The Sports Gene

Epstein examines what the evidence actually shows about the contributions of genetics and training to elite athletic performance, and argues that both the pure talent and the pure practice accounts are wrong.

His attack on the ten thousand hours claim covers the enormous variation in hours required to reach expert level, the finding that some individuals reach elite performance with far less practice, and the argument that trainability itself is heritable, so the response to identical training varies substantially between individuals. The HERITAGE family study, which measured aerobic capacity response to a standardised training programme, found responses ranging from almost none to enormous improvement.

His genetic material covers specific well-established cases including height distributions in basketball and volleyball, the ACTN3 variant and its association with power versus endurance performance, the Finnish cross-country skier with a mutation producing elevated haemoglobin, and the geographic concentrations of elite runners in specific regions of Kenya and Ethiopia, which he attributes to a combination of body morphology, altitude and cultural factors rather than to any national genetic characteristic.

He covers the hardware and software distinction, arguing that reaction time in elite athletes is not faster than in ordinary people and that the advantage is in pattern recognition built through practice. His treatment of race is careful and he addresses the difficulty of discussing population differences without the discussion being misused. The book is more careful about evidence than most popular science and Epstein states uncertainty where it exists. The heritability of trainability is the finding with the widest application, since it applies to any domain where people receive identical instruction and produce different results.