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Forty-five years ago today, at the 1968 Olympic Games in Mexico City, Bob Beamon, a lanky twenty-two year old from South Jamaica, Queens, won the gold medal in the long jump with a belief-defying jump of twenty-nine feet, two-and-one-quarter inches, breaking the world record by nearly two feet in an event usually won by no more than a few inches. Beamon still holds the Olympic record, and his jump is one of only a handful on record over twenty-nine feet. In his book The Perfect Jump, the sportswriter Dick Schaap described Beamon’s reaction after he learned how far he had jumped:
Suddenly, the enormity of what he had done sank in, and Beamon fell to his knees, leaned his head against the Tartan running track, almost as if he were kissing the ground, then clasped his head in his hands. Waves of nausea rolled over him, and his heart pounded as it had never pounded before, and he could see stars in front of his eyes. "Tell me I am not dreaming," he mumbled. (p. 97)
How did Beamon jump so far? Mexico City, which is located in the high plateaus of south-central Mexico, is nearly eight-thousand feet above sea level, and things hurtled through the air fly farther at high altitudes than at lower altitudes. However, altitude can’t be the explanation, because Beamon jumped so much farther than all of the other contestants, beating silver medalist Klaus Beer of Germany by well over two feet, who edged Bronze medalist Ralph Boston of the U.S. by just over an inch. Also, excluding Beamon, the average jump in Mexico City—just under twenty-six feet—was statistically no different than the average jump in less altitudinous Munich in the ’72 Olympics. The best explanation we have for Beamon’s jump is simply that he did everything right at the same time, and consequently leapt farther than anyone thought humanly possible.
Trying to predict an extraordinary athletic feat—a Beamonesque effort, to use the word coined after Beamon's jump—is like trying to predict a catastrophic natural disaster. These events are, for all intents and purposes, impossible to predict for the very reason that they are so rare. Scientists need observations to build statistical models that accurately forecast the future. But we at least know something about what distinguishes Olympians from the rest of us.
Training history is one factor. In a 2006 study published in High Ability Studies, Michael Johnson, Gershon Tenenbaum, and William Edmonds compared amounts of deliberate practice—which the psychologist K. Anders Ericsson and his colleagues define as engagement in activities that are specifically created to improve performance in a domain—in groups of elite and sub-elite swimmers. This study is impressive because the elite swimmers were truly elite: five had won at least one Olympic gold medal, and the other three had been ranked in the top five in the world. The sub-elite swimmers did not meet these lofty criteria, but were still highly accomplished, having participated in national events such as the NCAA championship.
Not surprisingly, all of the swimmers had accumulated large amounts of deliberate practice focused on swimming. The overall average was about 7,500 hours. But, interestingly, average amounts were very similar for the elite and sub-elite groups: 7,129 hours for the elites and 7,819 hours for the sub-elites. Furthermore, there was a large amount of variability in the swimmers’ training histories. One of the elites—winner of Olympic gold in 1996 and 2000—had the sort of story that you might expect for an Olympian. She got her start in competitive swimming at age five, decided to become an elite swimmer at age twelve, and had accumulated over seven-thousand hours of deliberate practice. But another elite didn’t begin competitive swimming until he was a senior in high school, and had accumulated only about three-thousand hours of deliberate practice. Remarkably, this late bloomer won Olympic gold after less than two years of serious swimming.
This sort of evidence suggests that deliberate practice is not the only factor that plays a major role in becoming an elite athlete, and a rapidly expanding body of scientific evidence indicates that genetic endowment is another important piece of the puzzle. Here is how the University of Sydney geneticists Daniel MacArthur and Kathryn North began their important 2005 review of the literature, published in Human Genetics:
Elite athletes, viz. athletes who have competed at a national or international level in their chosen sport, represent a rare convergence of genetic potential and environmental factors...There is no question that environmental factors such as training and nutrition are essential for the development of an elite athlete. However, these factors alone are not sufficient; most of us could never achieve elite athlete status, however hard we trained. Just as genetic predisposition plays a major role in determining one’s susceptibility to multifactorial diseases such as diabetes and cancer, elite athletic performance is a complex fitness phenotype substantially determined by genetic potential. (p. 331)
The gene is the basic unit of heredity—the transmission of traits from parents to offspring—and directs the construction of proteins, which are building materials of cells of living organisms. Some genes are the same in all people, but others take on different forms, which are called alleles. A person’s unique combination of alleles is his or her genotype, whereas that person’s observable traits and characteristics are his or her phenotype. The fundamental question for scientists interested in the hereditary basis of behavior is the extent to which differences in genotype account for differences in phenotype.
As senior Sports Illustrated writer David Epstein summarizes in his fascinating and well-researched new book The Sports Gene, there is solid evidence that differences in genetic endowment contribute to differences in athletic success. In a groundbreaking study, a team of Australian researchers (including MacArthur and North) investigated the relationship between genotype for ACTN3—a gene that encodes the alpha-actinin-3 protein in “fast-twitch” muscles—and elite status in sprinting events. The sample included 107 athletes from short-distance events in track, swimming, cycling, and skating, as well as nine judo athletes. Compared to 18 percent of control subjects, only 6 percent of these athletes—and none of the thirty-two Olympians in the sample—had a variant of ACTN3 that made them alpha-actinin-3 deficient. This evidence for a “gene for speed”—to quote from the title of a recent review by Yemima Berman and Kathryn North—has since been replicated in labs around the world.
There is no denying the importance of training in achieving athletic greatness. Bob Beamon would probably not have become an elite long jumper had he not transferred to Jamaica High School where he was discovered and trained by the legendary track coach Larry Ellis. There is also no denying that most any healthy person can benefit from training. Practice improves performance. But the emerging picture is that genetic endowment may limit what is possible through training.
This conclusion runs counter to the popular view that most anyone can achieve most anything with enough training, but this is just what the scientific evidence tells us.
Author note: I dedicate this article to my father, Sam Hambrick, who told me about Bob Beamon's jump.
