Tiger woods. I can't think of any tennis player who has been in the top 100 for the past few decades who didn't commit to it totally as a young child. Start tennis at 10? Too old. Swimmers. Has anyone stumbled into sporting greatness from being outside the top 5%? Or 1% when they hit adulthood?

So what is being said? A huge amount of elite success is in the hardware, i.e. the body &/or brain. These go through rather large changes between ages 10 an 18. Puberty. This shakes up the ordering among those who showed enough promise to have already committed to becoming elite.

What am I missing here? Seems like this research is nothing more than "Kids change through puberty, the nature and sizes of the changes are a bit of a lottery for each kid." Much like the the genetic factors are also a lottery so you can't reliably predict who is going to be great from the results of their parents. (But if your parents are both 5ft, the NBA seems an unlikely destination for you).

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beambot 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Definitely uncommon, but not unprecedented:

Hakeem Olajuwon - didn't start basketball until 15 or 16.

Kurt Warner - undrafted, returned to NFL at 28.

Francis Ngannou - started MMA at 26.

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kevinmchugh 18 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Dennis Rodman grew up overshadowed by his sisters' basketball skills, and then had some unheard of growth spurt of 8" after finishing high school. He hadn't even played much high school ball.

	▲	harry8 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Both Dennis Rodman and Hakeem Olajuwon are not 5ft, they are very tall and athletic. That combination is more important than basketball skill attained at 18 years of age. These attributes differs from tennis, or chess. Being elite at being both tall and athletic probably changes the most over puberty?

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presentation 17 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Basketball is probably not a great example since just being enormous gives you a huge chance of making it to the NBA, which I guess is just another form of being a prodigy.

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gritspants 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Sure, and if we keep going back in time to perhaps the greatest American athlete of all time, Jim Thorpe - he'd handily be beaten by elite high schoolers today.

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benatkin 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Basketball is a general purpose sport. The Claude of it can win. Some other sports such as gymnastics would need something more like the AlphaZero of it to win.

	▲	leksak 14 hours ago \| parent \| next [-]
		Both of these sports select for different type of body types - what do you mean? Gymnasts are shorter than the average population.
	▲	triceratops 7 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		> Basketball is a general purpose sport. The Claude of it can win. There aren't too many pro-ballers shorter than 5'10" (177cm), and definitely no dominant ones. If we're defining "general purpose sport" as a sport in which people of all shapes and sizes are able to achieve greatness, then I would say soccer or golf fit that definition better. Men's soccer in the 2010s was dominated by 2 of the best players in history: Cristiano Ronaldo and Lionel Messi. There's a 7 inch height difference between the two. Ronaldo is powerful and muscled, Messi is lithe and graceful. Both played in approximately the same position on the field, in the same era. Both were brilliant.

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kazinator 18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

What is being said is not simply that people who engaged in a certain activity since childhood do not become top performing adults. Obviously that happens a lot. But rather that the top child or youth performers are not reliably the ones that turn into top adult performers.

	▲	harry8 17 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Let me express it another way. Think of 5 relevant attributes of your body for playing something well. Guesstimate where they were on the population bell curve when you were 10. Guesstimate if these would have been on a different spot on the population bell curve for that attribute when you were an adult. Would you have guessed it when you wee 10? Would others have guessed it about you at that age? Puberty changes you in unpredictable ways. Do we need a study to know that? Everyone committing to tennis before they are 10 are elite, you wouldn't do it otherwise. Who is the best player of that elite set changes given the great puberty shake up.

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18 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

[deleted]

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g947o 18 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

You missed the second word in the title, "prodigies".

	▲	benatkin 18 hours ago \| parent [-]
		That was covered just fine IMO. The reaction seems to be "so what?" I think that's a valid reaction. It's a long article to state something obvious, that the important thing about being on your way to greatness is having great talent and training to win starting at an early age, not winning before reaching a certain age. I had an LLM first pick five figure skaters, and in the follow up query tell me which had wild success before age 12, and only two of the five fit that category, but each started learning at 6 years old or earlier. The other three seem like child prodigies in retrospect to me.