Dr. Ross Tucker

The pathway that produces elite athletes is the focal point of many nations’ and teams’ high performance strategy. Identifying, and then managing the environment that develops a talented junior into a potential Olympic medalist or World champion is fundamental to sporting achievement, and is optimized in a number of different ways around the world. Recently, the issue has been polarized into two dogmas - a talent model, and a training model. In the talent model, popularized by a handful of recent best-selling books, it is proposed that talent is a myth, that all individuals share common genes, and that 10,000 hours of deliberate practice are necessary to activate these dormant genes in order to become elite. This has implications for age of initiation of sport, as well as specialization, and the overall design of our sporting systems from school to professional level. In this presentation Professor Ross Tucker will analyze the concepts put forward by this model, and describe how a rigorous and complete scientific understanding of elite sports performance, from genes, to daily training environments, reveals that often, doing the “right thing” is not necessarily the best thing, and what implications this may have for our strategic thinking about producing champions.