Got Talent? The Great Debate (Dr. Colin Higgs)

Great athletes, are they born or made? What’s the contribution of genetics and training? Can you predict who will be a great athlete?

These are all very interesting questions. However, the most interesting question is, do the experts agree on the answers?

After our panel at the Canadian Sport for Life Summit 2012, we know there is no agreement! Four speakers, and four very different opinions on what is meant by talent. 

(Actually, you could say there were three opinions on what is meant by talent – and one speaker, Paul Jurbala, who made a great case for the removal of the word talent from the language of sport!) 

First up was me. I’m convinced that what we think of as talent is the cumulative effect of two things:

1. having the right genetic material (If you want to be a great athlete choose your parents carefully)
2. having the right sport experiences in the right order at the right time of your life. 

I also think that the next 20 years is going to see an explosion of information on epigenetics - the hormonal-controlled switching-on and switching-off of genes - related to fine tuning the body for sport. In my view, that’s where the future of talent identification and development lies.

Vicki Harber brought us back down to earth with a bang and reminded us that in the critical early years of life it’s the parents who control what the child does, where they go and what they play. And that parents don’t always have a realistic view of what talents their children have.

Sean Scott from Own the Podium provided us with a great overview of the current state of the art in Talent Identification. He summed up his view in a perfect one-liner: “Training beats talent until talent trains.”

He also touched on the critical idea that, in trying to identify talented athletes, we really need to focus not so much on what they can DO now - but on how well they respond to training. 

Paul Jurbala rounded out the panel with a brilliant, funny, and controversial take on talent. Disagreeing with much that the other panelists said (and particularly with me), he made the case that innate talent does not exist, but that potential for excellence does. He argued that potential needs to be systematically developed – and I can’t argue with that!

We only had a few minutes for questions and answers, and we really needed hours. The highlight for me was Mark Vulliamy’s comment. He provided great support for the genetic basis for sport performance when he bent his substantial height down to the microphone to complain, tongue firmly in cheek, that however hard he had trained, he had never made it as a jockey.

Stay tuned for round two of the nature vs. nurture debate at next year’s Summit.

For an in depth look at the emerging science of epigenetics see here.

Dr. Colin Higgs
Dr. Colin Higgs is a member of the Canadian Sport for Life Leadership Team and Director of Commonwealth Games Canada’s International Development through Sports (IDS) branch. A tenured full professor in the School of Human Kinetics at Memorial University of Newfoundland, Dr Higgs has done extensive field work in developing countries and has published and presented widely on both sport development and social development through sport.