Triathlon Talent and Leeds

Talent is a word overused and misused.  Coaches and laymen considered talent a physical attribute but what happened in Leeds should make us think about what pure talent is about.  The chasing peloton was just five seconds behind the Brownlees and nobody from the peloton could bridge them because the Brwonlees have talent.  The main ingredient of talent is perseverance and knowledge about the “who is who.” Nothing physical:

“… I nearly gave up actually first lap in the city centre, and I said to Alistair ‘stop, we’re getting caught’ and he said to keep on going and suddenly we had 10-15 seconds from nowhere, and then I thought ‘wow, this is going be a long day out!”

“I’m used to getting told what to do by Alistair! But thankfully it was the right decision – it was the hard way of doing it but it was the right decision. It made it a fun race – it made it a hard race. I played into his hands – I made it a long-distance race, not really an ITU race. It’s great to have a good course – a course where you can actually show an all-round triathlete. Weaknesses get exposed.”

Talent is cultural, educational, it is far from being physical:

3 janv. 2014

Triathlon and ISO – 2014 triathlon

http://www.exeterswim.org/neest/__doc__/Improvements%20Torturous%20Path.pdf

Improvement's Torturous Path

By Tom Slear

Special Splash Correspondent

Splash Magazine:May

-

June 2005

Why do some improve steadily and others plateau? Why isn’t the slope of an improvement curve predictable? Basic logic dictates that as swimmers get older, they should be bigger, stronger, better trained and therefore, faster. Improvement might not have a constant, positive slope –nothing in sport is that assured –but it should be steady over the long-term, with peaks of larger magnitudes than valleys. However, those familiar with swimming know this is simply not the case. Improvement’s path contains detours and even U-turns. Many brilliant young swimmers plateau, and then, says Collins, who has coached three swimmers from age groupers to Olympians, the “window of opportunity closes. They are sure bets for the next year and the next year never comes. Kids expect to improve every year, and in many cases, that simply doesn’t happen.”

“You will find that across sports, there is not much correlation between those who have success when they are 10 and 11 with those having success when they are 19 and 20,” says Dr. Thomas Raedeke of the Department of Exercise and Sport Science at East Carolina University. “It could be for a lot of reasons, not the least of which is that when success comes early on and you are improving by leaps and bounds, you come to expect that. When it stops, and you are improving only fractionally, that can be very frustrating, especially when others you used to beat are improving more. It may cause you to question your commitment to the sport, which affects how hard you work and whether you continue to improve.”

In a study he authored, Sokolovas compared the swimmers in the best all-time, top-100 times for age groups from 10-and-under through 17-18. Among the 17-and 18-year olds, only 10.3 percent of the girls and 13.2 percent of the boys were listed in any event as 10-

and-unders. When compared to the lists of 11-and 12-year-olds, the percentages were 20.3 for the girls and 12.6 for the boys. Not until the 15/16 age group did the percentages become significant –49.7 for the girls and 53.5 for the boys. As Sokolovas concluded, “Most of the future elite swimmers swim slower than age-group champions, especially at

ages until 15-16 years.”

The top-16 rankings portray a significantly different picture. Of the 43 men and women on America’s 2004 Olympic team, 18 (42 percent) had a top-16 national ranking in either short-course yards or long-course meters as a 10-and-under. Among those were Michael Phelps and Aaron Peirsol, who set world records in Athens, and Jenny Thompson, who, at 31, competed in her fourth Olympic Games. Twenty-five of the 2004 Olympians –58 percent –had a top-16 ranking as 11-and 12-year-olds.

As a doctors, seeing patients dying, we need to keep believing that things could change if we perseverate on the treatment because we believe in the treatment, we can motivate the patient to continue struggling if the patient believes on us as doctors.  Many doctors give up on patients because they are tired or because they do not believe in what they do.  The best doctor is the one who perseverates on the treatment because the doctor believes in the treatment and is able to influence the patient to continue fighting the illness.  Alistair could be the best doctor treating patients.