The marvels of elite sports: how to get there?

683 Br J Sports Med July 2011 Vol 45 No 9 ones who performed best in youth competitions.2 3 The reason for this is that many factors play a role; factors related to both the athlete (ie, rate of learning, training and maturation of anthropometric, physiological, technical, tactical and psychological skills) and the environment (ie, opportunities created by parents, trainers, coaches, talent development programme and the competition structure) along with a component of chance.4 For example, we know that body size is related to sports performance and that youth athletes with more advanced levels of maturity (sexual, skeletal, age at peak height velocity) are, on average, taller than peers who are more delayed in maturity status.5 Therefore, in youth sport competitions, the more mature athletes seem to perform better.6 This, however, is only a temporary advantage because when adolescence nears termination, height differences among athletes of contrasting maturity status are negligible.7 An often cited ‘rule of the thumb’ is that in order to reach expertise, at least 10 000 h of deliberate practice in a period of 10 years is needed.8 This means that talent identifi cation and development in most sports may take place during athletes’ adolescent growth spurt. Studies on the relative age effect9 support the notion that in reality many youth athletes are still identifi ed as being talented on the basis of their current rather than their future level of performance and, consequently, the best youth performers are the ones who are invited to join talent development programmes or selection teams. This implies that in our talent identifi cation system, we systematically and mistakenly fail to notice the talented athletes who may not be the best performers yet, but who have the potential to be so in the future. Moreover, we fail to provide this neglected group of athletes with extra training facilities, highly certifi ed trainers and medical supervision. Therefore, to further unravel the mystery of talent, the best way may be to longitudinally follow youth athletes throughout their sports career, from start to adulthood, measuring underlying The marvels of elite sports: how to get there? Marije T Elferink-Gemser,1,2 Geir Jordet,3 Manuel J Coelho-E-Silva,4 Chris Visscher1