub Popeye Jones's son can be a top pick in the NHL draft, just imagine if Lebron had devoted his life to hockey from birth. He'd smash every record and win every trophy.

Let's not confound the argument here.

The idea is: what sport has the least reliance on innate ability. Hard work will make you the best.

Hockey certainly requires innate athleticism. Just because the talent pool is relative small due to access issues doesn't change that fact.

Rich Piana wrote:

Serious answer. It has to be Curling. Someone who puts the hours in to be able to see the physics on the ice... be able to judge ice conditions.. study opponent habits... etc. they could overcome a lesser natural talent.

I would agree with this ^^.

Wonder about shooting sports, though. I think practice is huge. How much talent does it take to master 10 meter air rifle?

Harambe wrote:

What? You can measure heritability pretty easily with high statistical power with twin and adoption studies.

Then shouldn't you have a long list of reviewable links?

Lumping in maternal effects and 'imprinting' (whatever that means w.r.t. little understood epigenetics), it's a pretty sane conclusions that if environment is similar (i.e. elite athletes all live roughly similar lifestyles), that genetics is the separating factor.

the operative weasel word being "sane." Much like "plausible." It's like saying "hmmmm... could be" in a way that lets you shift the meaning to "definitely" without people noticing. Rhetorical trick.

As I have pointed out millions of times, environment is not similar between elite western and east African runners due to the vast difference in caloric intake. Westerners who feed their children that sparingly would be jailed for abuse, so large scale comparative studies are impossible. But it is "sane" to suppose that the slight build of so many east Africans is a direct adaptation to diet, something specific and easily fact-checked rather than conjured out of statistical correlations. There's an answer to "what diet." There is no answer to "which genes."

Measuring heritability is basic genetics.

Let me know if you actually open these links -- I'm trying to figure out if sourcing actually strengthens the perception of my points.

A primer from a genetics textbook:

Two reviews:

Two random sub studies:

Clearly athletic ability can be partially inherited. This isn't surprising.

You try to shift the argument here by discussing population genetics. It's is much much more difficult to say population of people x has better athletic genetics than population of people y. Usually the inside-group genetic variation is near that of the between group variation.

Just because we cannot prove a genetic component for superior athletic populations doesn't mean there isn't a strong genetic driver at the individual level.

I'd say something like weight lifting / power lifting honestly. Any healthy person who starts at a young age can be good if they're willing to put in the right amount of work and not get hurt.

rich whitey sports wrote:

If NBA scrub Popeye Jones's son can be a top pick in the NHL draft, just imagine if Lebron had devoted his life to hockey from birth. He'd smash every record and win every trophy.

Unlikely. Being 6'8 is not an advantage in hockey. You are a lot better off being 6'3 or so.

Odds are Lebron would not be as big of hockey star. But if you take the 10000 kids/year who are playing D1 basketball, football,... and have them all play hockey from age 4, you will find that some of them are better hockey players than they are basketball players.

trollism wrote:

Bad Wigins wrote:

and the answer to OP's question is cycling. Not difficult to get good at if you work hard and spend lots of money. Probably why it is such a big-money sport with many categories of competition.

So anyone could win Le Tour?

Anyone could at least become competitive in one of the lower categories, barring misfortune of some sort.

Harambe wrote:

a link about heritability of traits

Athletic talent is not the kind of specifiable thing you can call a trait. Muscle strength can be, but the question remains just what kind of strength - a speed skater's giant thighs are strong in very different ways from a sprinters. And concrete things like strength are not what people mean when they say "talent." Talent is what makes one strong athlete succeed where another of equal strength fails.

For example, it is possible, even likely, that genotypes favoring the adaptation of skinniness to restricted diet are frequent in east Africa, but that is not "talent." For every Kenyan who becomes a good runner, there are many equally skinny who try and fail. It's an advantage, but not the decisive advantage. Nobody knows what the decisive advantage is. You can't study the heritability of a trait you can't even identify.

Lol you don't actually watch hockey do you? Lebron is too tall to be explosive on skates, he would most likely be defense but even if he played forward he would not smash every record. Waynes records will never be touched, everyone knows that. The game has just changed too much. Also, hockey is different than many sports in the sense that speed and height are not the two most sought after qualities. Hockey IQ is far and away the most important and thats where wayne stood head and shoulders above the rest. Just look up a pic of him off ice, hes built like a distance runner but he's the greatest of all time because he was always one step ahead of everyone else on the ice. The game was far rougher for a little guy back then too.

Lebron is a beast no doubt. Probably the greatest athlete of this generation but he's not meant for hockey. He could still do it of course, cause he's that gifted, but he would not be the iconic all time great he is in basketball.

Dude you didn't even look at the links you asked for. Which I suppose answers my request above.

They have done many studies on this stuff. From things as generic as "athlete status" to specific tests of ability.

You're just moving my goalposts here. Of course if you conjure up an imaginary ability that you define as unknowable then you won't be able to test for it?

VO2 max is heritable. Strength is. Likelihood of making a national team in a sport is. The list goes on and on. You don't need to point to a gene or trait to measure the heritability of outcomes. I mean, you could devise a study where you measure the heritability of mile PRs. That's a direct measurement of your "talent" term. The fact remains that "talent" is a composite of biological and psychological factors. Many of which have been measured and shown to be highly heritable.

Golf seems to be registering a lot of votes. I'm aware of at least one person who pursued the work over talent bit fairly seriously for a while:

http://thedanplan.com/

To the person who said shooting, that could also be a contender, as long as eyesight doesn't deteriorate too badly over time.