The Sports Gene

Baseball players have to know before the final two hundred milliseconds of a pitch where to swing, so the earlier they pick up anticipatory cues the better.

Several sports psychologists I interviewed told me that they publicly support a view that marginalizes genes because they believe it sends a positive social message. “But maybe it’s dangerous too,” one eminent sports psychologist told me, “to say that you’re stuck where you are because you’re not working hard enough.” Either way, the social message

throwing. Of all the sex differences that have ever been documented in scientific experiments, throwing is consistently one of the largest.

The successes with talent transfer attest to the fact that a nation succeeds in a sport not only by having many athletes who practice prodigiously at sport-specific skills, but also by getting the best all-around athletes into the right sports in the first place.

According to the scientific literature, the average sport-specific practice hours to reach the international levels in basketball, field hockey, and wrestling are closer to 4,000, 4,000, and 6,000, respectively.

Variance is a statistical measure of how much individuals deviate from the average. In a sample of two runners, if one athlete completes the mile in four minutes and the other runs it in five minutes, then the average is four and a half minutes and the variance is half a minute. The question for scientists is: What accounts for that variance, pract

“We’ve tested over ten thousand boys,” he says, “and I’ve never seen a boy who was slow become fast.”

As an adult, Holm would top out at 5'11", downright Lilliputian for a high jumper. In a sport that requires raising one’s center of mass as high as possible, starting with a high center of mass is an enormous advantage.