[bigbluesax]

I don't even think it's a good strategy for creating elite athletes. Can we really determine someone's "elite potential" by how good they are as a young kid? If one kid has parents who took them skating a couple of times and the other didn't, the first one is going to absolutely destroy the second in a competition, but does that really tell us anything about how they will perform, 10 years down the line at the olympics? Yet we filter out anyone who doesn't conform to this standard.

[divan]

True. Traditional (and still popular) beliefs that sports talents can be identified early are questioned a lot within the sports science community. [1] Canada has implemented a scientifically-based LTD (Long-Term Development) model of sports development [2], and while it's based a bit on concepts of optimal windows of trainability (like the age where flexibility is trained best), it draws on the fact that everyone's journey in sports is unique. This non-linearity is also a basis of a modern coaching science known as the Constraint-Led Approach (CLA) [3] – it's basically a non-linear pedagogy applied to motor skill acquisition practices.

[1] https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.0066...

[2] https://sportforlife.ca/long-term-development/

[3] https://www.routledge.com/Routledge-Studies-in-Constraints-B...